“Sic transit gloria mundi”[i] is not a bad pun about Gloria Swanson getting sick on the trolley every Monday, as Ogden Nash had supposed, but rather the first line of Emily Dickinson’s first published poem, which I discussed last month. It is one we have only as a transcript from the newspaper that published it. It was published — without her permission — because it delighted some editor. It may be that experience which soured her on publication, although the following poem, which Franklin dates to 1863, may be expressing disgust with the subsequent theft of three poems, at least one of which is now among her most beloved. The 4th line of this poem gave last month’s post its subtitle:
Publication – is the Auction
Of the Mind of Man –
Poverty – be justifying
For so foul a thing
Possibly – but We – would rather
From Our Garret go
White – unto our White Creator –
Than invest – Our Snow –
Thought belong to Him who gave it –
Then – to Him Who bear
It’s Corporeal illustration – sell
The Royal Air –
In the Parcel – Be the Merchant
Of the Heavenly Grace –
But reduce no Human Spirit
To Disgrace of Price – [ii]
I would argue that, despite the clarity of this poem, Dickinson was not opposed to publication. She circulated her poems to a fair number of acquaintances. On 15 April 1862 she wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and sent him four poems, in response to his article “Letter to a Young Contributor.” He had urged these “young contributors” to “Charge your style with life,”[iii] presumably before it was published. He had then challenged them thus: “Such being the majesty of the art you presume to practice, you can at least take time before dishonoring it.” She was then 34, and had written about half of the poems that survived her death, including the one above — she had certainly taken time.
She asked Higginson in a letter “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?” This question began not only her letter (there are 5 other sentences, punctuated as paragraphs) but also “a correspondence that lasted until the month of her death”[iv] on May 15, 1886. In all those 24 years he never accepted a poem of hers for publication. Johnson concludes, in his biography, that Higginson “literally did not understand what he was reading.”[v] But even without his encouragement, she still chose to publish, preferring a samizdat, rather than a print, method of distribution.
Her only letter published in her lifetime was two years earlier than “Sic transit gloria mundi”, in The Indicator (Amherst College) II, 7, February 1850. Beginning “Magnum bonum, ‘harum scarum,’” it is, like “Sic transit gloria mundi,” a Valentine, possibly written to George H. Gould, a good friend of her brother Austin. The manuscript is missing, but the editor of The Indicator comments “I wish I knew who the author is. I think she must have some spell, by which she quickens the imagination, and causes the high blood ‘run frolic through the veins.’”[vi] So it is safe to say that Dickinson could delight her contemporaries, if not the man she chose as a mentor.
She could so delight them that ten times in her life they published poems by her, and republished two of them several more times, all without seeking her permission, as far as we know. The copies from which they set the poems are all lost, but seem to have come from members of her family. In this post and the next, I will discuss the other nine poems, partly as a demonstration that not all of her readers thought that she should not publish.[vii]
The second of her poems published in her lifetime showed up in the Springfield Daily Republican (August 2, 1858), titled “To Mrs — , with a Rose”. Note that this is nearly four years before her letter to Higginson:
Nobody knows this little Rose –
It might a pilgrim be
Did I not take it from the ways
And lift it up to thee.
Only a Bee will miss it –
Only a Butterfly,
Hastening from far journey –
On its breast to lie –
Only a Bird will wonder –
Only a Breeze will sigh –
Ah Little Rose – how easy
For such as thee to die!
This is the last poem in what Miller calls “Fascicle One,” and which R. W. Franklin dates to 1858.[viii] The fascicles were sheets of paper sewn together, somewhat like chapbooks, onto which she copied her poems. This is clearly one of the poems Dickinson chose to keep, and which she spent time in copying out in fair hand. Miller indicates no variant readings. But I would guess that the dating of the poem is affected by our knowledge of the date of its publication. From the title, it seems possible that the recipient of the poem might have given it to the paper, and perhaps seeing it in print pleased Dickinson.
But it might have been this next poem which soured Dickinson on publication. First published in the Springfield Daily Republican (May 4, 1861), it was given the title “The May-Wine”:
I taste a liquor never brewed –
From Tankards scooped in Pearl –
Not all the Frankfort Berries
Yield such an Alcohol!
Inebriate of air – am I –
And Debauchee of Dew –
Reeling – thro’ endless summer days –
From inns of molten Blue –
When “Landlords” turn the drunken Bee
Out of the Foxglove’s door –
When Butterflies – renounce their “drams” –
I shall but drink the more!
Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats –
And Saints – to windows run –
To see the little Tippler
From Manzanilla come!
Or it may not have soured her. This was published in the “Original Poetry” column of the paper; Thomas H. Johnson speculates that “the editors wanted a rhyme and they produced a version that could never, by any stretch of the imagination, been hers.”[ix] One could make that supposition. This is how it appeared in print:
I taste a liquor never brewed,
***From tankards scooped in pearl;
Not Frankfort Berries yield the sense
***Such a delirious whirl.
But, given Dickinson’s penchant for revising her poems, it might be just as possible that they got a copy from their source of an earlier version. By any stretch of my imagination, that reading could be one she wrote, then abandoned. This particular poem was bound into Fascicle Twelve (of forty), on sheet one, and there are two alternative readings on that same sheet. The alternative third line reads “Not all the vats upon the Rhine,” which is the reading I first learned, and the alternative last line is “Leaning against the – Sun –”. Dickinson did not hesitate to experiment, and change a copy she had thought was done. That becomes even clearer in her next published poem, printed a month and a half before her letter to Higginson. It was again Springfield Daily Republican which published it, on March 1, 1862:
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.
Light laughs the breeze
In her Castle above them –
Babbles the Bee in a stolid Ear,
Pipe the sweet Birds in ignorant cadence –
Ah, what sagacity perished here!
This dates, according to Miller, from late 1859; she suggests that Susan Dickinson’s copy is the possible source for the editors. But in 1861, around the time of the publication, she copied another version into Fascicle Ten with a different second stanza, and then copied two more alternatives to that stanza. It now reads like this:
Safe in their Alabaster chambers –
Untouched by Morning –
And untouched by Noon –
Lie the meek members of the Resurrection –
Rafter of Satin – and Roof of Stone!
Grand go the Years – in the Crescent – above them –
Worlds scoop their Arcs –
And Firmaments – row –
Diadems – drop – and Doges – surrender –
Soundless as dots – on a disc of Snow –
[alternative stanzas below]
—
Springs – shake the sills –
But – the Echoes – stiffen –
Hoar – is the window –
And – numb – the door –
Tribes – of Eclipse – in Tents – of Marble –
Staples – of Ages – have buckled – there
—
Springs – shake the seals –
But – the silence – stiffens –
Frosts unhook – in the Northern Zones –
Icicles – crawl from polar Caverns –
Midnight in Marble –
Refutes – the Suns –
I can’t help but note that these are wildly differing second stanzas, and that Dickinson was obviously undecided about which of them to use. In these matters, before her letter to Higginson, she seems to be fairly willing to experiment, and it is not surprising that she might seek the opinion of an editor who had extended to his young contributors this challenge: “Such being the majesty of the art you presume to practice, you can at least take time before dishonoring it.”
But hold on, I hear you say: isn’t that the kind of bafflegab all editors fling at young contributors?
Your turn.
[i] Emily Dickinson’s poems, as she preserved them / edited by Cristanne Miller. Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap, 2016; pp. 696-8.
[ii] Ibid., pp. 386-7.
[iii] This information and the next quote both come from Emily Dickinson : an interpretive biography / by Thomas H. Johnson. — Cambridge, Massachusetts : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1955, p. 104.
[iv] Selected letters / Emily Dickinson; edited by Thomas H. Johnson — Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, pp. 171-172, letter no. 260.
[v] Op. cit., p. 111.
[vi] Ibid., pp. 36-7; letter no. 34.
[vii] In the absence of footnotes that follow, you may assume that the texts, and all information regarding publication, come from Miller’s notes to the poems, and about contributors, in Emily Dickinson’s poems, as she preserved them.
[viii] The poems of Emily Dickinson / edited by R.W. Franklin. — Reading ed. — Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999; p. 22, no. 11.
[ix] Emily Dickinson : an interpretive biography, p. 112.
The poem you quote first sounds to me less like a reaction to evil editorial changes than a reflection upon the inherent questionableness of buying and selling something that should arguably be a free (divine) gift–with an implicit self-directed sermon about the perils of being too much influenced by a desire for publication as opposed to poetic expression. A question of motivations.
All writers, or nearly all, desire publication. (Emily Dickinson is sometimes cited as an exception, but I think you’ve made a good case that this isn’t precisely true.) However, many more writers than just Dickinson have ambivalent feelings not only about publication, but also about the how desires related to publication affect both them and their work. Beyond a certain minimal threshold for publication, it’s seldom argued (in fact, I’m not sure it’s ever been argued) that desire for better sales is a major driver for writers to produce work of better quality. Similarly, hope for publication can help motivate a writer to write–but can also (I know from experience) have a stifling effect on one’s work.
I think you’re right about “Publication – is the Auction,” but Thomas H. Johnson, who first made the assertion that this was such a reaction (although Higginson and Todd were flirting with the idea) seems to put more emphasis on the idea for psychoanalytic reasons. I think that the reaction described by Dickinson in “The soul selects her own society” and Milton in his wish, or fear, that *Paradise Lost* would “fit audience find, though few,” is very clearly a wish for a public that could appreciate their work, not a turning of the back on hoi polloi — and, in fact, hoi polloi embraced both poets before the academy did. Perhaps we should read into that nothing, but I think the romantic embrace of the disgraced and neglected is most definitely NOT an academic impulse — or maybe wasn’t before the Beat poets became the recipients of academic anxiety to not miss out on the Next Big Thing.