The Books Briefing: What Literary Letters Reveal
The raw power of correspondence: Your weekly guide to the best in books
“Mr. Higginson,” an unpublished, reclusive 31-year-old poet wrote to an Atlantic contributor—a man she had never met—in 1862. “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.”
The letter, with its quaint phrases and handwriting that , was unsigned, and accompanied by a card nestled under a smaller envelope. The name on the card was Emily Dickinson. As Martha Ackmann recounts in ,the letter
