Letters to Thomas Wentworth Higginson (For Attendance)

Letters 260 and 261 are the letters that I will be focusing on for this post. These letters were the first letters that Dickinson wrote to Thomas Higginson, a war hero that had previously written an article to upcoming writers in the Atlantic Monthly. This first letter would spark a friendship between the two that lasted until the final month of Dickinson’s life, I liked these letters not only because of the story of her and Higginson but also for the actual content of it. In letter 260 she asks Higginson if her, ‘Verse is alive?’ and continues to personify her verse by stating if the verse ‘breathed’ in the middle of the letter. Dickinson seems as though she is asking him to or warning him to not publish her work by stating, ‘that you will not betray me’ and this is reinforced when he replied to her discouraging her from publishing her poems that she sent him. This discouragement was felt in the next letter when she writes ‘Thank you for the surgery – it was not so painful as I supposed.’ Letter 261 is incredibly sad for me and when reading it I can only feel empathy for Dickinson, although the letter clearly highlights her range of ‘lexicon’ that she is able to pull from. In this letter Dickinson answers many of Higginson’s questions and cleverly integrates sentences such as ‘while my though is undressed’, referring to Higginson’s earlier quote from the Atlantic Monthly that reads, ‘what a delicious prolonged perplexity it is to cut and contrive a decent clothing of words’. It is assumed that the friend that taught her ‘Immortality’ is a man by the name of Benjamin Franklin Newton and the two editors are thought to be Bowles and Holland.

-Reece