A female, American poet

Emily Dickinson (1830-86) wrote nearly 1,800 poems—only seven were published during her lifetime.

She was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. She attended Amherst Academy and one year of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary—then she seems to have retreated into her home, interacting only with her family and a small circle of friends.

Dickinson’s family was devoutly religious, but she never made the public profession of faith necessary for joining the church—nevertheless, many of her poems are about religious subjects. One critic refers to her “hymnal meters, her biblical references, clipped Calvinist idiom, and enduring preoccupation with God, Jesus, suffering, death, and (her "Flood subject") immortality.”

“Hymnal meters” means that many of Dickinson’s poems seem to be based on the rhythm of hymns and other songs. This means that you can sing “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died,” for example, to the tune of “Amazing Grace.”

Other critics have pointed out that her poems contain many paradoxes and riddles, including lines like “it might be lonelier/ Without the loneliness”; and “Water is taught by thirst.” The question of what she really believes about religion or other subjects is a difficult one: one critic points out “The problem with saying where Dickinson stands (say, on the question of a Protestant God) is that she can be found in two or five places at once. Her concerns manifest themselves as continuing self-debates, as varied and often conflicting dramatizations rather than as static position-papers.”

Some of her poems contain sentiments that don’t seem that different from those found in Whitman’s poems. In poem 435, “Much Madness is divinest Sense,” for example, she states that what the majority understands to be sensible and reasonable may actually be madness to someone who has a “discerning Eye.” This seems very much in line with Whitman’s position of radical individualism—it’s best not to follow authorities or traditions or the crowd, because they might be completely wrong. What Dickinson emphasizes, however, is the impact that differing from society might have. “Demur” means to object, but gently: it conveys the idea of saying “I’d rather not” as opposed to a violent rejection of something. Yet Dickinson states that the reaction to that sort of gentle objection is rather extreme: “you’re straightway dangerous—/And handled with a Chain.” Oppose society, even in the mildest way, and, Dickinson says, you’ll provoke a violent reaction.

It’s also interesting to note poem 632, “The Brain—is wider than the Sky,” because it touches on a subject dear to the hearts of both European and American Romantics: perception. In the first two stanzas of the poem, Dickinson celebrates the power of the mind to conceive of vast immensities like the sky and the sea. Her language celebrates the human capacity to understand, to metaphorically contain the sky or absorb the sea. The final stanza is more paradoxical and seems to present a limit. While the first two stanzas present the brain as easily taking in the sky and the sea, in the third stanza it’s presented as being equal in weight to God. When it came to the question of which was more significant, the human mind or God, Walt Whitman clearly came down on the side of the mind—his conception of the religions of the world is that they’ve prepared humanity to stand on their own, and now we have no need for the religions of the past. Dickinson can’t dismiss God nearly as easily. The first two stanzas of the poem present the brain as easily absorbing the sky and sea and having room for more, but that’s not the case here. The brain is the exact weight of God, not heavier than God. Dickinson could be saying that God is the one subject that stretches the capacity of the mind; she could be saying that all we can know of God is limited by the capacity of our frail human minds. She may be saying we should be suspicious of people who try to tell us about God, because their vision of God is tainted by their own personal perspectives; she may even be commenting that God might be a creation of the human mind.

This is one of the reasons readers find Dickinson so fascinating—her poetry is so condensed and cryptic and layered with multiple meanings that we have to keep puzzling over it.

Critic Roger Lundin points out that even though some of Dickinson’s ideas resemble those of her Romantic contemporaries, that “there was perhaps something of Dickinson's Puritan inheritance that led her to perceive the limits of Romantic optimism found in the work of her contemporaries Emerson and Whitman, yet, like them, she refused to accept the notion of Original Sin.”

Dickinson and Whitman share similar ideas on some subjects, but they differ strongly on other topics. One major difference lies in their poetic styles: Whitman’s rambling, expansive poems versus Dickinson’s precise, concise, rhyming lines. Dickinson also seems more aware of life’s limitations than Whitman. It’s hard to imagine Whitman writing poem 341, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes.” This poems seems to be about the numbness that comes after a great loss—it reminds me a bit of Tennyson’s poem 78 from In Memoriam: “with long use her tears are dry.”

The language of Dickinson’s poem emphasizes the absence of feeling: the nerves “sit ceremonious,” the heart is “stiff,” the feet are “mechanical” and go around in a “Wooden way”; Dickinson’s overall comment seems to be that this is a “Quartz contentment, like a stone”—the pain isn’t as sharp, but the mourner feels the contentment of a mineral, a quartz contentment, not something that’s alive.

It’s hard to imagine the Whitman of “Song of Myself” writing anything similar—Whitman’s pattern is to break through barriers and limitations, not dwell on them. Dickinson seems more far more keenly aware that some problems can’t be solved by a positive mental attitude or sheer force of individual personality. Whitman probably couldn’t have written the lines “This is the Hour of Lead—/Remembered, if outlived.” He doesn’t seem to recognize that there are some sorrows that people just have to live through, without a quick and easy solution, or that some pain can’t be overcome at all—you’ll live with it for the rest of your life. In this case, as in many others, Dickinson’s vision of life seems more complete than Whitman’s

For discussion:

- Based on the poems in the anthology, what does Dickinson think about death? About nature? About relationships?

- The introduction to the section on Dickinson says Poem 754, “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun,” “refers to the way a woman’s life is defined in relation to a man’s” (Norton 1050). Do you see the poem as talking about the relationships between women and men? Why or why not?