White heat : the friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson

## From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. In 1862, Emily Dickinson wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a noted man of letters and radical activist for abolition and women's rights, asking if he would look at her poems. He did and recognized immediately their strange power. As Wineapple points out in this brilliant study, Dickinson's letter marked the blossoming of a complicated lifelong friendship. Although the two met face-to-face only twice, Higginson found Dickinson's explosive poetry seductive. Drawing on 25 years' worth of Dickinson's letters (Higginson's are lost), Wineapple contests the traditional portrait of her as isolated from the world and liking it that way. In her poems and her letters, Wineapple shows, Dickinson was the consummate flirt, a sorceress, a prestidigitator in words. Wineapple resurrects the reputation of Higginson, long viewed as stodgy in his literary tastes (he reviled Whitman) yet who recognized Dickinson's genius and saw her work as an example of the democratic art he fervently believed in. As Wineapple did previously with Hawthorne (\_Hawthorne: A Life\_), she elegantly delves into a life and offers rich insights into a little-known relationship between two of the late–19th century's most intriguing writers. 32 photos. __(Aug. 13)__ Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. ## From Critics embraced this new angle on the life of Emily Dickinson, one of America’s best-loved poets but also one of the most difficult to understand. While the subject of the book may seem rather narrow, reviewers claimed that Wineapple’s excellent narrative and literary sensibilities keep __White Heat__ from becoming overly obscure. Only the __Boston Globe__ faulted Wineapple for reading too vaguely between the lines, literally, of Dickson and Wineapple’s correspondence and for rehashing older material. Overall, however, the result is a book that balances literary criticism, biography, and history, while never straying too far from the few available facts about Dickinson and her life. Copyright 2008 Bookmarks Publishing LLC The First Book To Portray One Of The Most Remarkable Friendships In American Letters, That Of Emily Dickinson--recluse, Poet--and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Minister, Literary Figure, Active Abolitionist. The Letter -- Before -- Thomas Wentworth Higginson : Without A Little Crack Somewhere -- Emily Dickinson : If I Live, I Will Go To Amherst -- Emily Dickinson : Write! Comrade, Write! -- Thomas Wentworth Higginson : Liberty Is Aggressive -- During -- Nature Is A Haunted House -- Intensely Human -- Agony Is Frugal -- No Other Way -- Her Deathless Syllable -- The Realm Of You -- Moments Of Preface -- Things That Never Can Come Back -- Monarch Of Dreams -- Pugilist And Poet -- Rendezvous Of Light -- Beyond The Dip Of Bell -- Poetry Of The Portfolio -- Me-come! My Dazzled Face -- Because I Could Not Stop. Brenda Wineapple. Includes Bibliographical References (p. 373-384) And Index. White Heat is the first book to portray the remarkable relationship between America's most beloved poet and the fiery abolitionist who first brought her work to the public. As the Civil War raged, an unlikely friendship was born between the reclusive poet Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a literary figure who ran guns to Kansas and commanded the first Union regiment of black soldiers. When Dickinson sent Higginson four of her poems he realized he had encountered a wholly original genius; their intense correspondence continued for the next quarter century. In White Heat Brenda Wineapple tells an extraordinary story about poetry, politics, and love, one that sheds new light on her subjects and on the roiling America they shared. From the Trade Paperback edition.