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almost three hundred lyrics by then, including lines relaying the Holy Trinity
to her garden plot: “In the name of the Bee— / And of the Butterfly—And of
the Breeze—Amen!” Dickinson tells him her family are all religious “except
me—and address an Eclipse, every morning—whom they call their ‘Father.’”
And this too: “You speak of Mr Whitman. I never read his Book—but was told
that he was disgraceful.”
Before striking up this correspondence, she ’d seen Higginson’s judgment on
poetic eccentricity: “It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote ‘Leaves of
Grass,’ only that he did not burn it afterwards. A young writer must commonly
plough in his first crop.” She herself was nothing if not eccentric, and Higginson
was unequipped to see how these two mid-century poets, like Hawthorne and
Melville in the novel and Thoreau in the essay, were breaking new ground for
American writing.
Emily Dickinson in Amherst could well have missed Leaves of Grass by “Walt
Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,” which hardly sold at first. But one
poem she likely encountered. Her household took the recently founded Atlantic
Monthly, whose February and May 1860 issues it ’s known she read. That April
the magazine published Whitman’s “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life.”
Nature here in sight of the sea taking advantage of me to dart upon me
and sting me,
Because I have dared to open my mouth to sing at all....
Ebb, ocean of life, (the flow will return,)
Cease not your moaning you fierce old mother,
Endlessly cry for your castaways, but fear not, deny not me,
Rustle not up so hoarse and angry against my feet as I touch you or
gather from you.Too gabby for her, but Dickinson felt Nature ’s dart and sting, and by 1860
she ’d “dared... to sing,” sounding her own depths in “I taste a liquor never
brewed”:
Inebriate of Air—am I—
And Debauchee of Dew—
Reeling—thro endless summer days—
From inns of Molten Blue—While it ’s easier to picture Walt tramping Long Island shoreline than Emily
staggering home soused, that ’s not the point. Her reeling speech gets unheard-
of reach from summer’s “Molten Blue.”
In the popular view, Dickinson seems a wraith in white, seldom descending
from her small wooden desk in the upstairs corner bedroom. Yet she had intense
friendships, and knew uncultivated nature around Amherst. “When much in
the Woods, as a little Girl, I was told that the Snake would bite me, that I might