| For Emily Dickinson there were three
worlds, and she lived in all of them, making them the substance of everything
that she thought and wrote. There was the world of nature, the things and the
creatures that she saw, heard, felt about her, there was the "estate" that was
the world of friendship. And there was the world of the unseen and unheard. From
her youth she was looked upon as different. She was direct, impulsive, original,
and the droll wit who said unconventional things which others thought but dared
not speak, and said them incomparably well. The characteristics which made her
inscrutable to those who knew her continue to bewilder and surprise, for she
lived by paradoxes. Certainly the greatest paradox was the fact that the three most pervasive friendships were the most elusive. She saw the Reverend Charles Wadsworth of Philadelphia but three or four times in the course of her life, and then briefly, yet her admiration of him as an ideal and her yearning for him as a person were of us surpassed importance in her growth as a poet. She sought out for professional advice the critic and publicist Thomas Wentworth Higginson and invited his aid as mentor for more than twenty years, though she never once adopted any counsel he dared to hazard. In the last decade of her life, she came to be a warm admirer of the poet and novelist Helen Hunt Jackson, the only qualified judge among Emily Dickinson's contemporaries who believed her to be a great poet, yet Emily Dickinson steadfastly refused to publish even though Mrs. Jackson' s importunity was insistent. |