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White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson

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Brenda Wineapple's expertise as a biographer is evident on every page. She knows how to handle her massive research without intruding on the main narrative. She knows how to balance conflicting views of her two protagonists, evoking sympathy and admiration for both. She is able to place them deftly in the context of their moment in American history. She reads Dickinson's poems with sensitivity and skill. White Heat deserves the great reception it has received so far, and even surpassed expectations I had after reading reviews in the NY Times and The New Yorker.

Brenda Wineapple writes an intimate portrait of Higginson and Dickinson with sensitivity and elegance. I was afraid it would be rather dry, but just the opposite is true. The author is heady and scholarly, but the writing takes off like an engrossing story, lifts you with it. There is nothing stodgy or stuffy about this book. The narrative flows with grace, and her prose style engages you with its intelligent delivery. It is thoroughly researched--while reading it, I was brought back in time and place. I saw through their eyes. I was inside of Dickinson and beside Higginson. At Emily's home in Amherst, I easily felt what she felt when she looked out her window.

I look forward to more from this author.

At first glance, even from the old photos, they seem like vastly different people. Thomas Wentworth Higginson was a man of various talents. He was a well-traveled writer, yes; but he was also involved in public service and the reform movement, and he was intent on seeking out a certain amount of fame and celebrity for himself. Emily Dickinson was the quintessential homebody who saw the world mostly from her bucolic Main Street window. She wrote poetry that she shared only with close friends or tucked away in the bottom drawer of her dresser. Higginson grew up in the realm of liberal Unitarianism and Harvard College. Dickinson's conservative grandfather was a devout Congregationalist who founded Amherst College. Their families represented the opposite edges of life in New England in the 1800s. Yet it was WORDS that brought these unlikely correspondents together.

With "White Heat," Brenda Wineapple follows the current trend of studying history through dual biography, or vice versa. Odds are good that much of the reading public will recognize only one of the two names listed in the title, for Emily's storied reputation precedes her. Even those who cannot recite her lines by heart "know" that she was a recluse who wasn't published much during her lifetime. But what parts of her myth are true, and which are not? Wineapple does her best to unravel the life of the real Emily Dickinson -- or, at least, as close to reality as we can guess.

Fans of the Transcendentalists know well of Wentworth Higginson, the former minister who was a disciple of Thoreau and one of John Brown's Secret Six. They will have heard something about him becoming Dickinson's literary agent of sorts, publishing her work posthumously. But how did he come to be so involved with her? How did he gain access to her poetry? What's the rest of the story?

Here we learn that Emily sent her first letter to Wentworth in 1862, prompted by an article he wrote in the Atlantic Monthly, and thus began a correspondence and friendship that lasted until her death in 1886. (She initially asked for writing advice and included samples of her poems; he was so awed that he knew he had none to give.) We follow their lives chronologically and discover much about their personalities through their letters and other writings. Wentworth even visited Emily on several occasions, and she greeted him at the door with bouquets of flowers. Thus is it easy for the romantics among us to imagine that the two were in love. But Wentworth was married, and Emily was coquettishly playful but kept her distance. Only in her cryptic verses did she allow a glimpse of her thoughts and emotions. And after she was gone, her best friend did his best to share her gifts with the rest of the world.

(As if having a book published today isn't challenging enough: How difficult must it have been to try to assemble a volume of someone's poems with both her sister and her brother's mistress demanding involvement in the process and the proceeds? And who edited those stanzas, anyway?)

"White Heat" should have wide appeal to fans of Dickinson, fans of the Transcendentalists, students of American lit and the writing process, and anyone who admires insightful Civil-War-era biographies. This outstanding work deserves as much success as John Matteson's Alcott bio, "Eden's Outcasts," found this past year.

It is rare to find truly new information about Emily Dickinson's most elusive and private life. It is even more so when it occurs in first rate scholarly fashion by a great writer who understands the depth of ED's spiritual core. "White Heat" is a must-read for anyone serious about learning facts never before revealed concerning both Emily Dickinson's life and work. Incredibly to me was an astonishing additional bonus contained in this treasure of a book: namely, a newly discovered photograph of Emily Dickinson - in later life that will blow your socks off - the exquisite beauty of her; and the blaze of courage as well as resolve in that amazing face. Amazon is offering this wonderful work at a bargain - please don't miss out on the art, heart and inspiration gifted here to all.

Emily Dickinson wrote over 1700 poems of lyrical complexity about nature, immortality, death and her love of nature. Thomas Wentworth Higginson was a man of Renaissance complexity, brilliance and service to his country. These two nineteenth century figures: a reclusive poetic genius and a man of action are the subjects of Dr. Brenda Wineapple's new duo biography. Wineapple is famous for her previous stellar biography of New England's genius Nathaniel Hawthorne. She knows New England life during the nineteenth century with a literary scholar's thoroughness.
Emily Dickinson "the Belle of Amherst" Massachusetts wrote Thomas Wentworth Higginson a letter asking if he thought her poetry was worthy of being published. He wrote her that her work was excellent. Thus from the early 1860's until her death the two were ardent pen pals
Higginson was a man of letters, an abolitionist who worked with John Brown on the latter's raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859, a U.S. Congressman and an advocate for Women's Rights. Higginson was also the first commander of the African-American regiment the First South Carolina which fought at Fort Wagner in the summer of 1863.
Dickinson corresponded with Higginson until she died in 1886. They met only a few times and their relationship was platonic. Dickinson was red headed and freethinking regarding spirituality. Higginson was deeply involved in the transcendalist circle of Concord Mass. He knew such literary giants as Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowe and Henry David Thoreau. Dickinson would not leave her well to do family's property while Higginson traveled to Europe and saw combat in the Civil War in which he was injured. Higginson wed twice but was probably in love with Dickinson as was she with him.
Brenda Wineapple is one of our finest American Literature scholars. She is especially good at:
a. Examining many of Dickinson's poems with a skilled eye.Emily Dickinson's poems were directly related to her life experiences in her sequestered old maidish milieu.
b. Wineapple also looks at the literary efforts of Higginson whose best writing was in his political articles defending freedom for slaves and supporting women in their long fight for the vote and social justice.
c. Wineapple is very familiar with Concord, Amherst and Harvard where much of the story of her two subjects was played out overe several decades. She explores the dynamics of both her subjects home lives.
Emily was the middle child of an austere set of parents. Her father was a congressman and Emily visited Washington DC. Her younger sister Vinnie
was a complex person as was Emily's older brother Austin. Austin became involved in an affair with Mrs. Mabel Dodge. The two eventually married. Dodge and Higginson worked hard in their joint effort to have Dickinson's poems published> In this they succeeded though they often disagreed on how the poems should be presented to the poem and what version to use in the printed book. There were also disuptes within the family regarding the arduous publishing of Emily's work. During her life only two of the poems had been published. Following her death is was Dodge and Higginson who got her poems in print beginning her journey to literary fame.
d. The author is good at explaining the New England literature in mid-nineteenth century American culture. We eat, sleep, write and dream with Dickinson. We also follow the amazing career of Thomas Wentworth Higginson a good man who fought for freedom for the downtrodden.
Emily Dickinson is not the tiny little wimp many people believe her to have been! Rather, she was a bold explorer of the use of language and her unorthodoxy was brave in a culture of conformity.
This is an excellent volume which is essential in understanding the genius of Dickinson and how she reached out to the world through her poetry and letters. Recommended.

Most people think of Emily Dickinson as a reclusive woman who never ventured far from home and stayed withdrawn composing poems while spending her days taking care of her parents. While this may be a superficially accurate picture in some respects, she was anything but reclusive in her connections with those she chose to include in her life like. She was a passionate and seductive genius. She danced and flirted in her poems and in her letters.
For decades, I've loved Emily's poems, the unique way she has in describing the world, the flowers she could see, the blossoms of her thoughts, and the passions of her dreams. After reading Brenda Wineapple's beautiful and poetic biography, I now have a truer appreciation of why her poetry sings with such resonance. She was a woman who reached out in love, so wanting to share what she felt. Thomas Wentworth Higginson -- her chosen Preceptor who she always felt had saved her life -- may not have been equal to the task of fully extending himself to her in all ways, but, still, she chose well. It was Higginson who was, in the end, instrumental in introducing to the world the poems of this beautiful little woman who sought love in her life and gave it to the world with unbounded clarity and brilliance that feels so alive and is so wonderful to behold. After reading this biography, you will, like I, fall in love with Emily Dickinson, and that, my friends, is all the recommendation you will need to know to own and read, again and again, this beautiful and poetic biography about a wondrous poet and introspective woman and a good man who tried to do right in the world.

When I discovered Emily Dickinson in high school, I discovered poetry--its very essence, its white heat. This has been a life-long love affair. Of the many articles and books written about Dickinson and her poetry, this one serves to illuminate the poet and her poetry the best. The author does a wonderful job of elucidating the nuances and meanings of the poems through reference to individual poems while she alternates the biographies of these two fascinating individuals--one very much immersed in the culture and politics of the day, Higginson, and the other Emily Dickingson, who so enigmatically, yet consciously, selected her "own society." If you wish to appreciate and understand the poetry--poems that I have continued to return to again and again over the years--read this one book. Making the book even more memorable for me was the opportunity I had of visiting the Dickinson homestead a few years ago. I remember it vividly and the wonderful tour, which ended which each visitor selecting one of Dickinson's poems to read.

Like the book's title, this one is from one of Emily Dickinson's poems. "White Heat" is from Dickinson's "Dare you see a Soul at the "White Heat"? As so often happens, one tries to say something about Emily only to discover that, whatever it was, Emily herself already said it better a century and a half ago. We are talking here, after all, about America's greatest poet, an accolade often speciously accorded to Walt Whitman, for an ever-so-American populist reason: ever since "Leaves of Grass" finally made it into public consciousness, late in Whitman's own life, any number of poetaster Modernists have been seeking, with varying degrees of success, to emulate him. Nobody, on the other hand, ever tries to emulate Emily. Even more than Shakespeare, she seems a totally singular poetic event; it's impossible.

No doubt that is something like what Thomas Wentworth Higginson dimly perceived, himself a wannabe poet, from the first day he set eyes on some highly eccentric (by the standards of the time) poetry included in a letter from the unknown spinster daughter of a very good Amherst Massachusetts family, writing to ask whether literary lion Higginson was "too deeply occupied" to spare her a few words of poetic mentorship. Higginson wrote back with some prosaic advice on how Emily might strive to make her work more publishable, together with an admonition not to attempt publication until she succeeded, thus launching a decades-long correspondence that ran right up to Emily's death in 1886.

In all those years, Emily never actually took any of Higginson's advice, Higginson never published any of her poetry, and the two only met in person twice, on occasions that could not have been very gratifying to either of them. During all that time, Emily maintained her coy pose as "nobody,"a recluse shut away from the world in her upstairs bedroom, living through her books and a fits-and-starts production of poetry that she rarely showed to anyone but family and dearest friends and never sought to publish. As to "who" Higginson was, Harvard educated Boston Brahmin Universalist minister, Abolitionist, Feminist, radical Activist, Civil War commander of the first Union black regiment, featured Atlantic Monthly writer and prominent literary critic, it would seem a question that Higginson himself spent most of his restlessly eventful career trying to answer, as very much a man of his hyperambitious times. It was a question that Emily, quintessentially agnostic backwoods nobody who also happened to be a delphic poetess for the ages with a genius standing somewhere entirely outside historical time, and who probably had Higginson's number from day one, could probably have answered for him with a bulls-eye accuracy, had she ever chosen to do so. For all that it was Higginson's own exertions that made him historically important, it was only his tenuous connection with Emily that, ironically, made him immortal.

As such, it may look to us today, in history's wrong-end-of-the-telescope retrospect, like a totally frivolous hookup between these two very different characters, a mere distraction in the strange career of a poetic genius about whom we are always wishing we knew more. It is on this point that Brenda Wineapple steps in with an insight almost as telling as Emily's own might have been, to show how wrong we are to take the correspondence as unimportant or a mere distraction in either of their careers. Rather, it would seem that Emily, at least, knew exactly what she was doing, and her genius profited by it, even if not in any way that Higginson might have intended. It was an intellectual flirtation or courtship, the kind Emily preferred, the coquettish quality of which totally mesmerized Higginson and played him like a fish for decades, no physical contact necessary. In fact, when they did finally meet in the flesh, on the occasion of a visit by Higginson to Emily's Amherst home, the encounter seemed to completely unnerve the both of them.

In the end, Higginson did finally man up and give his peculiar protege her due. Not only did he eulogize Emily at her funeral, but he ultimately helped edit, regularized, and played a key role in the publication of, a posthumous collection of her poetry that astonished all concerned by flying off the shelves as an immediate best seller. Today, of course, when contemporary taste tends to prefer Emily's poetry just as she wrote it, in its purest form, much of Higginson's editorial workmanship looks rather like a travesty upon great art, a lacy brassiere on the Venus de Milo, and I still wince every time I spot Emily's "Because I could not stop for Death--" orthographically tarted up, editorially tweaked and made-over as "The Chariot." What we may forget, of course, is the vote of thanks inevitably owed Higginson and others, inasmuch as, by the standards of the time, chances are that Emily's reinventions of the English language, without the aid of such ham-handed handiwork, might not have been publishable at all, meaning that it would all have disappeared into history's black hole and we wouldn't have it today.

As to Emily Dickinson, her oeuvre, and the many circumstantial sidelights cast upon it, the literary and critical corpus waxes enormous as her name and fame only grow over the decades since her death. Though not all of the books are good, some are indeed good and useful, and a very few offerings can truly be called great. Brenda Wineapple's specially insightful contribution to the corpus is uniquely admirable and must rank as an example of that latter class.

I cannot speak highly enough of this original, engaging, and well-written book. A few mistakes on the Civil War (the author is a little confused about rank and unit size) does not detract from the overall story. In addition to rescuing Higginson from obscurity and throwing light on Dickinson, the great merit of the book is the way she illuminates the poems--by both them--by giving them a context.

If you love Emily Dickinson, you will love this book. If you're not familiar with her work, get this book and prepare to become a fan.