6 - Dickinson's Poetic Spirituality

Summary

“Faith” is a fine invention

When Gentlemen can see —

(Fr202; J185)

One finds prayerful utterance throughout

Dickinson's poems.

— Jane Donahue Eberwein, Dickinson: Strategies of Limitation

Cotton Mather would have burnt her for a witch.

— Allen Tate, “Emily Dickinson”

STUDYING EMILY DICKINSON in cultural context brings her “flood subject” of immortality (and all of the spiritual motifs associated with it) into focus. One does not spend much time with Dickinson's poetry before realizing that it is infused with rich and complex spiritual themes — themes that have commanded the exclusive attention of several Dickinson scholars — hence the need for this separate chapter.

Dickinson's Spiritual Sensibility: Tradition and Innovation

Elisa New, in her 1993 book The Regenerate Lyric: Theology and Innovation in American Poetry, building from Yvor Winters's theory that American poetry is essentially about “human isolation in a foreign universe” (qtd. New 2), regards American poetry “as the religious center of an already religiocentric literature,” fueled by “an experimental Calvinism not so easily dislodged by Unitarian, Transcendentalist, or Romantic forces” (2). If “Puritanism released the energy of uncertainty,” as John Robinson states in Emily Dickinson: Looking to Canaan (1986: 36), then Dickinson uses that energy to stage a drama of the soul as it struggles to bridge the unbridgeable gulf between the reality of death and the promise of salvation for the undisclosed elect.

As a matter of principle, Dickinson's earliest academic critics generally overlooked or underplayed the influence of cultural forces, including religious ones, upon Dickinson's art (Allen Tate being an exception).