A Conversation with Brenda Wineapple

"Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive??The Mind is so near itself -- it cannot see, distinctly -- and I have none to ask -- ?Should you think it breathed -- and had you the leisure to tell me, I should feel quick gratitude -- “

That's how Emily Dickinson begins her first letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson. The year was 1862; The 38-year-old Higginson was an prominent cultural critic and activist. Emily Dickinson was 31, an unknown, if prolific poet and a recluse. Yet, an improbable and intense friendship began. Dickinson reached out to Higginson, who responded to the genius he saw in her work. Their correspondence would continue for the next quarter century, with Dickinson sending Higginson almost 100 of her poems. After her death, Higginson became a co-editor of Dickinson's work and arranged for its publication. Drawing on 25 years' worth of Dickinson's letters (Higginson's are lost), Brenda Wineapple re-creates this extraordinary friendship in her book White Heat, which was a finalist for National Book Critics Circle Award. White Heat combines biography, literary criticism and history. The result is a book that allows us to see Dickinson and her poems through the eyes of a contemporary, as a person within the context of her times -- a genius to be sure, but more savvy than one might imagine. While Higginson emerges as a radical thinker, astute critic and wise friend.