1830-1886
Author: Ahsan Nabi Khan
Here is a poet who is undoubtedly claimed as the cofounder of modern American poetry, along with Whitman. She designed poems more like traditional maxims than long drags of descriptions. Combined with wit and subtlety, the short stanzas of Emily Dickinson embody her literary, yet simple life at Massachusetts, USA.
She was born in 1830 in Amherst, got education at the local academy and lived there for the rest of her life. Only for educative purposes, she once attended Mount Holyoke College before it was named so, for a short time period. The rest of her life she remained within the bounds of Massachusetts. She even rarely left her father’s house.
This has given inwardness to her expression, but has not prevented her thought to be deep and reading to be wide in English literature. Traveling was certainly not in her priorities. She was basically more interested in intellectual voyage into poetry of John Keats and Robert Browning, the prose of John Ruskin and Sir Thomas Browne, and the novels of George Eliot and Charlotte and Emily Brontë. Her companions were the Hills, sunsets, noise in her pool and a dog, which she valued as better than humans because “they know, but do not tell”.
Her own opinion about her upbringing was that she went to school, but had no education. She claimed to have learnt ‘Immortality’ from her boyfriend, who after coming too close, left her alone. She had a brother and a sister, but she said they were not cared for by their busy parents. She was given religious books, but she considered herself not religious at all. Even then, she treasured Book of Revelation, the translated Bible.
Meditation about metaphysical topics goes parallel to her regular verses. She followed this style from John Donne and George Herbert, both being metaphysical poets. The common way that Protestants’ hymnology commanded typical stanza pattern is seen in her verses like “Our God, Our Help in Ages Past”
Our God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Our shelter in the stormy blast,
And our eternal home.
There is not much variation in rhyme and meter. So it made the regular verses fit for singing. More importantly, it shows her intense religious nature that is in juxtaposition with a deep psychological experience. Such poems reflect her background of Calvinism, the Protestant theological system in which justification by faith alone becomes an overriding emphasis on the grace of God culminating in the predestination—certain souls are predestined to be saved, the others to be damned.
Calvinist tradition places probing self-analysis and brooding seriousness. She picked the habit of analyzing oneself, but kicked the seriousness with her mischievous wit. Her originality distinguishes her from purely orthodox Christianity and her love for nature separates her from Puritan ancestors. She retained her individuality and distinction. Her transcendentalism, regarding the divine as the guiding principle in mankind, drew her poetry closer to Emerson, Whitman and Thoreau in her contemporaries. Still, she sees a sharper image of life than they do.
When going through her poems, one often is struck by her out of the ordinary and surprising vocabulary. She uses colloquial in idiom which requires an expansion of underlying meaning. Her compact syntax, heavy use of dashes and the peculiar use of capital letters requires readers to give repeated and careful readings. She was criticized for making her readers perplexed this way, but her reason was to convey the complex feelings and emotions with these idiosyncrasies. When advised by Thomas W. Higginson, a contemporary influential critic to write more polite, less direct, simple and smoother poetry, she replied in a poem made in her habitual style,
I cannot dance upon my toes
I cannot dance upon my Toes—
No Man instructed me—
But oftentimes, among my mind,
A Glee possesseth me,
…
And though I had no Gown of Gauze—
No ringlet, to my Hair,
Nor hopped to Audiences—like Birds,
One claw upon the Air
…
Nor any know I know the Art
I mention—easy—Here—
Nor any Placard boast me—
It’s full of Opera
Richard B. Sewall has written an extensive biography of Dickinson, in which he describes her determination to express the unique complexity of her mind. At first she was resigned to “barefoot rank: of anonymity” but her firmness to seek truth lead her to publish her poems. Bible, the essential religious scripture kept her spiritually alive in her loneliness. Without her firm devotion to religion and the art of poetry, she would have suffered the destructive neurosis. But she survived. As one of her poem ‘The Soul selects her own Society’ barely hints at her success in her conscientious effort to reveal the truth of her own life, she just had to tell it ‘slant’. She invites us to ponder upon the many riddles of life with our own individual consciousness. Let us put some thought here:
The Soul selects her own Society—
Then—shuts the Door—
To her Divine Majority—
Present no more—