“Sometimes I take out your letters & verses, dear friend,” he wrote, “and when I feel their strange power, it is not strange that I find it hard to write & that long months pass. Higginson thought that she needed someone-a person who admired her, even if he did not always understand what she was saying. But he forced himself to put aside timidity and continued to write, knowing what he could not offer in useful criticism he might be able to offer in dependability, friendship, and generosity. He was clumsy with words, he told her, and often missed the fine edge of her thought. ![]() ![]() At times, her talent made him reluctant to answer her letters, aware he never could match her artfulness. But Higginson had plenty of questions for Dickinson, chief among them inquiries about her seclusion. If tongue-tied, he would pull the paper from his pocket and select a matter to discuss. To mitigate awkwardness, he would write down conversation topics. As a boy, he was shy around women outside his family. Higginson was excited and nervous about paying calls. Read: Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s ‘Letter to a Young Contributor’ Largely gone, too, were the callow signatures of “Your Gnome” and “Your Scholar.” Now she signed her name with a single word: “Dickinson.” That is who she had become. In her letters, Higgison had noticed, she no longer signed her name on a card slipped inside the envelope-a game played as much for effect as reticence. The hundreds of poems in fascicles and on sheets hidden away in her room bore witness to what she already had accomplished. She no longer was hoping to make her family proud. Dickinson’s sense of self made the difference. Although others around her were busy with their own lives, she did not feel as forsaken as she once had. Nearly 40 years old, she was more patient, less insistent, and more forgiving of perceived slights from those close to her. She had stopped collecting her poems in stitched booklets-fascicles-and new poems remained unbound on loose sheets. ![]() Her great literary productivity of the Civil War years had tapered off. Higginson’s visit would be no ordinary call for Dickinson-not that she received many guests. Eight years after writing her initial letter, on August 16, 1870, Dickinson and Higginson finally met face-to-face. “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?” Dickinson’s letter set into motion a correspondence with Higginson that lasted almost a quarter of a century. ![]() She wrote Higginson-a stranger to her-directly and sent four poems, along with a note. Emily Dickinson read the essay and then took the most unprecedented step of her life. That beginning line, with its two-word invitation to ladies, may have caught the eye of a 31-year-old woman living in Amherst, Massachusetts-a woman who did not entirely agree about the dashes. Use black ink and quality paper, and avoid sloppy dashes. Thomas Wentworth Higginson went on in “Letter to a Young Contributor” to offer advice to would-be writers seeking to publish. “My dear young gentleman or young lady,” the essay in the April 1862 issue of The Atlantic began.
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