Emily Dickinson did not go next door to meet
the lecturer.
Critical Overview.
Emily Dickinson’s importance as a poet was
appreciated privately in her lifetime by family
members and the few friends and associates to
whom she sent her poems. Her public recogni-
tion as a poet awaited the 1890 publication of
Poems, edited by Thomas Wentworth Higginson
and Mabel Loomis Todd. TheNew York Times
advertised this first edition with the following
claim: ‘‘the thoughtful reader will find in these
pages a quality more suggestive of the poetry of
William Blake than of anything to be elsewhere
found.’’ When two more volumes were published
by these editors (1891, 1896), Dickinson’s audi-
ence widened. But the attention was not all pos-
itive. In 1892, Thomas Bailey Aldrich wrote a
harsh criticism of Dickinson’s poetry. Aldrich
was at the time the editor of the Atlantic
Monthly, and he used his position to broadcast
his view that the poetry was both incoherent and
formless.
Several collections followed. One of these
wasFurther Poems by that Shy Recluse, Emily
Dickinson, which appeared in 1929. This collec-
tion had the following unwieldy subtitle: ‘‘With-
held from publication by her sister, Lavinia.
Edited by her niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi,
and Alfred Lette Hampson.’’ This collection was
reviewed by Percy Hutchison in theNew York
Timeson May 17, 1929. Hutchison pointed out
the Dickinson was not in theOxford Book of
English Verse, edited by Sir Arthur Quiller-
Couch, although Longfellow, Emerson, and
Poe were. Nor did Dickinson’s name appear in
Barrett Wendell’sA Literary History of America,
but these omissions did not mean the Dickinson
was not a poet of great talent and importance.
Hutchison described Dickinson as a ‘‘‘natural’
poet’’ whose poetry ‘‘is as spontaneous as the
bird’s song.’’ He grouped Dickinson with the
‘‘great mystics in English poetry.’’ He conceded,
however, that work expresses a personal mysti-
cism from which the reader is ‘‘debarred.’’ High-
lighting some of her explicitly spiritual poems,
Hutchison concluded that Dickinson is ‘‘not a
poet to be judged as other poets are... but mar-
veled at.’’A frog in a bog(Image copyright Sebastian Knight, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
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