hexafu

Introduction

The family and friends who gathered for Emily Dickinson’s funeral in Amherst, Massachusets on a sunny May afternoon in 1886 had no idea that the woman they mourned was one of the greatest lyric poets in the English language. To the members of the group that had assembled at the Dickinson home that day, Emily was a beloved sister and a dynamic, albeit eccentric, friend. All of the mourners knew that their reclusive neighbor had written poetry of a kind. Some were even aware that a very few of those poems had been published anonymously during her lifetime.

None of them, however, had any notion of the enormous scope of this woman’s genius or the abiding significance of the work that lay upstairs in a box in Emily’s room. Yet within a matter of decades, those poems were to earn her a place in the top echelon of poets in the English language.

Dickinson had wanted it this way. From the time that she began seriously writing poetry in her late twenties until her death almost thirty years later, she had sought to develop her art in virtual anonymity. At death she left behind close to 1,800 poems, only a handful of which had been published against her will or with her grudging permission. Not only did she not seek fame in her own lifetime, but she positively shunned publicity of any kind, securing for herself by her early thirties a solitude that was so complete that few were ever to see her again.

Yet at the same time, Dickinson did not exactly hide her poetic light under a bushel. She carried on a voluminous correspondence and freely sent copies of her poems along with her letters throughout her adult life. We know that she mailed to friends and family over 575 copies of her poems, and given the number of her letters that were lost or destroyed before her fame was secured, the total number is probably much higher than that.

She intended her poems to do any number of things for their recipients – to bring comfort to a grieving acquaintance, to revive the flagging spirits of a neighbor, or perhaps simply to entertain or delight a treasured friend.

What Dickinson did not seek in her own lifetime was a larger audience.

Having been raised in a Whig culture that prized patience and self-mastery, she was willing to defer entirely the prominence that might otherwise have been hers. She banked on fame, but only the notoriety that would come to her after death.

“Lay this Laurel on the One/Too intrinsic for Renown,” she wrote of her father several years after his death. In life, fame brought only distractions and the prying gaze of the public; after death, it could grant something much more satisfying:

The first We knew of Him was Death —

The second, was Renown —

Except the first had justified

The second had not been – [#1006]

This “renown” fit neatly into her “strategy of immortality”:

A Spider sewed at Night

Without a Light

Opon an Arc of White —

If Ruff it was of Dame Or Shroud of Gnome

Himself himself inform —

Of Immortality

His strategy

Was physiognomy – [#1163]

In saying that Dickinson’s poetry was an “art of belief,” I intend the phrase in several ways. Her poetry is in large measure about belief — about the objects of belief and its comforts, as well as belief’s great uncertainties.

With daring tenacity, she explored the full range of human experience in her reflections upon such subjects as God, the Bible, suffering, and immortality.

“On subjects of which we know nothing, or should I say Beings,” she wrote a few years before she died, “we both believe, and disbelieve a hundred times an Hour, which keeps Believing nimble.”

To keep the “Believing nimble” one needed skill, and in this sense, too, Dickinson realized that belief is an art that demands trial and practice.

A product of the romantic age and a prophet of modernity, she comprehended more fully than most people in her day how much the human mind contributes to the process of belief. Art, after all, is about the making of things; and in matters of belief, the history of the modern world is the story of our increasing awareness of the extent to which we participate in the making of truth as well as in the finding of it. However hard it was to fashion and sustain, belief was essential to Dickinson:

So much of Heaven has gone from Earth

That there must be a Heaven

If only to enclose the Saints

To Affidavit given —

The Missionary to the Mole Must prove there is a Sky

Location doubtless he would plead

But what excuse have I?

Too much of Proof affronts Belief

The Turtle will not try

Unless you leave him — then return —

And he has hauled away. #1240]

From our vantage point more than a century later, Emily Dickinson stands as one of the major religious thinkers of her age. She knew the Christian tradition, and especially its scriptures and hymns, in depth; on several occasions, in adolescence and young adulthood, she agonizingly approached the threshold of conversion but never passed over it; and throughout her adult life, in her poems and letters, she brilliantly meditated upon the great perennial questions of God, suffering, the problem of evil, death, and her “Flood subject,” immortality.

Though she never joined the church – and quit attending it at all around the age of thirty – she wrestled with God all her life. Only months before she died, she called herself “Pugilist and Poet.” Like Jacob, who told the angel, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me,” Dickinson would not let go of God.

For Dickinson the struggle with God had a great deal to do with the considerable challenges that arose to Christian belief in her lifetime.

When she was born, the argument from design was securely in place on a six-thousand-year-old earth; at about the time that she began to write poetry regularly, Darwin published The Origin of Species and the earth had grown suddenly older. Like Fyodor Dostoevsky and Friedrich Nietzsche – contemporaries with whom she merits comparison – Dickinson was one of the first to trace the trajectory of God’s decline.

As she wrote in a brilliant poem about the ebbing of belief, God’s “Hand is amputated now/And God cannot be found -” Unlike Nietzsche, she was not gleeful about the possible loss of God but profoundly sad about it, because “The abdication of Belief/Makes the Behavior small —” [#1581].

At the same time that she wrestled with God the Father – questioning not his existence as much as his presence and justice – Dickinson was drawn irresistibly to Jesus the Son. It was the humanity of this one who was “acquainted with Grief” that drew her to him.

“I like a look of

Agony,/Because I know it’s true —,” she observed in a poem, and in the suffering of Jesus she detected a truth that she could believe without a doubt

[#339]. To the end of her life, Dickinson rarely wavered in her expressions of affection for this “Tender Pioneer.”

In dwelling so exclusively on the humanity of Jesus, however, Dickinson also exposed the limits of the romantic turn in theology and culture.

To a significant extent, she followed the lead of Ralph Waldo Emerson and others as they sought to feed the life of the spirit by drawing from the fathomless depths of the self.

In her most expansive moods, she saw those inner resources as more than sufficient to nourish the soul. But when suffering scorched her life and parched her spirit, Dickinson learned the true poverty of human divinity:

It is easy to work when the soul is at play —

But when the soul is in pain

The hearing him put his playthings up

Makes work difficult – then – [#242]

When theology turns into anthropology, Jesus becomes merely a pioneer in the endless process of bearing pain.

A full half century before Karl Barth thundered against the bankruptcy of liberal theology, Emily Dickinson had already intuited the limits of romantic optimism. A Christ who is only a prophetic representative of our own humanity is trapped with us in our finitude. What to do with that finitude was a question that consumed her to the end of her life.

Emily Dickinson is unique among the major figures of modern culture.

No other person in American history has become so famous in death after having been so anonymous in life. All comparable persons of greatness in the modern world have led lives that have been, to some degree, public.

For the politicians, statesmen, religious leaders, and leaders of business whom we remember, it is a given that the interest they have generated after death has only intensified the importance they had established in life. The same is true even of those artists and intellectuals in whom we take an ever keener interest today. Those painters, poets, and composers may have had only slight influence over the course of world affairs, but as they labored at their crafts, they were known for what they did.

Matters were entirely different, however, for Emily Dickinson. All but alone among the major figures of the modern world, she had no audience for the public performance of her life or work. In the manner in which she lived and wrote her poetry, as well as in her views of God and the self, Dickinson developed the full implications of the modern move to what Charles Taylor has called the “inexhaustible inner domain.”

She pushed to the limit the Protestant tendency to shift the center of God’s activity from the world outside the self to the spiritual world within it.

This woman who loved letters because they gave her “the mind alone without corporeal friend” lived the most intensely focused inward life of any major figure in American history. In doing so, she discovered what Blaise Pascal once memorably termed the “greatness and wretchedness” of humanity. And in living her extraordinary life as she did, Dickinson was able to practice an art of belief that eventually made her the greatest of all American poets and one of the most brilliantly enigmatic religious thinkers this country has ever known.