"'[A] wholly new and original poetic genius': Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Emily Dickinson, and Literary Immortality"

Abstract

Abstract:Beyond Higginson's personal friendship with Dickinson, his literary criticism—much of which Dickinson may have read in The Atlantic Monthly—and his editing of her poems weave a narrative about the United States' poetry to which Dickinson is the logical conclusion. Higginson relentlessly attacked Whitman, (who he perceived to be a degenerate, self-promoting charlatan), and used his literary criticism to extol characteristics, personal and poetic, that carved out a place for Dickinson, or a poet like her, in the American literary tradition. Higginson's criticism persistently seeks to answer one question: in America, what is a poetic genius? Judging by Higginson's decades-long dedication to Dickinson's work, and the place he helped to establish for her in American poetry, she appears to have been the answer. In short, the trajectory of Higginson's theories of poetic genius (and great poetry) indicates a type of self-fulfilling prophesy for Dickinson's rise to fame.