Discover Paul Éluard and Max Ernst’s Still-Bizarre Proto-Surrealist Book Les Malheurs des immortels (1922)

When the names of French poet Paul Élu­ard and Ger­man artist Max Ernst arise, one sub­ject always fol­lows: that of their years-long ménage à trois — or rather, “mar­riage à trois,” as a New York Times arti­cle by Annette Grant once put it. It start­ed in 1921, Grant writes, when the Sur­re­al­ist move­men­t’s co-founder André Bre­ton put on an exhi­bi­tion for Ernst in Paris. “Élu­ard and his Russ­ian wife, Gala, were fas­ci­nat­ed by the show and arranged to meet Ernst in the Aus­tri­an Alps and lat­er in Ger­many. Ernst, Élu­ard and Gala quick­ly became insep­a­ra­ble. The artist and the poet start­ed a life­long series of col­lab­o­ra­tions on books even as Ernst and Gala start­ed an affair.”

This arrange­ment “even­tu­al­ly pro­pelled the trio on a jour­ney from Cologne to Paris to Saigon,” which con­sti­tutes quite a sto­ry in its own right. But on pure artis­tic val­ue, no result of the encounter between Élu­ard and Ernst has remained as fas­ci­nat­ing as Les Mal­heurs des immor­tels, the book on which they col­lab­o­rat­ed in 1922.

“It appears that Ernst, still in Ger­many at that stage, cre­at­ed the images first: twen­ty-one col­lages com­posed of engrav­ings cut out of nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry mag­a­zines and cat­a­logues,” writes Daisy Sains­bury at The Pub­lic Domain Review. Unlike in the Dada works known at the time, “the artist is care­ful to dis­guise the images’ com­pos­ite nature. He blends each sec­tion into a seam­less, coher­ent whole.”

“Ernst and Élu­ard then worked togeth­er on twen­ty prose poems to accom­pa­ny the illus­tra­tions, send­ing frag­ments of text to each oth­er to revise or sup­ple­ment.” The result, which pre­dates by two years Breton’s Man­i­feste du sur­réal­isme, “rep­re­sents a pro­to-Sur­re­al­ist exper­i­ment par excel­lence.” In the text, phras­es like “Le petit est malade, le petit va mourir” recall “children’s nurs­ery rhymes, with a sing-song qual­i­ty stripped of sense”; in the images, “a caged bird, an upturned croc­o­dile, and a webbed foot trans­formed through col­lage into the ulti­mate sym­bol of human friv­o­li­ty, a fan, evoke the clas­si­fi­ca­tion sys­tems of mod­ern sci­ence (and reli­gion before that) as well as their poten­tial mis­use in human hands.”

It’s worth putting all this in its his­tor­i­cal con­text, a Europe after the First World War in which mod­ern life no longer made quite as much sense as it once seemed. The often-inex­plic­a­ble respons­es of cul­tur­al fig­ures involved in move­ments like Sur­re­al­ism — in their work or in their lives — were attempts at hit­ting the reset but­ton, to use an anachro­nis­tic metaphor. Not that, a cen­tu­ry lat­er, human­i­ty has made much progress in com­ing to grips with our place in a world of rapid­ly evolv­ing tech­nol­o­gy and large-scale geopol­i­tics. Or at least we might feel that way while read­ing Les Mal­heurs des immor­tels, avail­able online at the Inter­net Archive and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Iowa’s dig­i­tal Dada col­lec­tion, and regard­ing these tex­tu­al-visu­al con­struc­tions as deeply strange as any­thing designed by our arti­fi­cial-intel­li­gence engines today.

via Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Intro­duc­tion to Sur­re­al­ism: The Big Aes­thet­ic Ideas Pre­sent­ed in Three Videos

Watch Dreams That Mon­ey Can Buy, a Sur­re­al­ist Film by Man Ray, Mar­cel Duchamp, Alexan­der Calder, Fer­nand Léger & Hans Richter

A Brief, Visu­al Intro­duc­tion to Sur­re­al­ism: A Primer by Doc­tor Who Star Peter Capal­di

Europe After the Rain: Watch the Vin­tage Doc­u­men­tary on the Two Great Art Move­ments, Dada & Sur­re­al­ism (1978)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

T. S. Eliot’s Classic Modernist Poem The Waste Land Gets Adapted into Comic-Book Form

The phrase “April is the cru­elest month” was first print­ed more than 100 years ago, and it’s been in com­mon cir­cu­la­tion almost as long. One can eas­i­ly know it with­out hav­ing the faintest idea of its source, let alone its mean­ing. This is not, of course, to call T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land an obscure work. Despite hav­ing met with a deri­sive, even hos­tile ini­tial recep­tion, it went on to draw acclaim as one of the cen­tral Eng­lish-lan­guage poems of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, to say noth­ing of its sta­tus as an achieve­ment with­in the mod­ernist move­ment. But how, here in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, to read it afresh?

One new avenue to approach The Waste Land is this com­ic-book adap­ta­tion by Julian Peters, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture for his graph­ic ren­di­tions of oth­er such poems as Edgar Allan Poe’s Annabel Lee, W. B. Yeats’ “When You Are Old,” and Eliot’s own “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

It’s an adap­ta­tion, to be pre­cise, of the first of The Waste Land’s five sec­tions, “The Bur­ial of the Dead,” which opens on a First World War bat­tle­field — at least in Peters’ adap­ta­tion, which puts the first line “April is the cru­elest month” into the con­text of night­mar­ish imagery of blood­shed and death — and ends in a worka­day Lon­don likened to Dan­te’s hell.

The Waste Land presents a tempt­ing but daunt­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty to an illus­tra­tor, filled as it is with vivid evo­ca­tions of place and appear­ances by intrigu­ing char­ac­ters (includ­ing, in this sec­tion, “Madame Sosostris, famous clair­voy­ante”), and char­ac­ter­ized as it is by exten­sive lit­er­ary quo­ta­tion and sud­den shifts of con­text. But Peters has made a bold start of it, and any­one who reads his adap­ta­tion of “The Bur­ial of the Dead” will be wait­ing for his adap­ta­tions of “A Game of Chess” through “What the Thun­der Said.” Though much-scru­ti­nized over the past cen­tu­ry, Eliot’s mod­ernist mas­ter­piece (hear Eliot read it here) still tends to con­found first-time read­ers. To them, I always advise con­sid­er­ing poet­ry a visu­al medi­um, an idea whose pos­si­bil­i­ties Peters con­tin­ues to explore on a much more lit­er­al lev­el. Explore it here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Read the Entire Com­ic Book Adap­ta­tion of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

A Com­ic Book Adap­ta­tion of Edgar Allan Poe’s Poignant Poem Annabel Lee

W. B. Yeats’ Poem “When You Are Old” Adapt­ed into a Japan­ese Man­ga Com­ic

T. S. Eliot Illus­trates His Let­ters and Draws a Cov­er for Old Possum’s Book of Prac­ti­cal Cats

T. S. Eliot Reads His Mod­ernist Mas­ter­pieces “The Waste Land” and “TheLovee Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

James Earl Jones (RIP) Reads Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” and Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”

Note: With the sad pass­ing of James Earl Jones, at age 93, we’re bring­ing back a post from our archive–one fea­tur­ing Jones read­ing two great Amer­i­can poets, Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whit­man. These read­ings first appeared on our site in 2014.

For all its many flaws the orig­i­nal Star Wars tril­o­gy nev­er strayed too far afield because of the deep well of grav­i­tas in James Earl Jones’ voice. The omi­nous breath­ing, the echo effect, and that arrest­ing baritone—no amount of danc­ing Ewoks could take away from his vocal per­for­mance. And though Jones’ expres­sive face has also car­ried many a film, his unmis­tak­able voice can give even the sil­li­est of mate­r­i­al the weight of an oil tanker’s anchor. So then imag­ine the effect when Jones reads from already weighty lit­er­a­ture by Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whit­man? “Chills” only begins to describe it. Just above, hear him read Poe’s “The Raven,” a poem whose rhymes and sing-song cadences con­jure up the mad obses­sion that mate­ri­al­izes as that most por­ten­tous and intel­li­gent of all the winged crea­tures.

While Vad­er and Poe seem like nat­ur­al com­pan­ions, the read­ing by Jones above of selec­tions from Whitman’s “Song of Myself” also makes per­fect sense. As com­fort­able on the stage as he is before the cam­eras, Jones has an excel­lent ear for the Shake­speare­an line, clear­ly good prepa­ra­tion for the Whit­man­ian, an “oper­at­ic line,” writes The Bro­ken Tow­er, “due to its brea(d)th.” In the truth Whit­man sings in his expan­sive tran­scen­den­tal poem, “the body, the body politic, and the nation’s body, are all lit­er­al­ly the stuff of the uni­verse, star­dust smat­tered and strewn from the uni­fy­ing explo­sion of our shared ori­gin.” There are few read­ers, I aver, who could hold such “stuff” togeth­er with the strength and depth of voice as James Earl Jones. The record­ing above, of sec­tions 6–7 and 17–19, comes from a read­ing Jones gave in Octo­ber of 1973 at the 92nd St. Y. Below, hear the com­plete record­ing, with sev­er­al more stan­zas. Jones begins at the begin­ning, rum­bling and bel­low­ing out those lines that trans­mute ego­tism into mag­is­te­r­i­al, self­less inclu­siv­i­ty:

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Fred­er­ick Douglass’s Fiery 1852 Speech, “The Mean­ing of July 4th for the Negro,” Read by James Earl Jones

Darth Vader’s Voice: The Orig­i­nal Voice Ver­sus the Vocals of James Earl Jones

James Earl Jones Reads Oth­el­lo at White House Poet­ry Jam

Watch Stars Read Clas­sic Children’s Books: Bet­ty White, James Earl Jones, Rita Moreno & Many More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Gustave Doré’s Macabre Illustrations of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” (1884)


One of the busiest, most in-demand artists of the 19th cen­tu­ry, Gus­tave Doré made his name illus­trat­ing works by such authors as Rabelais, Balzac, Mil­ton, and Dante. In the 1860s, he cre­at­ed one of the most mem­o­rable and pop­u­lar illus­trat­ed edi­tions of Cer­vantes’ Don Quixote, while at the same time com­plet­ing a set of engrav­ings for an 1866 Eng­lish Bible. He prob­a­bly could have stopped there and assured his place in pos­ter­i­ty, but he would go on to illus­trate a 1872 guide to Lon­don, a new edi­tion of Samuel Tay­lor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and sev­er­al more huge­ly pop­u­lar works.

In 1884, he pro­duced 26 steel engrav­ings for an illus­trat­ed edi­tion of Edgar Allan Poe’s gloomy clas­sic “The Raven.” Like all of his illus­tra­tions, the images are rich with detail, yet in con­trast to his ear­li­er work, par­tic­u­lar­ly the fine lines of his Quixote, these engrav­ings are soft­er, char­ac­ter­ized by a deep chiaroscuro appro­pri­ate to the mood of the poem.

Above see the plate depict­ing the first lines of the poem, the haunt­ed speak­er, “weak and weary,” slumped over one of his many “quaint and curi­ous volume[s] of for­got­ten lore.” Below, see the raven tap­ping, “loud­er than before,” at the win­dow lat­tice.

By the time Doré’s edi­tion saw pub­li­ca­tion, Poe’s most famous work had already achieved recog­ni­tion as one of the great­est of Amer­i­can poems. Its author, how­ev­er, had died over thir­ty years pre­vi­ous in near-pover­ty. A cat­a­log descrip­tion from a Penn State Library hold­ing of one of Doré’s “Raven” edi­tions com­pares the two artists:

The careers of these two men are fraught with both pop­u­lar suc­cess and unmit­i­gat­ed dis­ap­point­ment. Doré enjoyed phe­nom­e­nal mon­e­tary suc­cess as an illus­tra­tor in his life-time, how­ev­er his true desire, to be acknowl­edged as a fine artist, was nev­er real­ized. The crit­ics of his day derid­ed his abil­i­ties as an artist even as his pop­u­lar­i­ty soared.

One might say that Poe suf­fered the oppo­site fate—recognized as a great artist in his life­time, he nev­er achieved finan­cial sta­bil­i­ty. We learn from the Penn State Rare Col­lec­tions library that Doré received the rough equiv­a­lent of $140,000 for his illus­trat­ed edi­tion of “The Raven.” Poe, on the oth­er hand, was paid approx­i­mate­ly nine dol­lars for his most famous poem.

The Library of Con­gress has dig­i­tal edi­tions of the com­plete Doré edi­tion of “The Raven.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Gus­tave Doré’s Dra­mat­ic Illus­tra­tions of Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy

Behold Gus­tave Doré’s Illus­tra­tions for Rabelais’ Grotesque Satir­i­cal Mas­ter­piece Gar­gan­tua and Pan­ta­gru­el

The Adven­tures of Famed Illus­tra­tor Gus­tave Doré Pre­sent­ed in a Fantasic(al) Cutout Ani­ma­tion

Gus­tave Doré’s Exquis­ite Engrav­ings of Cer­vantes’ Don Quixote

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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How the 13th-Century Sufi Poet Rumi Became One of the World’s Most Popular Writers

The Mid­dle East is hard­ly the world’s most har­mo­nious region, and it only gets more frac­tious if you add in South Asia and the Mediter­ranean. But there’s one thing on which many res­i­dents of that wide geo­graph­i­cal span can agree: Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥam­mad Rūmī. One might at first imag­ine that a thir­teenth-cen­tu­ry poet and mys­ti­cal philoso­pher who wrote in Per­sian, with occa­sion­al for­ays into Turk­ish, Ara­bic, and Greek, would be a niche fig­ure today, if known at all. In fact, Rumi, as he’s com­mon­ly known, is now one of the most pop­u­lar writ­ers in not just the Mid­dle East but the world; Eng­lish rein­ter­pre­ta­tions of his verse have even made him the best-sell­ing poet in the Unit­ed States.

“The trans­for­ma­tive moment in Rumi’s life came in 1244, when he met a wan­der­ing mys­tic known as Shams of Tabriz,” writes the BBC’s Jane Cia­bat­tari. She quotes Brad Gooch, author of Rumi’s Secret: The Life of the Sufi Poet of Love, describ­ing them as hav­ing an “elec­tric friend­ship for three years,” after which Shams dis­ap­peared. “Rumi coped by writ­ing poet­ry,” which includes 3,000 poems writ­ten for “Shams, the prophet Muham­mad and God. He wrote 2,000 rubay­at, four-line qua­trains. He wrote in cou­plets a six-vol­ume spir­i­tu­al epic, The Mas­navi.” He did all this work in ser­vice of what, in the ani­mat­ed TED-Ed les­son above, Stephanie Honchell Smith calls his ulti­mate goal: “the reuni­fi­ca­tion of his soul with God through the expe­ri­ence of divine love.”

How is such a love to be accessed? “Love resides not in learn­ing, not in knowl­edge, not in pages in books,” Rumi declared. “Wher­ev­er the debates of men may lead, that is not the lover’s path.” He pur­sued it through devo­tion to Shams’ Sufism, “par­tic­i­pat­ing in rit­u­al­ized danc­ing and preach­ing the reli­gion of love through lec­tures, poet­ry, and prose.” Lat­er in life, he shift­ed “from ecsta­t­ic expres­sions of divine love to vers­es that guide oth­ers to dis­cov­er it for them­selves,” incor­po­rat­ing “ideas, sto­ries, and quotes from Islam­ic reli­gious texts, Ara­bic and Per­sian lit­er­a­ture and ear­li­er Sufi writ­ings and poet­ry.” Per­haps there can be no full appre­ci­a­tion of Rumi’s work with­out a schol­ar’s under­stand­ing of the lan­guages and cul­tures he knew. But if his sales fig­ures are any­thing to go by, the long­ing into which his com­plex work taps is uni­ver­sal.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Mys­ti­cal Poet­ry of Rumi Read By Til­da Swin­ton, Madon­na, Robert Bly & Cole­man Barks

Learn Islam­ic & Indi­an Phi­los­o­phy with 107 Episodes of the His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps Pod­cast

The Com­plex Geom­e­try of Islam­ic Art & Design: A Short Intro­duc­tion

500+ Beau­ti­ful Man­u­scripts from the Islam­ic World Now Dig­i­tized & Free to Down­load

The Birth and Rapid Rise of Islam, Ani­mat­ed (622‑1453)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The First Recording of Allen Ginsberg Reading “Howl” (1956)

Allen_ginsberg_erads howl

Image by Michiel Hendryckx, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Occa­sion­al­ly I slip into an ivory tow­er men­tal­i­ty in which the idea of a banned book seems quaint—associated with sil­ly scan­dals over the tame sex scenes in James Joyce or D.H. Lawrence. After all, I think, we live in an age when best­seller lists are topped (no pun) by tawdry fan fic­tion like Fifty Shades of Grey. Nothing’s sacred. But this notion is a mas­sive blind spot on my part; the whole aware­ness-rais­ing mis­sion of the annu­al Banned Books Week seeks to dis­pel such com­pla­cen­cy. Books are chal­lenged, sup­pressed, and banned all the time in pub­lic schools and libraries, even if we’ve moved past out­right gov­ern­ment cen­sor­ship of the pub­lish­ing indus­try.

It’s also easy to for­get that Allen Ginsberg’s gen­er­a­tion-defin­ing poem “Howl” was once almost a casu­al­ty of cen­sor­ship. The most like­ly suc­ces­sor to Walt Whitman’s vision, Ginsberg’s orac­u­lar utter­ances did not sit well with U.S. Cus­toms, who in 1957 tried to seize every copy of the British sec­ond print­ing. When that failed, police arrest­ed the poem’s pub­lish­er, Lawrence Fer­linghet­ti, and he and Ginsberg’s “Howl” were put on tri­al for obscen­i­ty. Appar­ent­ly, phras­es like “cock and end­less balls” did not sit well with the author­i­ties. But the court vin­di­cat­ed them all.

The sto­ry of Howl’s pub­li­ca­tion begins in 1955, when 29-year-old Gins­berg read part of the poem at the Six Gallery, where Ferlinghetti—owner of San Francisco’s City Lights book­store—sat in atten­dance. Decid­ing that Ginsberg’s epic lament “knocked the sides out of things,” Fer­linghet­ti offered to pub­lish “Howl” and brought out the first edi­tion in 1956. Pri­or to this read­ing, “Howl” exist­ed in the form of an ear­li­er poem called “Dream Record, 1955,” which poet Ken­neth Rexroth told Gins­berg sound­ed “too for­mal… like you’re wear­ing Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty Brooks Broth­ers ties.” Ginsberg’s rewrite jet­ti­soned the ivy league deco­rum.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, no audio exists of that first read­ing, but above you can hear the first record­ed read­ing of “Howl,” from Feb­ru­ary, 1956 at Portland’s Reed Col­lege. The record­ing sat dor­mant in Reed’s archives for over fifty years until schol­ar John Suit­er redis­cov­ered it in 2008. In it, Gins­berg reads his great prophet­ic work, not with the cadences of a street preach­er or jazzman—both of which he had in his repertoire—but in an almost robot­ic monot­o­ne with an under­tone of man­ic urgency. Ginsberg’s read­ing, before an inti­mate group of stu­dents in a dor­mi­to­ry lounge, took place only just before the first print­ing of the poem in the City Lights edi­tion.

Note: This post orig­i­nal­ly appeared on our site in 2013. Over the years, the audio orig­i­nal­ly fea­tured in the post, along with many of the links, went dead. So we gave every­thing a refresh and brought it back.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Allen Gins­berg Record­ings Brought to the Dig­i­tal Age. Lis­ten to Eight Full Tracks for Free

James Fran­co Reads a Dream­i­ly Ani­mat­ed Ver­sion of Allen Ginsberg’s Epic Poem ‘Howl’

2,000+ Cas­settes from the Allen Gins­berg Audio Col­lec­tion Now Stream­ing Online

Allen Ginsberg’s “Celes­tial Home­work”: A Read­ing List for His Class “Lit­er­ary His­to­ry of the Beats”

13 Lec­tures from Allen Ginsberg’s “His­to­ry of Poet­ry” Course (1975)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Bukowski Reads Bukowski: Watch a 1975 Documentary Featuring Charles Bukowski at the Height of His Powers

In 1973, Richard Davies direct­ed Bukows­ki, a doc­u­men­tary that TV Guide described as a “cin­e­ma-verite por­trait of Los Ange­les poet Charles Bukows­ki.” The film finds Bukows­ki, then 53 years old, “enjoy­ing his first major suc­cess,” and “the cam­era cap­tures his rem­i­nis­cences … as he walks around his Los Ange­les neigh­bor­hood. Blunt lan­guage and a sly appre­ci­a­tion of his life form the core of the pro­gram, which includes obser­va­tions by and about the women in his life.”

The orig­i­nal film clocked in at 46 min­utes. Then, two years lat­er, PBS released a “heav­i­ly-edit­ed 28-minute ver­sion of the film,” using alter­nate scenes and a rearranged struc­ture. Renamed Bukows­ki Reads Bukows­ki, the film aired on Thurs­day, Octo­ber 16, 1975. And, true to its name, the film fea­tures footage of Bukows­ki read­ing his poems, start­ing with “The Rat,” from the 1972 col­lec­tion Mock­ing­bird Wish Me Luck. You can watch Bukows­ki Reads Bukows­ki above, and find more Bukows­ki read­ings in the Relat­eds below.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Hear 130 Min­utes of Charles Bukowski’s First-Ever Record­ed Read­ings (1968)

Charles Bukows­ki Reads His Poem “The Secret of My Endurance

Tom Waits Reads Charles Bukows­ki

Four Charles Bukows­ki Poems Ani­mat­ed

 

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Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium: A Beautiful Digital Edition of the Poet’s Pressed Plants & Flowers Is Now Online

So many writ­ers have been gar­den­ers and have writ­ten about gar­dens that it might be eas­i­er to make a list of those who didn’t. But even in this crowd­ed com­pa­ny, Emi­ly Dick­in­son stands out. She not only attend­ed the frag­ile beau­ty of flow­ers with an artist’s eye—before she’d writ­ten any of her famous verse—but she did so with the keen eye of a botanist, a field of work then open to any­one with the leisure, curios­i­ty, and cre­ativ­i­ty to under­take it.

“In an era when the sci­en­tif­ic estab­lish­ment barred and bolt­ed its gates to women,” Brain Pick­ings’ Maria Popo­va writes, “botany allowed Vic­to­ri­an women to enter sci­ence through the per­mis­si­ble back­door of art.”

In Dickinson’s case, this involved the press­ing of plants and flow­ers in an herbar­i­um, pre­serv­ing their beau­ty, and in some mea­sure, their col­or for over 150 years. The Har­vard Gazette describes this very frag­ile book, made avail­able in 2006 in a full-col­or dig­i­tal fac­sim­i­le on the Har­vard Library site:

Assem­bled in a pat­terned green album bought from the Spring­field sta­tion­er G. & C. Mer­ri­am, the herbar­i­um con­tains 424 spec­i­mens arranged on 66 leaves and del­i­cate­ly attached with small strips of paper. The spec­i­mens are either native plants, plants nat­u­ral­ized to West­ern Mass­a­chu­setts, where Dick­in­son lived, or house­plants. Every page is accom­pa­nied by a tran­scrip­tion of Dickinson’s neat hand­writ­ten labels, which iden­ti­fies each plant by its sci­en­tif­ic name.

The book is thought to have been fin­ished by the time she was 14 years old. Long part of Harvard’s Houghton Library col­lec­tion, it has also long been treat­ed as too frag­ile for any­one to view. The only access has come in the form of grainy, black and white pho­tographs. For the past few years, how­ev­er, schol­ars and lovers of Dickinson’s work have been able to see the herbar­i­um in these stun­ning repro­duc­tions.

The pages are so for­mal­ly com­posed they look like paint­ings from a dis­tance. Though most­ly unknown as a poet in her life, Dick­in­son was local­ly renowned in Amherst as a gar­den­er and “expert plant iden­ti­fi­er,” notes Sara C. Ditsworth. The herbar­i­um may or may not offer a win­dow of insight into Dickinson’s lit­er­ary mind. Houghton Library cura­tor Leslie A. Mor­ris, who wrote the for­ward to the fac­sim­i­le edi­tion, seems skep­ti­cal. “I think that you could read a lot into the herbar­i­um if you want­ed to,” she says, “but you have no way of know­ing.”

And yet we do. It may be impos­si­ble to sep­a­rate Dick­in­son the gar­den­er and botanist from Dick­in­son the poet and writer. As Ditsworth points out, “accord­ing to Judith Farr, author of The Gar­dens of Emi­ly Dick­in­son, one-third of Dickinson’s poems and half of her let­ters men­tion flow­ers. She refers to plants almost 600 times,” includ­ing 350 ref­er­ences to flow­ers. Both her herbar­i­um and her poet­ry can be sit­u­at­ed with­in the 19th cen­tu­ry “lan­guage of flow­ers,” a sen­ti­men­tal genre that Dick­in­son made her own, with her ellip­ti­cal entwin­ing of pas­sion and secre­cy.

The first two spec­i­mens in Dickinson’s herbar­i­um are the jas­mine and the priv­et: “You have jas­mine for poet­ry and pas­sion” in the lan­guage of flow­ers, Mor­ris points out, “and priv­et,” a hedge plant, “for pri­va­cy.” There is no need to see this arrange­ment as a pre­dic­tion of the future from the teenage botanist Dick­in­son. Did she plan from ado­les­cence to become a recluse poet in lat­er life? Per­haps not. But we can cer­tain­ly “read into” the lan­guage of her herbar­i­um some of the same great themes that recur over and over in her work, car­ried across by images of plants and flow­ers. See Dickinson’s com­plete herbar­i­um at Har­vard Library’s dig­i­tal col­lec­tions here, or pur­chase a (very expen­sive) fac­sim­i­le edi­tion of the book here.

Note: Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2019.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sur­pris­ing Map of Plants: A New Ani­ma­tion Shows How All the Dif­fer­ent Plants Relate to Each Oth­er

His­toric Man­u­script Filled with Beau­ti­ful Illus­tra­tions of Cuban Flow­ers & Plants Is Now Online (1826)

How Emi­ly Dick­in­son Writes A Poem: A Short Video Intro­duc­tion

The Sec­ond Known Pho­to of Emi­ly Dick­in­son Emerges

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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