Are You Too Deeply Occupied?
We have countless opportunities to nurture genius, but we must look in unexpected places. Genius often hides behind the shy eyes of a child, too reclusive to leave her familiar surroundings. In 1862 Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote a piece in the Atlantic Monthly entitled “Letter to a Young Contributor”. The response he received, written in a peculiar bird-scrawl began, “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?” It appeared to be unsigned until he discovered a small sub-envelope within that contained a card with the shyly penciled name “Emily Dickinson.” Enclosed also were four poems, and his curious and encouraging response led to a three-decade correspondence with Dickinson, she playing a coy “Scholar” and he bewildered and moved by the flights of her mind.
Emily Dickinson (born on this day, December 10th in 1830) could not have imagined the towering height of the fame which was to come.