In 1862, writer and abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson received a letter that held four poems written in a wavy hand, and this question: "Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?"

Emily Dickinson, then 31, was not so naive or humble as that sly query implied. She knew very well that her raw, intense poems were stunning.

Decades later, Higginson would recall reading "The nearest Dream recedes -- unrealized -- " and three other poetic diamonds and reeling with "the impression of a wholly new and original poetic genius."

Zeroing in on Dickinson's letters to Higginson, most of which were preserved, and the few letters from him to her that survived, Brenda Wineapple's "White Heat" (Alfred A. Knopf, 432 pages, $27.95) explores the friendship between Dickinson and Higginson, and in doing so upends myths about both.

Far from being a fragile, sexually confused agoraphobic, Dickinson was an astute and capable woman who chose solitude to pursue her art unimpeded. And her correspondent, long skewered for allegedly editing Dickinson's work after her death, was indispensable during her lifetime as the "brave iconoclast" on whom she tested her ideas -- and as one of the few people who truly understood her.

Much of the dreadful posthumous editing of Dickinson's poems, Wineapple argues, was done not by Higginson, but by the unfortunate Mabel Loomis Todd, the lover of Emily's brother Austin. When Todd wasn't scribbling away about sexual encounters with the stormy-browed Austin, she was erasing dashes and altering words in Dickinson's poetry.

Dickinson and Higginson met in person only three times, but their correspondence was intense. Of all the men (and women) whom biographers have cast as potential lovers for Dickinson (it is likely she had at least three infatuations that today would be called emotional affairs), Higginson would have been her choice, Wineapple theorizes -- because he truly loved her, and she him. Yet neither made a move toward physical intimacy -- because there would have been too much to lose.

Instead, Higginson, the passionate political doer, the brave soldier against slavery and for suffrage, and Dickinson, the brilliant, reticent dreamer, complemented each other and motivated each other toward their best and boldest work. For instance, Wineapple proposes that Dickinson's powerful and mysterious "My Life had stood -- a Loaded Gun -- " was inspired by Higginson's essay about slave rebel Nat Turner.

In addition to being inspiring on its own terms, "White Heat" will trigger many a reunion with Dickinson's poems, some of the most powerful and beautiful flights of thought ever undertaken by a human being. As Higginson verified for the poet, her Verse was alive, indeed -- in truth, it was immortal.

Pamela Miller is a night news editor at the Star Tribune.