Figuring

by Maria Popova

This, after all, was a woman who at only nineteen confidently mocked her brother for saying that her philosophic meditations were incomprehensible and that she should write in simpler style: “I’ll be a little ninny—a little pussy catty, a little Red Riding Hood, I’ll wear a Bee in my Bonnet, and a Rose bud in my hair.” She didn’t hesitate to poke fun at his patriarchal condescension: “Permit me to tie your shoe, to run like a dog behind you. I can bark, see here! Bow wow!” She would grow out of her teenage sarcasm but would retain the willful defense of her sensibility, consistently refusing suggested simplifications of her poems with the same quiet confidence in her style of thought and expression. After her death, her longtime editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson would bow at the self-possession with which she had upheld her peculiar style and resisted his edits over the decades: “After all, when a thought takes one’s breath away, a lesson on grammar seems an impertinence.”