Above her deep thought, attention to detail, and capacity for metaphorical complexity, Emily Dickinson is remembered for the way she changed poetry. The monument of Dickinson’s art is revealed when juxtaposed with that of her poetic contemporaries. While Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, for example, strove to proclaim a point directly to the American people, Dickinson was comfortable to dance on a question and to communicate to the reader not through doctrine or pre-constructed method but, rather, directly through her soul. Though her poetry had few readers in her lifetime, she seemed to believe that it would be read eventually (“This is my letter to the world, / That never wrote to me,—”). This reveals an important question: for whom or what was she writing? What was her poetic purpose? Dickinson’s poetry is fundamentally distinct because of its self-sufficiency and its revolutionary goal, to consider the human soul before its surroundings.
The broad things which influenced Dickinson can be counted on one’s fingers. Her contained life, however, could not contain her spirit, rather it concentrated it: her attention to detail is unmatchable (“He [the snake] likes a Boggy Acre / A floor to cool for corn—”). It follows that her poetry would in turn be brief, rich, and complete. Literary critic Alfred Kazin asserts that her poetry was her life in “Emily Dickinson: The Alone to the Alone.” While many other poets of her time, revolutionary in their own right, had tangible purposes, Dickinson projected her soul onto the soul of the world and that of its inhabitants. Therefore, a thoughtful analyst could understand Dickinson as a person with little more than her poetry as a reference. This is a rare and powerful attribute. Her soul is accessible in its entirety through her poetry.
This insight is critical to determine her purpose. She, as an artist, was driven to put herself on the page. As a person of little influence and big ideas (and so clearly terrified by the end of life), it is very reasonable that she sought to don herself immortality, if she had not ordered her sister to burn her poetry after her death.1 Thus, by elimination, her purpose must have come from pure self-expression, a necessary psychological application. In a personal interview, Cheryl McIntosh, an expert on Dickinson’s poetry, said, “Don’t lose the forest for the trees, she [Dickinson] had to write because she was an artist.” This seems logical, but it was not a universally accepted idea. As transcendentalists locked horns with more traditional thinkers—Whitman declaring the likes of, “There was never any more inception than there is now”—poetry became ever more integrated with philosophy and theology. But Dickinson functioned in her vacuum, where she could distill her soul and her life. Instead of constructing new ideas out of the world, Dickinson desired to deconstruct it, to liquefy it, to boil it down to its essence.
McIntosh identified a specific poem which highlights Dickinson’s fears, and thus suggests her goals as a poet: “I died for beauty.” In this poem, the speaker is buried next to a man who died for truth, and the speaker says that she died for beauty, but failed. This reveals Dickinson’s longing to describe beauty which correlates with but does not equal truth. In the poem, she considers herself and her grave-mate kin. Truth was not unimportant to Dickinson, but it was not the fundamental goal of her art. Rather, she focused on beauty: the beauty of nature, the beauty of the human soul, the beauty of the inevitable. Kazin notes that as opposed to Dickinson “Hawthorne, Emerson, and Stowe had at least this in common: each had a belief consistent with itself.” While many of her contemporaries were trying to stir the pot at the time, Emily Dickinson tried to stir the mind—all the time.
On account of this difference, Dickinson’s content was fresh, and, to an extent, predicted some of modern thought. Because she wanted to stir the mind, not feed it, she never concluded with an absolutism; she preferred to explore the questions. Kazin wrote, “The power of attention is for Dickinson a truer, more spontaneous way of thinking than having ‘ideas’ … Other people had faith absolute, she had mind.” McIntosh said, “Most poets were concerned with combining traditional methods with theological truth. Dickinson was much more willing to grapple with life’s contradictions. She anticipated a more realistic view of life. She … understood modern angst.” Helen Vendler suggests in “Dickinson the Writer,” that Dickinson indirectly addressed her poetry’s ambiguous nature in the quote “Deal with the soul / As with Algebra!” in that the reader could apply his own variables.
In this respect, Dickinson was a master of mirroring her work to more traditional work. For instance, all of her poems can be sung to the tune of Amazing Grace. She often opened her poems with sweeping statements (e.g. “Renunciation—is a piercing Virtue—”). But the poems in whose trajectories seem most clear are those which are the most surprising:2
Renunciation—is a piercing Virtue—
…
Against itself—
Itself to justify
Unto itself—
When larger function—
Make that appear—
Smaller—that Covered Vision—Here—
In a time of great cultural change, she was caught in the middle. She, in full, admonished nothing, absorbed everything, and brought it all together. In our interview, Cheryl McIntosh highlighted this memorable dichotomy: “She [Dickinson] was not a full-blown transcendentalist, but she was very interested by their [the transcendentalists’] ideas … but she never completely gave up on God either.” When the controversies of the day became irrelevant, so did writing which focused solely on them, but Dickinson focused on the grand themes behind them and has remained relevant.
Emily Dickinson wrote “because she was an artist.” She had no grand political or social motive, a great distinction from other radical thinkers in the mid to late nineteenth century (McIntosh). She herself described her purpose as beauty. Even with her limited experience outside of the Homestead, she felt surrounded by beauty: she says in #466 that she can collect “Paradise” by “spreading wide…[her] hands.”3 She consumed the world around her, and the size of that world prompted her to look closer. Dickinson was not the classifier of the atmosphere; she was the “inebriate of air.” She did not write for people—she wanted her work burned—but for the world itself (“This is my letter to the world / That never wrote to me”).
She writes in #598 the following:
The Brain is just the weight of God—
For—Heft them—Pound for Pound—
And they will differ—if they do—
As Syllable from Sound.
Here the brain is said to equal God in weight but not in format. God is in nature; he is “sound”; he is not a description of truth and beauty, rather, in this poem, he is truth and beauty. Dickinson’s work, on the other hand, is “syllable”, those beauties and truth are distilled into English.2 This is Dickinson’s purpose: to take the sound that only she could hear with such clarity and to turn the moment into a monument, a monument which lives on today.
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