In yesterday’s post, I shared a review of the first edition of Dickinson’s poetry from a January 1891 edition of the New York Commercial Advertiser. The appraisal was a bit perplexing in that its oddly allotted backhanded compliments seemed to present both a positive and negative assessment of Dickinson’s work. Millicent Todd Bingham shared excerpts of the review in Ancestors’ Brocades, The Literary Debut of Emily Dickinson as an example of the type of disapproving remarks that would enflame the fury in Dickinson’s sister Lavinia. However, Willis J. Buckingham reprinted the entire review in his book Emily Dickinson’s Reception in the 1890s, A Documentary History, and in his introductory remarks, he said, “The anonymity of this notice is regrettable, for it is keenly observant. The reviewer particularly notes, with a pleasure rare for the decade, Dickinson’s ferocity, extravagance, and playfulness."
After I published my post, and I was going about my daily duties and diversions, I had a revelation, and it had to do with some of the early appraisals of Dickinson’s poetry.
Poet, novelist, and literary critic Andrew Lang called Dickinson “a minstrel who subdues grammar to rhyme, and puts even grammar before sense,” and that her poems “are conspicuously in the worst possible words, and the thought, as far as any thought can be detected, is usually either commonplace or absurd.”
Editor Arlo Bates asserted that Dickinson had "the insight of the civilized adult with the simplicity of the savage child,” and of her poems he said, “there is hardly one of them which is not marked by an extraordinary crudity of workmanship.”
Thomas Bailey Aldrich, editor at The Atlantic, declared, "An eccentric, dreamy, half-educated recluse in an out-of-the-way New England village (or anywhere else) cannot with impunity set at defiance the laws of gravitation and grammar….Miss Dickinson’s versicles have a queerness and a quaintness that have stirred a momentary curiosity in emotional bosoms. Oblivion lingers in the immediate neighborhood.”
Below, left to right: Andrew Lang, Arlo Bates, Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Here was my epiphany:
As reviews like these and others flashed in my brain, I realized that these harsh and disapproving men advanced their opinions NOT after reading Dickinson’s work “in the rough,” so to speak; no, they spewed these sentiments after reading heavily altered versions of the works, with modifications made to fit the day’s literary conventions. Early editors Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson regularized Dickinson’s punctuation, removed unconventional capitalization, forced slant rhymes into perfect rhymes, "corrected" unique grammar, altered lines and/or removed complete stanzas, and more. This made me wonder what these bygone and now-forgotten critics would have crowed had they seen the original, unaltered versions of these poems. Pardon me for getting a bit indelicate here, but I wonder what insults they would have belched had they rawdogged* readings of Dickinson’s unconventional lines as written. I suspect they would have experienced sudden and severe mental collapse.
Anyway, just some literary food for thought. Time to get back to my weekend’s duties and diversions.
*The American Dialect Association’s “Word of the Year” for 2024 was – and I’m not making this up – “rawdog,” “to undertake without usual protection, preparation, or comfort,” originating from a slang term referring to...well, I suspect you know to what it refers; info on the ADA’s choice is HERE.
