Alice James, in a diary entry dated January 6, 1892:
It is reassuring to hear the English pronouncement that Emily Dickinson is fifth-rate — they have such a capacity for missing quality; the robust evades them equally with the subtle. Her being sicklied o’er with T.W. Higginson makes one quake lest there be a latent flaw which escapes one’s vision.Long before I kept a blog, I kept a commonplace book, writing out passages of all sorts by hand. I found these sentences quoted in a letter from Lorine Niedecker to fellow poet Louis Zukofsky, February 14, 1952. I just checked, and the quotation is accurate.
I mean no disrespect to “the English.” It’s the idea of disapproval as a mark of high quality that amuses me.
Related reading
All OCA Dickinson posts (Pinboard)
[For Thomas Wentworth Higginson, see here.]
comments: 2
I like the little Hamlet allusion. I confess to being more interested in Dickinson as a person (I've visited her home) than as a poet. All those dashes — it just doesn't swing for me.
“Sicklied o’er”: that went right by me.
We can agree to disagree about ED. I hope the dress is still in the glass case in the bedroom — I remember how staggering it felt to see that.
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