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- Title
"Not Quite--Content--": Emily Dickinson Retouches a Paint Mixed by John Quincy Adams and Oliver Wendell Holmes.
- Authors
PUTNAM, PHOEBE
- Abstract
This essay presents the discovery that one of Emily Dickinson's least-read poems, "It's thoughts--and just One Heart--," is an unmarked revisionary reply to a poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes that itself is a revisionary reply to a poem that John Quincy Adams wrote in reply to a poem by Oliver Goldsmith. The stakes of this finding are high, for scholars today still understand Dickinso-nian intertextuality within the framework of a famous claim that the poet made in 1862, that she "never consciously touch[ed] a paint, mixed by another person" without "mark[ing]" (overtly identifying) her use of allographic material. "It's thoughts--and just One Heart--" renders this claim null and void, even according to the generous terms with which we currently parse it, and is therefore a poem that compels us to reconsider decades of scholarly consensus about how and to what extent Dickinson engaged in her work with the literature and popular culture of her place and time.
- Subjects
DICKINSON, Emily, 1830-1886; POETRY (Literary form); PAINTING; ADAMS, John Quincy, 1767-1848; HOLMES, Oliver Wendell, 1809-1894; GOLDSMITH, Oliver, ca. 1730-1774
- Publication
PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 2014, Vol 129, Issue 1, p52
- ISSN
0030-8129
- Publication type
Essay
- DOI
10.1632/pmla.2014.129.1.52