Emily Dickinson Emily Dickinson, whose work is one of the most original contributions to recent poetry, was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, December 10, 1830. She was a physical as well as a spiritual hermit, actually spending most of her life without setting foot beyond her doorstep. She wrote her short, introspective verses without thought of publication, and it was not until 1890, four years after her death, that the first volume of her posthumous poetry appeared with an introduction by Thomas Wentworth Higginson. "She habitually concealed her mind, like her person, from all but a very few friends," writes Higginson, "and it was with great difficulty that she was persuaded to print, during her lifetime, three or four poems." Yet she wrote almost five hundred of these direct and spontaneous illuminations, sending many of them in letters to friends, or (written on chance slips of paper and delivered without further comment) to her sister Sue. Slowly the peculiar, Blake-like quality of her thought won a widening circle of readers; Poems (1890) was followed by Poems-Second Series (1892) and Poems-Third Series (1896), the contents being collected and edited by her two friends, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd. Several years later, a further generous volume was assembled by her niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, entitled The Single Hound (1914). The sharp quality of her work, with its cool precision and clear imagery, makes her akin, at least in technique, to the later Imagists. (See Preface.) But a passionate and almost mystical warmth brings her closer to the great ones of her time. "An epigrammatic Walt Whitman," some one has called her, a characterization which, while enthusiastic to the point of exaggeration, expresses the direction if not the execution of her art. Technically, Emily Dickinson's work is strikingly uneven; many of her poems are no more than rough sketches, awkwardly filled in; even some of her finest lines are marred by the intrusion of merely trivial conceits or forced "thought-rhymes." But the best of her work is incomparable in its strange cadence and quiet intensity. Her verses are like a box of many jewels, sparkling with an unexpected brilliancy. Emily Dickinson died, in the same place she was born, at Amherst, May 15, 1886. CHARTLESS I never saw a moor, I never saw the sea; Yet now I know how the heather looks, And what a wave must be. I never spoke with God, INDIAN SUMMER These are the days when birds come back, To take a backward look. These are the days when skies put on Oh, fraud that can not cheat the bee, Induces my belief, Till ranks of seeds their witness bear, Oh, sacrament of summer days, Thy sacred emblems to partake, SUSPENSE Elysium is as far as to The very nearest room, If in that room a friend await Felicity or doom. What fortitude the soul contains, That it can so endure The accent of a coming foot, The opening of a door. A CEMETERY This quiet Dust was Gentlemen and Ladies, And Lads and Girls; Was laughter and ability and sighing, And frocks and curls. This passive place a Summer's nimble mansion, Where Bloom and Bees Fulfilled their Oriental Circuit, Then ceased like these. BECLOUDED The sky is low, the clouds are mean, A travelling flake of snow Across a barn or through a rut A narrow wind complains all day PEDIGREE The pedigree of honey Does not concern the bee; A clover, any time, to him Thomas Bailey Aldrich Thomas Bailey Aldrich was born in 1836 at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he spent most of the sixteen years which he has recorded in that delightful memoir, The Story of a Bad Boy (1869). From 1855 to 1866 he held various journalistic positions, associating himself with the leading metropolitan literati. A few years later he became editor of the famous Atlantic Monthly, holding that position from 1881 to 1890. Aldrich's work falls into two sharply-divided classes. The first half is full of overloaded phrase-making, fervid extravagances. The reader sinks beneath clouds of damask, azure, emerald, pearl and gold; he is drowned in a sea of musk, aloes, tiger-lilies, spice, soft music, orchids, attar-breathing dusks. Too often, Aldrich dwelt in a literary Orientalism; his Cloth of Gold was suffused with "vanilla-flavored adjectives and patchouli-scented participles" (to quote Holmes), laboring hard to create an exotic atmosphere by a wearisome profusion of lotus blossoms, sandalwood, spikenard, blown roses, diaphanous gauzes, etc. The second phase of Aldrich's art is more human in appeal as it is surer in artistry. "In the little steel engravings that are the best expressions of his peculiar talent," writes Percy H. Boynton, "there is a fine simplicity; but it is the simplicity of an accomplished woman of the world rather than of a village maid." Although Aldrich bitterly resented the charge that he was a maker of tiny perfections, a carver of cherry-stones, those poems of his which have the best chance of permanence are the short lyrics and a few of the sonnets, exquisite in design. The best of Aldrich's diffuse poetry has been collected in an inclusive Household Edition, published by Houghton, Mifflin and Company. He died in 1907. MEMORY My mind lets go a thousand things, Two petals from that wild-rose tree. "ENAMORED ARCHITECT OF AIRY RHYME" Enamored architect of airy rhyme, Build as thou wilt, heed not what each man says. Good souls, but innocent of dreamers' ways, Will come, and marvel why thou wastest time; Others, beholding how thy turrets climb "Twixt theirs and heaven, will hate thee all thy days; But most beware of those who come to praise. O Wondersmith, O worker in sublime |