Keenness, Care, & Emily Dickinson
By Ellen Reiss

     One of the most famous letters in American literature is the letter Emily Dickinson wrote on April 15, 1862 to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, after reading an article of his in the Atlantic Monthly. She wanted criticism from him about her poetry, and began her letter with this sentence: "Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?" 

     That sentence is beautiful. And the reason for its beauty is in the following Aesthetic Realism principle, which describes too the largest need of Emily Dickinson's life and everyone's life: "All beauty," Mr. Siegel wrote, "is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves." Emily Dickinson's opening question to Higginson has first, in the meaning of the words and their sound, a quality of pondering, of interior intricacy, of a self (the Higginson self) concerned with its own thoughts: "Are you too deeply occupied..." The three oo sounds seem to brood; the ps, formed with lips coming together, make for a feeling here of self involved with itself. And then, there is an emerging into something so different — that sharp, glowing, urgent, world—vital matter which makes the previous pondering look petty in comparison: "to say if my Verse is alive?" The vs cut, severely yet sweetly. The soaring i in the grandeur of that word alive continues the dimmer i in the questioned word occupied. The sentence is a swift thrust, critical; yet considerate too. 

     Throughout Emily Dickinson's letters there are prose sentences that are poetic—good for the same reason her poems are largely good: they are a oneness of reality's opposites. Her sentences poke and glow. And they often make a one of meditativeness and sharpness. Therefore they have that which Eli Siegel showed is the decisive thing in poetry: music. 
 

The letter I quoted from — #260 in The Letters of Emily Dickinson (ed. T.H. Johnson, 1958) — represents an enormous desire of people: the desire for criticism. Though the criticism Emily Dickinson asks for is of her poetry, every person, Aesthetic Realism explains, is thirsty for criticism of ourselves: we long to learn what is good in us, so we can strengthen it; and to learn what in ourselves is unjust and weakens us so we can get rid of it. Though we may look for flattery and lap it up with terrific eagerness, the depths of us long for what Emily Dickinson pleads for in behalf of her poetry:

     Eli Siegel was the true, courageous, faithful critic, of art and selves, for whom humanity has thirsted. He had both the great knowledge and kindness to "tell... what is true," and I love him unboundedly for it — as Emily Dickinson would have. In another letter to Higginson, #268, dated July 1862, she writes these lovely words about criticism: "Will you tell me my fault, frankly..., for I had rather wince, than die. Men do not call the surgeon, to commend—the Bone, but to set it, Sir, and fracture within, is more critical. And for this, Preceptor, I shall bring you...every gratitude I know." 
 

Aesthetic Realism has, forever, the critical knowledge people ache for, because it explains the fight going on in everyone. It is a fight between what Mr. Siegel showed to be the deepest desire of every human being, "to like the world on an honest or accurate basis" — and a terrific desire to have contempt, "the addition to self through the lessening of something else." 

     Emily Dickinson was a poet because of the strength of her desire to like the world. This is the desire that impels art. We see it, for example, in the letter I have just quoted from. Higginson apparently asked for a picture of her, and the Amherst lady responds as follows: "I had no portrait, now, but am small, like the Wren, and my Hair is bold, like the Chestnut bur — and my eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves—Would this do just as well?" The biggest opposites in our lives are Self and World; and to like the world is to feel its simultaneous difference from and kinship with ourselves. That is what Emily Dickinson does in this humorous, sincere, and logical statement. 

     But she also had contempt. Eli Siegel is the critic who identified contempt as both the biggest enemy to art and the constant crippler of life; the source of every brutality and the weakener of mind. Emily Dickinson did not know that it was contempt which weakened her own mind, made for her deep despondency and self-dislike. She did not know the difference between being a keen critic of people and having contempt for them. We see the two mingled — along with simply a bounding and rich care for things — in the following statement to Higginson, April 25, 1862: 

You ask of my Companions Hills — Sir — and the Sundown — and a Dog — large as myself, that my Father bought me — They are better than Beings...and the noise in the Pool, at Noon — excels my Piano....My Mother does not care for thought — and Father, too busy with his Briefs — to notice what we do....They are religious — except me — and address an Eclipse, every morning — whom they call their "Father."