“Not Quite—Content—”: Emily Dickinson Retouches a Paint Mixed by John Quincy Adams and Oliver Wendell Holmes

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 Dickinsonian 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.