Emily Dickinson, Children's Poet

Illustration from St. Nicholas magazine for children
that accompanied one of Emily's poems

I learned this week that after Emily Dickinson died, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd were left to handle Dickinson's work. Todd was deeply involved in a love affair with Austin Dickinson, Emily’s brother, who was married to Susan, who was a very close friend of Emily.

Emily had been famously hesitant to publish while she was alive.

In an effort to promote the posthumously published volumes of Dickinson's poetry, her editors sometimes positioned the work as children's literature. These edits ranged from changing punctuation to amending the rhyme schemes to be more elementary and even changing entire lines. Todd said she altered some of Dickinson's poems to be more lullaby-like, changing them “in order to have the rhyme perfect."

I still have a tough time as an adult interpreting many of Dickinson's poems, and could not imagine reading them as a child.

One famous example of an edit is in  "I taste a liquor never brewed." Dickinson originally wrote:

Not all the Frankfort Berries

Yield such an Alcohol!

Todd and Higginson published it as:

Not Frankfort Berries yield the sense

Such a delirious whirl!

which substantially changes Dickinson's imagery and rhythm.

Some Dickinson poems appeared in children's magazines in the 1890s. Here is one poem from a children's magazine.

Here is Emily's original version:

Will there really be a "Morning"?

Is there such a thing as "Day"?

Could I see it from the mountains

If I were as tall as they?

Has it feet like Water lilies?

Has it feathers like a Bird?

Is it brought from famous countries

Of which I have never heard?

Oh some Scholar! Oh some Sailor!

Oh some Wise Men from the skies!

Please to tell a little Pilgrim

Where the place called "Morning" lies!

You can see that the only changes here are Emily's distinctive capitalizations.

St. Nicholas was the premier magazine for children's literature and it serialized some of the most famous classics in children’s literature, including: The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling, Tom Sawyer Abroad by Mark Twain, Little Men by Louisa May Alcott, and The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

The purist in me objects to changes made to her poems after her death, but the example above does read fine as a poem for children. 

What are your feelings about what the editors did with her work?

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Prompt: At The End Of

For our July prompt, we look at Jane Kenyon’s poem “Three Songs at the End of Summer,” which features three portraits of late summer.

For our August issue, we ask for poems that use her title as a starting place. Not poems about summer, but about endings. Your title should be "Three ______ at the End of ________."  For example, you could write "Three Scenes at the End of an Affair," or "Three Haiku at the End of Life." You might write three stanzas, or three short poems, three sections, or even "Three Lines at the End of Day."

I do like how Jane's poem's three parts are connected through nature and also distinct in their sounds, moods, and atmosphere. Her second section consists of two three-line stanzas. The poem ends with lines that lead us gently into autumn. The poem views the end of August as the end of summer, the way young people often mark the end of summer with the start of another school year.

I had the new books—words, numbers,
and operations with numbers I did not
comprehend—and crayons, unspoiled
by use, in a blue canvas satchel
with red leather straps.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: July 31

Jane Kenyon (1947–1995) was an acclaimed American poet and translator known for her luminous, spare, and emotionally resonant verse. Her life and work deeply chronicled her lifelong struggle with clinical depression, her spiritual faith, and the quiet beauty of rural New England. 

She was married to poet Donald Hall. Following their marriage in 1972, the couple relocated to Hall's family home Eagle Pond Farm in Wilmot, New Hampshire. That location provided the natural imagery for much of her writing.

Her poetry includes From Room to Room (1978), The Boat of Quiet Hours (1986), Let Evening Come (1990) and Constance (1993). Her Collected Poems contain all four collections.

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To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
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Walking with Dante

Dante Alighieri is certainly one of the most influential poets in our history. Though The Divine Comedy is considered an essential work of Western civilization, Dante is also one of the least read poets, especially in this time. Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso are the story of a journey, and reading them is a journey for a modern reader.

In an episode    "Dante: The Most Famous, Least Read Poet," one person talks about how this 700-year-old poem helped a widower rebuild his life. I'm sure he is not the only reader who has journeyed through Hell and emerged along with the poet.

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To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
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Frost and Auden on Artificial Intelligence

Before you start typing a comment here about how Robert Frost and W.H. Auden had no knowledge of artificial intelligence, let me explain where I'm going here.

I often use AI to create images to illustrate my (too) many blog posts. I was creating an image of myself surrounded by poetry based on what a chatbot already knew about me from prior queries. (You can see the result here.)

I can imagine many classic and modern poets sitting at a computer. The computer, the Internet, and certainly AI would be something from science fiction or fantasy, but being inquisitive people, I have to imagine they would want to experiment. They would certainly have opinions about all of it. So I proposed a kind of thought experiment to several chatbots about poets and AI, and specifically these two poets.

Robert Frost and W. H. Auden likely would have responded to AI very differently in tone, but with overlapping concerns about language, humanity, and authenticity.

Frost would be suspicious of abstraction and more interested in the human voice. I think he distrusted systems that moved people away from lived experience and direct human encounter. He valued some ambiguity and the “sound of sense” in language.

Though he might have admired AI’s technical cleverness, he would reject poetry produced without genuine experience behind it. Frost often emphasized that poetry comes from:

AI suggests to me that Frost might have asked, "Can language still be poetry if nobody has lived it?"

Auden might be intellectually fascinated by AI but morally cautious. He was interested in psychology, science, systems of thought, and modernity’s strange transformations and how language shapes society and consciousness.

But Auden worried about propaganda, impersonality, bureaucratic thinking, and probably would not be a supporter of any misuse of technology. Perhaps, he would see AI as an extraordinary linguistic tool, and also a dangerous amplifier of mass conformity or emotional detachment.

Auden wrote, “Poetry makes nothing happen,” but he did not mean that poetry is powerless. He meant poetry changes inner life indirectly, through consciousness and moral perception. He likely would have questioned whether AI can truly participate in moral experience or only imitate its language.

If the two sat down for a conversation and played with AI together, they might have some common ground. They would probably resist the idea that intelligence is merely information processing. Human meaning comes from mortality and embodiment, and art emerges from uncertainty and lived contradiction. The language of poetry matters because people risk themselves in it.

Like many people today, they might warn that AI could encourage people to substitute fluent expression for genuine thought.

They just might concede that much human language is already formulaic, imitative, and patterned. But poetry, for them, was valuable precisely because it resisted that drift into automatic speech.

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org