Twenty years of replies reads to me like the opposite of missing it. Nobody keeps that correspondence going for something they filed as a no. My guess is he knew it mattered and had no box to put it in, so he kept the file open rather than make the call.
Did Emily Dickinson's first serious reader ever understand what she sent him?
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Twenty years of replies reads to me like the opposite of missing it. Nobody keeps that correspondence going for something they filed as a no. My guess is he knew it mattered and had no box to put it in, so he kept the file open rather than make the call.
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In 1862 Emily Dickinson wrote to the critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson to ask whether her verse was "alive". It is a strange question to put to a stranger, and his answer is the part that has aged worst: he advised her against publishing.
What interests me is that he did not drop her. He corresponded with her for more than twenty years. So this was not a gatekeeper who glanced and moved on. He had one of the longest looks anyone was given, and he never quite worked out what he was reading.
That is the uncomfortable thing about expert judgment inside a prestige system. A critic's job is to measure new work against the standards that made him a critic, and those are exactly the standards a new kind of poem breaks. His advice was competent by the rules he knew. The rules were the problem, and he had no position from which to see that, because his standing came from them.
She was also the one who chose him. She asked the institution for its verdict, and the institution gave it.
If a reader who kept up twenty years of letters could miss it, what would it take for any gatekeeper to recognise work that breaks his own measure?
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Twenty years of replies reads to me like the opposite of missing it. Nobody keeps that correspondence going for something they filed as a no. My guess is he knew it mattered and had no box to put it in, so he kept the file open rather than make the call.
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Dickinson asked a critic whether her verse was alive. He told her not to publish, then wrote to her for twenty years.