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Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief, by Roger Lundin, Eerdmans, 1998, 272 pp.; $16, paper
When Emily Dickinson died at 56 in 1886, she was virtually unknown outside a tiny circle of acquaintances. Today she ranks as America's greatest poet and one of its most creative—though enigmatic—religious thinkers.
So argues Roger Lundin in this powerful contribution to the hundreds of books and articles on the Belle of Amherst.
That Dickinson has attracted so much attention is hardly surprising. After a seemingly conventional upper-middle-class childhood and adolescence, and a single year at Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary, Dickinson gradually secluded herself to her homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts. Except for two extended visits to Boston for eye treatment, in the last three decades of her life she saw few persons beyond her immediate family, and in the last two decades she left the grounds of her home but once. Frequently dressing in white, she permitted only a handful of visitors, sometimes expecting them to converse from the other side a slightly opened door, and other times simply turning them away. The same determined reclusiveness marked Dickinson's control of her work. Of some 1,800 known texts, only a handful were published in her lifetime, despite repeated entreaties from friends to share the fruit of her genius. Though Dickinson may have enjoyed several romantic relationships, including one in late life, she remained single.
Lundin argues that Dickinson's poetry was in large measure about belief, its uncertainties and comforts. On precisely arranged sheets, the Amherst poet crafted compressed lines about weighty topics—nature, consciousness, suffering, the life to come, and, of course, God. In Lundin's rendering, Dickinson's poetic sensibilities were particularly attuned to the vast silences. Her God was not so much nonexistent as mute, an eclipse, hidden: "I know that He exists / Somewhere—in Silence— / He has hid his rare life / From our gross eyes," she would write.
Nature too seemed mute. Where earlier generations had seen nature as a play of types—traces of divine intentionality written into the material fabric of creation—Dickinson saw in nature only tropes—a forum for the play of humanly imposed meanings. So it was that those dying in ages past "Knew where they went— / They went to God's Right Hand— / That Hand is amputated now / And God cannot be found—." And in the echo of this silence Dickinson erected the self, the autonomous "Columnar" self. With this gesture, Lundin urges, she accelerated the long Protestant tendency to move the center of God's activity from the external to the internal world.
But Dickinson went considerably further. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson and other nineteenth-century romantics, Dickinson sought to fathom the inexhaustible richness of consciousness itself. With them, she regarded ignorance, not sin, as the heart of the human dilemma. Men and women needed heaven in order to compensate for finitude and death, not to redeem life of its moral stain. By delving deep into the precincts of consciousness, she showed her preference for the private expressive self over the public conventional self favored by her evangelical Whig contemporaries (though one finds in Lundin's Dickinson few prefigurations of a post-Freudian world of subliminal desires or, for that matter, a postmodernist reveling in the endless play of signs).
Still, there were limits. Dickinson resisted the romantics' tendency to deify the self; she also resisted their tendency to sentimentalize childhood and death. So it was that the Victorian romantic readily blended into the modern realist. She proved herself a keen student of the natural world, but it was a Darwinian world, red in tooth and claw, filled only with the truths of human projection, not designs of divine creation. Like her contemporaries Melville and Nietzsche, Dickinson heralded an inner revolution as profound in its consequences as any political tumult: the coming of a world without belief. In this and other respects, Lundin argues, Dickinson lived the quintessentially modern life.
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