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Dickinson’s elliptically imagistic poetry of the 1860s:
    I tend my flowers for thee—
    Bright Absentee!
    My Fuschzia’s Coral Seams
    Rip—while the Sower—dreams—
    Geraniums—tint—and spot—
    Low Daisies—dot—
    My Cactus—splits her Beard
    To show her throat—
    (339, c. 1862)
    The passive female being is overcome—seemingly ravished—by the mysterious Byronic “Master” who has never been definitely named by countless biographers and commentators but whose presence in Dickinson’s most ardent poetry is unmistakable:
    My life had stood—a Loaded Gun—
    In Corners—till a Day
    The Owner passed—identified—
    And carried me away—
    And now We roam in Sovereign Woods—
    And now We hunt the Doe—
    And every time I speak for Him
    The Mountains straight reply—
    Though I than He—may longer live
    He longer must—than I—
    For I have but the power to kill,
    Without—the power to die—
    (754, c. 1863)
    Benfey suggests that Dickinson’s “Master” poems are addressed to three prominent men in the poet’s life, with whom she corresponded in terse, playful, enigmatic letters very like her verse—the “handsome and worldly editor of the Springfield Daily Republican ” Samuel Bowles; the “brooding…Byronic” Protestant preacher Reverend Charles Wadsworth of whom it was thrillingly said that his “dark eyes, hair and complexion (had) a decidedly Jewish cast” and Colonel Higginson, the prominent Boston literary man to whom Dickinson sent her verse in the pose of a school-girl eagerly seeking advice from a distinguished elder, though Dickinson was thirty at the time and had already written—and published, in Samuel Bowles’s newspaper—a poem as assured as the one beginning “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers…” (21, c. 1862) (The romantic relationship with elderly Judge Lord came later in Dickinson’s life.) Here is Dickinson’s now-famous letter of appeal, dated April 15, 1862:
    Mr Higginson,
    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—
    Should you think it breathed—and had you the leisure to tell me, I should feel quick gratitude—
    If I make the mistake—that you dared tell me—would give me sincerer honor—toward you—
    I enclose my name—asking you, if you please—Sir—to tell me what is true?
    That you will not betray me—it is needless to ask—since Honor is its own pawn—
    We can surmise that Higginson replied with encouragement and a predictable sort of advice, to which Dickinson responded with enigmatic dignity:
    You think my gait “spasmodic”—I am in danger—Sir—
    You think me “uncontrolled”—I have no Tribunal.
    As Benfey notes, Dickinson didn’t change a thing in her poems, and assures Higginson that she has no wish to be published: “I smile when you suggest that I delay ‘to publish’—that being foreign to my thought, as Firmament to Fin.”
    Both Benfey and Wineapple are very good at presenting the ways in which Dickinson and Higginson “invented themselves and each other” in their epistolary friendship; in both their books, though at greater length in Wineapple’s, Colonel Higginson unexpectedly emerges not as the contemptiblypompous figure who dared to “correct” the most original poet of the nineteenth century as if he were indeed her schoolmaster, which is our usual sense of Higginson, but as a person of considerable courage, imagination, generosity, and achievement. Unlike his distinguished New England literary mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, Higginson managed to combine the intellectual life with the life of a vigorous activist: as a young man he was a Protestant minister who lost