#arlo bates

Houghton Mifflin turned down the opportunity to publish Dickinson’s poetry in 1890.  They said her poems “were much too queer – the rhymes were all wrong.”  A representative at Roberts Brothers said, “It has always seemed to me that it would be unwise to perpetuate Miss Dickinson’s poems.”  

Arlo Bates, a poet and reader for Roberts Brothers, said that Dickinson combined "the insight of the civilized adult with the simplicity of the savage child.”

A review of Bates’ work by the Boston Herald in the 1890s stated that he “gives greater promise of high and enduring power than almost any other American poet of our own generation.”

I thought it might be interesting to compare a few poems by Dickinson and Bates. 

Here are also a few poems by Bates compared to three poems of Dickinson’s with similar themes. Let me know what you think.

He evil but he cute. Funny too.

In yesterday’s post, I shared a review of the first edition of Dickinson’s poetry from a January 1891 edition of the New York Commercial Advertiser. The appraisal was a bit perplexing in that its oddly allotted backhanded compliments seemed to present both a positive and negative assessment of Dickinson’s work. Millicent Todd Bingham shared excerpts of the review in Ancestors’ Brocades, The Literary Debut of Emily Dickinson as an example of the type of disapproving remarks that would enflame the fury in Dickinson’s sister Lavinia. However, Willis J. Buckingham reprinted the entire review in his book Emily Dickinson’s Reception in the 1890s, A Documentary History, and in his introductory remarks, he said, “The anonymity of this notice is regrettable, for it is keenly observant. The reviewer particularly notes, with a pleasure rare for the decade, Dickinson’s ferocity, extravagance, and playfulness."

After I published my post, and I was going about my daily duties and diversions, I had a revelation, and it had to do with some of the early appraisals of Dickinson’s poetry.

Poet, novelist, and literary critic Andrew Lang called Dickinson “a minstrel who subdues grammar to rhyme, and puts even grammar before sense,” and that her poems “are conspicuously in the worst possible words, and the thought, as far as any thought can be detected, is usually either commonplace or absurd.”

Editor Arlo Bates asserted that Dickinson had "the insight of the civilized adult with the simplicity of the savage child,” and of her poems he said, “there is hardly one of them which is not marked by an extraordinary crudity of workmanship.”

Thomas Bailey Aldrich, editor at The Atlantic, declared, "An eccentric, dreamy, half-educated recluse in an out-of-the-way New England village (or anywhere else) cannot with impunity set at defiance the laws of gravitation and grammar….Miss Dickinson’s versicles have a queerness and a quaintness that have stirred a momentary curiosity in emotional bosoms. Oblivion lingers in the immediate neighborhood.”

Below, left to right: Andrew Lang, Arlo Bates, Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Here was my epiphany: As reviews like these and others flashed in my brain, I realized that these harsh and disapproving men advanced their opinions NOT after reading Dickinson’s work “in the rough,” so to speak; no, they spewed these sentiments after reading heavily altered versions of the works, with modifications made to fit the day’s literary conventions. Early editors Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson regularized Dickinson’s punctuation, removed unconventional capitalization, forced slant rhymes into perfect rhymes, "corrected" unique grammar, altered lines and/or removed complete stanzas, and more. This made me wonder what these bygone and now-forgotten critics would have crowed had they seen the original, unaltered versions of these poems. Pardon me for getting a bit indelicate here, but I wonder what insults they would have belched had they rawdogged* readings of Dickinson’s unconventional lines as written. I suspect they would have experienced sudden and severe mental collapse. Anyway, just some literary food for thought. Time to get back to my weekend’s duties and diversions. ​

In The Virginia Room by Arlo Bates - Short Story - Full Audiobook

"Who was Arlo Bates?" you ask.

Arlo Bates was an American author, educator and newspaperman -- and he gave Roberts Brothers publishers his appraisal of Emily Dickinson's poetry as they were preparing to print and distribute a small number of the first edition of "Poems" in 1890, Emily Dickinson's literary debut.

I wrote about Bates the other day. I'm new to Tumblr -- so I'll try to link that specific post HERE -- and if it doesn't work, then search the tag for "Arlo Bates."

Anyway, this post continues with additional information:

Concerning Bates’ letter to Roberts Brother where he shared his appraisal Dickinson’s poetry:

One the one hand he gushed, “There is hardly one of these poems which does not bear marks of unusual and remarkable talent.”

On the other hand, like Thomas Wentworth Higginson and others, he fretted over the poems’ ‘extraordinary crudity of workmanship.”

In the same letter, he continued to both praise (strikingly) and criticize (pedantically):

“Had she published, and been forced by ambition and perhaps by need into learning the technical part of her art, she would have stood at the head of American singers. As it is she has put upon paper what reminded her of a mood or an emotion, and in nine cases out of ten she has not got enough down to convey the intelligence of her mood to any but the most sympathetic & poetical. There are some poems in the book, however, that are so royally good, & so many that to the poetical will be immensely suggestive, that it seems a pity not to have at least a small edition.”

Interesting, huh.

Today, Dickinson does stand “at the head of American singers” – and who’s heard of Arlo Bates? #justsaying

As an aside, all this talk about content v. form reminded me of info I’d read recently about some of the initial reviews of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” Many music critics criticized Gershwin's piece as “essentially formless and asserted that the composer had haphazardly glued melodic segments together.” One review in the New York Tribune criticized the work as “derivative,” “stale,” an “Inexpressive.”

Go figure.

Who was Arlo Bates?  

Arlo Bates was an American author, educator and newspaperman.

An 1876 graduate of Bowdoin College, Bates became the editor of the Boston Sunday Courier in 1880.  Later he taught English at the MIT.

In 1889, the prospective publisher of Dickinson’s poems sent the selected poems to Bates for an appraisal.  Here is some of what Bates said about his first look at Dickinson’s poetry:

“There is hardly one of these poems which does not bear marks of unusual and remarkable talent.”

Like Higginson and others, though, Bates fretted about the format: “there is hardly one of them which is not marked by an extraordinary crudity of workmanship.”

Dang, those Victorians were hung up on rigid formats and convention.

Bates continued, though, with “The author was a person or power which came very near to that indefinable quality which we call genius.”

Hmm…”very near”?

I’ll continue with more of Bates’ report tomorrow.

In the Virginia Room ♦ By Arlo Bates ♦ Mystery Short ♦ Full Audiobook

Title: In the Virginia Room

Author: Arlo Bates

Genre(s): Crime & Mystery Fiction, Anthologies

Language: English

Read By:  Snapdragon

Librivox Recording

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