Dickinson's "Alabaster Chambers"

Dickinson's "Alabaster Chambers" March 1, 2011 On this day in 1862, Emily Dickinson's "Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers" was published. This was the second of only a handful of poems published in Dickinson's lifetime, all of them anonymously and, most think, without her knowledge. Six weeks later she sent her famous letter to the critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson: "Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?" [full story] Please use these links when purchasing books (or anything else): Amazon Books Richard Wilbur turns ninety today. Wilbur is a former Poet Laureate, and a Pulitzer winner, and a respected translator, but his range includes children's books — two on "Opposites" ("What is the opposite of riot? It's lots of people keeping quiet") and The Disappearing Alphabet: What if there were no letter A? Cows would eat HY instead of HAY. What's HY? It's an unheard-of diet, And cows are happy not to try it. In the word DUMB the letter B is mute, But elsewhere its importance is acute. If it were absent, say, from BAT and BALL, There'd be no big or little leagues at all. Wilbur continues to publish, a collection of new work, Anterooms, coming out just last year. These are adult (and sometimes dark) poems, but "Some Words Inside Words" is described as "for children and others": In every ice cube there's a cub, and so It sometimes happens that a cub will grow Inside the freezer of a Frigidaire, Until it is a full-sized polar bear. What happens then? Well, opening the door, It steps into the kitchen with a roar And lumbers through the house, fierce, white and fat, Turning down every single thermostat. Ralph Ellison was born on this day in 1914 (Ralph Waldo Ellison, after Emerson), and on this day in 1940 Richard Wright's Native Son was published. Wright's novel was an immediate sensation and immediately reissued by Harper & Brothers — right, the 1940 Modern Library edition. Below, a moment from the opening chapter, in which young Bigger Thomas wakes to his trapped-rat life: Bigger whispered fiercely, whirling and kicking out his leg with all the strength of his body. The force of his movement shook the rat loose and it sailed through the air and struck a wall. Instantly, it rolled over and leaped again. Bigger dodged and the rat landed against a table leg. With clenched teeth, Bigger held the skillet; he was afraid to hurl it, fearing that he might miss. The rat squeaked and turned and ran in a narrow circle, looking for a place to hide; it leaped again past Bigger and scurried on dry rasping feet to one side of the box and then to the other, searching for the hole. Then it turned and reared upon its hind legs. Lytton Strachey was born on this day in 1880 — before his time, according to this letter to Virginia Woolf, excerpted from the recent Letters of Lytton Strachey: The literature of the future will, I clearly see, be amazing. At last it'll tell the truth, and be indecent, and amusing, and romantic, and even (after about 100 years) be written well. Quelle joie! -To live in those days, when books will pour out from the press reeking with all the filth of Petronius, all the frenzy of Dostoievsky, all the romance of the Arabian Nights, and all the exquisiteness of Voltaire! But it won't be only the books that will be charming then. The people! The young men! … even the young women….