Book Review - White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson

He had seen men enslaved, and seen death in battle on a terrible scale. So when a young, unknown poet named Emily Dickinson wrote to ask whether he thought her verse was “alive”, Thomas Wentworth Higginson – a critic for The Atlantic Monthly and a decorated Union veteran – knew he was seeing poetry that lived and breathed like nothing he had seen before.

Higginson was immediately awed by Emily Dickinson and went on to become her editor, mentor, and one of the reclusive poet’s closest confidantes. The two met only twice, but exchanged hundreds of deeply personal letters over the next twenty-five years; they commented on each other’s work, mulled over writers they admired, and dazzled each other with nimble turns of phrase. After she died, he shepherded the first collected edition of her poetry into publication and was a tireless champion of her work in his influential Recent Poems column for The Nation.

Later generations of literary scholars have dismissed Higginson as a dull, ordinary mind, blaming him for the decision to strip some of the distinctive, unusual structure from Dickinson’s poems for publication. However, Brenda Wineapple offers a portrait of Higginson that is far beyond ordinary. He was a widely respected writer, a fervent abolitionist, and a secret accomplice to John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry; wounded in the first year of the Civil War, he returned to service as colonel of the first federally authorized regiment of former slaves. White Heat reveals a rich, remarkable friendship between the citizen soldier and the poet, a correspondence from which Dickinson drew tremendous passion and inspiration – and which she credited, more than once, with saving her life.

Brenda Wineapple is the author and editor of five books, including the award-winning Hawthorne: A Life and Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein. Her essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in The American Scholar, The New York Times Book Review, Parnassus, Poetry, and The Nation. She teaches in the MFA programs at Columbia University and The New School in New York.

“The Devil's General: The Life of Hyazinth Graf Strachwitz -The Panze Graf” by Raymond Bagdonas

I enjoyed reading Raymond Bagdonas’ book “The Devil's General: The Life of Hyazinth Strachwitz -The Panzer Graf”. If you are looking for a scholarly tome on the life of Hyazinth Strachwitz you will be disappointed. Against the backdrop of events in Germany and Europe from the early days of his education through the thirty-year period World War One, the interwar years, World War Two, and ending with his life after the war the author tells the story of Hyazinth Strachwitz and the units he served in and lead. I really liked the description of the post-First World War life of the aristocracy and their adaptability to the interwar and changes under Hitler. 

While the conclusions drawn in some areas, like why he joined the SS, were general and without scholarly documentation, the author used sound logic based on available information in making these assumptions. The author takes the reader from Hyazinth Strachwitz’s early family history, education World War I, the interwar years to the invasion of Poland, to France and then Romania and Yugoslavia are just prelude to World War II on the Eastern Front.

Beginning with Operation Babarossa and continuing through the battles of Dubno, Uman, Nikolayev, Kiev, Kalach we see the leadership of Hyazinth Strachwitz in action with the Panzers. The journey continues down the road to Stalingrad, his promotion to Colonel and regimental commander in the Grossdeutschland Division. Battles at Kharkov, the plot to kill Adolph Hitler, Operations Citadel and Strachwitz and the battles of Kursk, Tukum and Germany. He surrendered to the US forces in May 1945.

We learned that Hyazinth Strachwitz was held as a prisoner June 1947. We learn his wife was run over and killed by an American truck. We see him move to Syria to work with the Syrian military, then go to Italy, and finally return to Germany in 1951 where he lived until dying of lung cancer in 1968.

While the book isn’t a scholarly treatment of Hyazinth Strachwitz, it is an important work that documents his actions and gives great insights into the use of the panzers on the eastern front.

“The Devil's General: The Life of Hyazinth Strachwitz -The Panzer Graf” by Raymond Bagdonas. The publisher is Casemate Publishing.