1862 He was the militant abolitionist and champion of women’s rights, the soldier-scholar about to lead the first regiment of freed slaves to fight in the Union army. She was developing into the greatest lyric poet of the 19th century – some would say of any century.
In April 1862, Thomas Wentworth Higginson had published a ‘Letter to a Young Contributor’ in The Atlantic Monthly, offering encouragements that even then must have been wildly optimistic. ‘The real interests of editor and writer are absolutely the same’, he wrote, and ‘the supposed editorial prejudice against new or obscure contributors’ is quite without foundation in reality. ‘On the contrary, every editor is always hungering and thirsting after novelties.’
Utopian or not, such blandishments were enough to encourage the 32-year-old Emily Dickinson to write to their author, enclosing four of her poems, prefaced by the shy question: ‘Are you too occupied to say if my verse is alive?’ Among the enclosures was one of her best, of which this is the first of two stanzas. The poem’s negation of the departed townsfolk’s pious hopes is devastating:
Safe in their Alabaster Chambers—
Untouched by Morning
And untouched by Noon—
Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection—
Rafter of satin,
And Roof of stone.
Struck by (as he would later write) this ‘wholly new and original poetic genius’, Higginson encouraged, offered some technical suggestions and asked for more. She wrote again, with more samples of her work, and he responded with increasing enthusiasm. On 8 June he received a third letter, this one ‘in a different mood’:
DEAR FRIEND, – your letter gave no drunkenness, because I tasted rum before. Domingo comes but once, yet I have had few pleasures so deep as your opinion, and if I tried to thank you, my tears would block my tongue.
It ended: ‘will you be my preceptor, Mr Higginson?’ Yes, he would – military and moral campaigns allowing – and his friendship would underpin her confidence until his death.