“Her and his” A Review by The Economist of “White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson” by Brenda WineappleJuly 24th, 2008
I’ve always been a huge Emily Dickinson fan and this book intrigues me… Moreover, I have always been particularly interested in the friendships and relationships among writers… KED
Part One: Life
XXXIII
Emily Dickinson:
DARE you see a soul at the white heat?
Then crouch within the door.
Red is the fire’s common tint;
But when the vivid ore
Has sated flame’s conditions,
Its quivering substance plays
Without a color but the light
Of unanointed blaze.
Least village boasts its blacksmith,
Whose anvil’s even din
Stands symbol for the finer forge
That soundless tugs within,
Refining these impatient ores
With hammer and with blaze,
Until the designated light
Repudiate the forge.
American literary friendships
Hers and his
Jul 24th 2008 From The Economist print edition
“BIOGRAPHY first convinces us of the fleeing of the Biographied,” wrote Emily Dickinson, America’s most famous female poet of the 19th century, uncannily foreseeing how inscrutable a subject she herself would turn out to be.
Rather like Emily Brontë, with whom she identified, Dickinson shrank from contact with the world, scuttling off in her signature white dress as soon as a visitor appeared at the door. Reluctant to share her pared-down, laser-sharp and sometimes terrifyingly inward poems through publication—only seven were printed in her lifetime—she nevertheless relied on an iron core of self-belief, quietly prophesying that posterity would recognise her genius.
Dickinson’s externally uneventful life has been chronicled before, but Brenda Wineapple finds a new way in by focusing on her relationship with the man who would eventually help to bring her to the public gaze after her death…
Read the rest of the review here: Hers and his
http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11785043
Book details - White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson By Brenda Wineapple Knopf; 432 pages; $27.95 Buy it at Amazon.com Amazon.co.uk
Hers and his
Jul 24th 2008 From The Economist print edition
“BIOGRAPHY first convinces us of the fleeing of the Biographied,” wrote Emily Dickinson, America’s most famous female poet of the 19th century, uncannily foreseeing how inscrutable a subject she herself would turn out to be.
Rather like Emily Brontë, with whom she identified, Dickinson shrank from contact with the world, scuttling off in her signature white dress as soon as a visitor appeared at the door. Reluctant to share her pared-down, laser-sharp and sometimes terrifyingly inward poems through publication—only seven were printed in her lifetime—she nevertheless relied on an iron core of self-belief, quietly prophesying that posterity would recognise her genius.
Dickinson’s externally uneventful life has been chronicled before, but Brenda Wineapple finds a new way in by focusing on her relationship with the man who would eventually help to bring her to the public gaze after her death…
Read the rest of the review here: Hers and his
http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11785043
Book details - White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson By Brenda Wineapple Knopf; 432 pages; $27.95 Buy it at Amazon.com Amazon.co.uk
20080724 “Her and his” A Review by The Economist of “White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson” by Brenda Wineapple
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