White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson » (Reprint)

Brenda Wineapple is the author of Genet: A Biography of Janet Flanner; Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein; and Hawthorne: A Life, winner of the Ambassador Award of the English-Speaking Union for Best Biography of 2003. Her essays and reviews appear in many publications, among them The New York Times Book Review and The Nation. She has been the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She lives in New York City and teaches creative writing at Columbia University and The New School.

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.
 
 

The New York Times - Miranda Seymour

By restoring [Higginson] to what now seems his rightful position—as a courageous, principled radical who was Dickinson's chosen reader, admirer and advocate—Wineapple throws what she describes as "a small, considered beam" upon the work and life of these two "seemingly incompatible friends," the recluse and the activist. That "beam," when directed by a writer as thorough and intuitive as Wineapple, brightens not only the pale figures of the poet and the hitherto elusive colonel but the poems for which, upon occasion, Dickinson drew inspiration from Higginson's more active life.

List of Illustrations

Introduction The Letter One: The Letter 3

Pt. 1 Before

2 Thomas Wentworth Higginson: Without a Little Crack Somewhere 17

3 Emily Dickinson: If I Live, I Will Go to Amherst 35

4 Emily Dickinson: Write! Comrade, Write! 63

5 Thomas Wentworth Higginson: Liberty Is Aggressive 81

Pt. 2 During

6 Nature Is a Haunted House 101

7 Intensely Human 120

8 Agony Is Frugal 146

9 No Other Way 161

10 Her Deathless Syllable 182

11 The Realm of You 197

12 Moments of Preface 214

13 Things That Never Can Come Back 230

14 Monarch of Dreams 247

15 Pugilist and Poet 255

16 Rendezvous of Light 264

Pt. 3 Beyond the Dip of Bell

17 Poetry of the Portfolio 271

18 Me - Come! My Dazzled Face 288

19 Because I Could Not Stop 302

Acknowledgments 319

Notes 323

Selected Bibliography 373

Emily Dickinson Poems Known to Have Been Sent to Thomas Wentworth Higginson 385

Emily Dickinson Poems Cited 389

Index 395