Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters

Series Editor: Marilyn Gaull

This series presents original biographical, critical, and scholarly studies of literary works
and public figures in Great Britain, North America, and continental Europe during
the nineteenth century. The volumes in Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters
evoke the energies, achievements, contributions, cultural traditions, and individuals
who reflected and generated them during the Romantic and Victorian period. The
topics: critical, textual, and historical scholarship, literary and book history, biography,
cultural and comparative studies, critical theory, art, architecture, science, politics, reli-
gion, music, language, philosophy, aesthetics, law, publication, translation, domestic
and public life, popular culture, and anything that influenced, impinges upon, expresses
or contributes to an understanding of the authors, works, and events of the nine-
teenth century. The authors consist of political figures, artists, scientists, and cultural
icons including William Blake, Thomas Hardy, Charles Darwin, William Wordsworth,
William Butler Yeats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and their contemporaries.
The series editor is Marilyn Gaull, PhD (Indiana University), FEA. She has taught
at William and Mary, Temple University, New York University, and is Research
Professor at the Editorial Institute at Boston University. She is the founder and editor
of The Wordsworth Circle and the author of English Romanticism: The Human Context,
and editions, essays, and reviews in journals. She lectures internationally on British
Romanticism, folklore, and narrative theory, intellectual history, publishing procedures,
and history of science.

PUBLISHED BY PALGRAVE MACMILLAN:

Shelley’s German Afterlives, by Susanne Schmid
Coleridge, the Bible, and Religion, by Jeffrey W. Barbeau
Romantic Literature, Race, and Colonial Encounter, by Peter J. Kitson
Byron, edited by Cheryl A. Wilson
Romantic Migrations, by Michael Wiley
The Long and Winding Road from Blake to the Beatles, by Matthew Schneider
British Periodicals and Romantic Identity, by Mark Schoenfield
Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism, by Clare Broome Saunders
British Victorian Women’s Periodicals, by Kathryn Ledbetter
Romantic Diasporas, by Toby R. Benis
Romantic Literary Families, by Scott Krawczyk
Victorian Christmas in Print, by Tara Moore
Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature,
edited by Monika Elbert and Marie Drews
Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print, by Alberto Gabriele
Romanticism and the Object, edited by Larry H. Peer
Poetics en passant, by Anne Jamison
From Song to Print, by Terence Hoagwood
Gothic Romanticism, by Tom Duggett
Victorian Medicine and Social Reform, by Louise Penner
Populism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel, by James P. Carson
Byron and the Rhetoric of Italian Nationalism, by Arnold A. Schmidt
Poetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America, by Shira Wolosky
The Discourses of Food in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, by Annette Cozzi
Romanticism and Pleasure, edited by Thomas H. Schmid and Michelle Faubert
Royal Romances, by Kristin Flieger Samuelian
Trauma, Transcendence, and Trust, by Thomas J. Brennan, S.J.
The Business of Literary Circles in Nineteenth-Century America, by David Dowling
Popular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain, by Clare A. Simmons
Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism, by Ashton Nichols
The Poetry of Mary Robinson, by Daniel Robinson
Romanticism and the City, by Larry H. Peer
Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination, by Gregory Leadbetter
Dante and Italy in British Romanticism, edited by Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass
Jewish Representation in British Literature 1780–1840, by Michael Scrivener
Romantic Dharma, by Mark Lussier
Robert Southey, by Stuart Andrews
Playing to the Crowd, by Frederick Burwick
The Regions of Sara Coleridge’s Thought, by Peter Swaab
John Thelwall and the Wordsworth Circle, by Judith Thompson
Wordsworth and Coleridge, by Peter Larkin
Turning Points in Natural Theology from Bacon to Darwin, by Stuart Peterfreund
Sublime Coleridge, by Murray Evans
Longing to Belong, by Sarah Juliette Sasson
British Literary Salons of the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries,
by Susanne Schmid
Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation, by Richard E. Brantley

ALSO BY RICHARD E. BRANTLEY

Wordsworth’s “Natural Methodism”
Locke, Wesley, and the Method of English Romanticism
Coordinates of Anglo-American Romanticism: Wesley, Edwards, Carlyle, and Emerson
Anglo-American Antiphony: The Late Romanticism of Tennyson and Emerson
Experience and Faith: The Late-Romantic Imagination of Emily Dickinson
Emily Di ck i ns o n’s R i ch
Co nv er sati on
Poetry, Philosophy, Science

Richard E. Brantley
EMILY DICKINSON’S RICH CONVERSATION
Copyright © Richard E. Brantley, 2013.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-0-230-34063-3
All rights reserved.
First published in 2013 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-34322-5 ISBN 978-1-137-10791-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137107916
Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst
College from THE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON, Ralph W. Franklin, ed.,
Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright
© 1998, 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright
© 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Reprinted by permission of the publishers from THE LETTERS OF EMILY
DICKINSON, Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press
of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1958, 1986, The President and
Fellows of Harvard College; 1914, 1924, 1932, 1942 by Martha Dickinson
Bianchi; 1952 by Alfred Leete Hampson; 1960 by Mary L. Hampson.
Copyright © 2007 by The Johns Hopkins University Press. Chapter Four first
appeared in The Emily Dickinson Journal 16.1 (2007), 27–52. Revised and
reprinted with permission by The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brantley, Richard E.
Emily Dickinson’s rich conversation : poetry, philosophy, science / by
Richard E. Brantley.
pages cm—(Nineteenth Century Major Lives and Letters)
Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

1. Dickinson, Emily, 1830–1886—Criticism and interpretation.

2. Philosophy in literature. I. Title.
PS1541.Z5B558 2013
811⬘.4—dc23 2012050197
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: June 2013
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Transferred to Digital Printing in 2013

To Diana
This page intentionally left blank
 Conte nts

Acknowledgments ix
List of Abbreviations xi

Introduction 1

Part I Gathering Experience

1 Proclaiming Empiricism 33
2 Guiding Experiment 71

Part II Extending Experience

3 Gaining Loss 103
4 Despairing Hope 125
Conclusion 153

Appendix A Empiricism and Evangelicalism:

A Combination of Romanticism 175
Appendix B Locke and Wesley: An Essence of Influence 179
Appendix C Wadsworth and Dickinson: A Marriage
of Minds 187
Notes 201
Works Cited 239
Index of Poems Cited 259
Index 263
This page intentionally left blank
 Ack now le d g me n ts

Audiences at Wake Forest University (2006), Brunel University

(2007), Suffolk University (2009), Oxford University (2010), Glasgow
University (2011), the Wordsworth Summer Conference (2011),
Virginia Intermont College (2011), Haverford College (2012), Brunel
University (2013), and the University of Maryland (2013) modeled
lively give-and-take. Especially helpful on these occasions were formal
suggestions and friendly amendments made by Wai Chee Dimock,
Stephen Finley, Richard Gravil, Samantha Harvey, Cynthia MacKenzie,
Amelia Osborne, James Osborne, Clo Phillips, Nicholas Roe, Elizabeth
Scheer, Robert Scholnick, Edwin G. Wilson, and Eric G. Wilson.
Readers of all or parts of the manuscript—Paul Crumbley, Jane Donahue
Eberwein, Burton John Fishman, Chris Gair, Kenneth Godwin, Gillian
Hillis, David Leverenz, Roger Lundin, Mikesch Meucke, Cristanne
Miller, Melvyn New, Marianne Noble, Joel Pace, Georgiana Strickland,
and Miriam Zach—showed how “opposition is true friendship.” The
editor of Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters, Marilyn Gaull,
accorded this project the pointed but generous and indispensable
criticism for which this “Maxwell Perkins” of studies in Romanticism
remains renowned; scholarly conversation is richer for her inimitable
mix of rigorous reading, fair hearing, common sense, and academic wis-
dom. Finally, just as dialogue with all these others produced this book,
so Diana Brantley’s near influence took the primary form, this time, of
daily exchanges about Dickinson’s art; the dedication signifies gratitude
for Diana’s colloquy over the years—and for the spirited but unstrained
copresence of her life-affirming love.
Scattered sections of chapter 1 appeared as “Emily Dickinson’s
Empirical Voice,” Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary
Relations 15.1 (April 2011): 105–32. Several consecutive pages of
chapter 2 are forthcoming as “The Interrogative Mood of Emily
Dickinson’s Quarrel with God,” Religion & Literature. A shorter
version of chapter 3 appeared as “From Loss to Gain: Aftermath
in the Late-Romantic Poetry of Emily Dickinson,” Symbiosis 10.2
(October 2006): 93–114. A shorter version of chapter 4 appeared as
x Acknowledgments

“Dickinson’s Signature Conundrum,” The Emily Dickinson Journal

16.1 (2007): 27–52. For their permission to reprint that material
here, and for their editorial guidance, thanks are given to Leslie Eckel,
Chris Gair, Roger Lundin, Cristanne Miller, Susannah Monta, and
Joel Pace.
 A b b r e viations

Fr Emily Dickinson. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. 3 vols. Ed. R. W.

Franklin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998. Citation by poem
number.
L Emily Dickinson. The Letters of Emily Dickinson. 3 vols. Ed.
Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard UP, 1958. Citation by letter number.
 Introd uction

[W]e were rich in conversation—

—Emily Dickinson to Austin Dickinson, October 5,
1851, L54 (Dickinson’s emphasis)

How farcical it seems to sit here a writing, when another Sunday’s

sun shall shine upon us all in each other’s society, and yet thanks to
a being inventing paper and pen, they are better far than nothing!
By means of them indeed, ‘tis little I can tell you but I can tell how
much I would if I could, and there’s something comforting in it.
—Emily Dickinson to Austin Dickinson,
November 16, 1851, L63

A s a schoolgirl who already belonged to a Shakespeare club, Emily

Dickinson (1830–1886) appeared destined to select her own society
of letters.1 The adult poet did just that. In “a room of [her] own,” she
held “sessions of sweet silent thought” in which she read “ghostlier
demarcations” of other writers and heard “keener sounds” of their
oblique influence.2 Encountering, at whatever remove, not only her
fellow-exemplars of belles lettres, as one would expect of her, but also,
surprisingly, such masters of expository prose as philosophers and sci-
entists, she crossed the boundaries between, and generated new and
paradoxical amalgams of, various fields. Thus the Myth of Amherst
sojourned among the registers of diverse genius.3
This book, in one sense, is an extended meditation on E. D. Hirsch’s
broad but discriminating and useful definition of “Literature” as
“everything worthy to be read, preferably the best thoughts expressed
in the best manner, but above all the best thoughts” (142). Hirsch,
for a change, subordinates “les belles lettres,” “the narrower, more
decadent conception of literature,” to “les bonnes lettres,” “the grand,
broad, and noble conception” (140–41). Thus Hirsch welcomes to the
realm of letters what literati usually leave out, for example, philoso-
phy, theology, or science. This book will explore belles lettres primar-
ily through the poetry and prose of Anglo-American Romantics—the
2 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

lyrics of Dickinson above all—and the works of Moderns for good mea-
sure, and will explore bonnes lettres primarily through the empirically
philosophical, empirically evangelical, and hard-core scientific prose of
Dickinson’s eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Anglo-American world.
But the link is not hierarchical (bonnes, pace Hirsch, is not better than
belles) but conversational. The Romantic- to Modern-era motif of this
study draws support from Richard Gravil’s Romantic Dialogues: Anglo-
American Continuities 1776–1862 (2000): among other things, Gravil
gives new meaning to Coleridge’s “Conversation Poems” (Coleridge’s
phrase; emphasis added) as a founding idiom of belles lettres through-
out Romantic Anglo-America.4 The philosophical and scientific themes
of Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation: Poetry, Philosophy, Science,
moreover—“Theme alone can steady us down,” as Frost reminds us
(31)—aspire to the historical breadth and interdisciplinary ambition of
Paul Crumbley’s distinctive companion volumes on the political con-
text of Dickinson’s brand of dialogue. Crumbley’s works and this book
can together illustrate how Dickinson interacted stylistically as well as
thematically with quite a varied and inclusive range of bonnes lettres.5
Sometimes by her design and sometimes through the detached
but intriguing self-consistency of her Zeitgeist, Dickinson’s speak-
ers dramatically engaged with her precursors and contemporaries in
literature as broadly and emphatically understood here as well as in
Hirsch. When the sway was point blank, she found in that upstairs
garret instant and plentiful fellowship among comparable imagina-
tions and kindred minds. These more than just cyberspace-like soul
mates animated her studying and composing quietude, and, however
exclusively they represented her virtual reality, they succeeded in pre-
venting her unrelieved isolation. They and their personae placed her
and her speakers squarely enough in their good company, and vice
versa, to make companionable or sociable, if not exactly gregarious or
Rotarian, a label sufficiently plausible even for the Myth of Amherst.
Of course, Dickinson’s personae often disputed among themselves
and with her signifying others. Still, they more or less willingly kept
civil tongues in their heads, for they did not so much brandish uncom-
promising injunction as deploy poetic argument. Dickinson did not
merely indulge in self-communion nor simply bet the family home-
stead on posthumous communication with however large a throng
of readers. Quoting her language alongside that of her signifying
others—frequently indenting her letters and poems and their poems
and prose as if in dialogue form—can serve to suggest that this poet
exchanged ideas through the usually indirect but always complex and
not seldom direct process of cultural osmosis.
 Introduction 3

Here, for an introductory example of such parallel quotations, are

lines from Wordsworth’s high Romanticism, on the one hand, and
from Dickinson’s late Romanticism, on the other, both passages cho-
sen, like all other such sets of purely belletristic dialogue scattered
throughout this book, for their philosophical and even scientific
implications. Wordsworth’s empirical orientation to

the world
Of all of us,—the place where in the end,
We find our happiness, or not at all!
(The Prelude [1850] 11:142–44)

finds coiled match in Dickinson’s:

The Fact that Earth is Heaven -

Whether Heaven is Heaven or not
If not an Affidavit
Of that specific Spot
Not only must confirm us
That it is not for us
But that it would affront us
To dwell in such a place -
(Fr1435)

Dickinson and those among her signifying others like Wordsworth

elected to plumb “the substance of things hoped for,” and found in,
this world (contrast Heb. 11:1).6 Her distilled demarcations, however,
can jolly well sound livelier than the works she read by her companion
explorers of reality, whether sublunar or stellar. She knew this news
would spread, expected her descendants to hear this earth-to-universe-
and-back-again message, and then to join her select society of partners
in literary, philosophical, and scientific tradeoff. For her and for her
fellow-conversationalists, whether or not she was always aware of talk-
ing with them, and including whoever will ever enter this discussion,
experience can feel as efficacious as experiment can prove dispositive.
For this “us,” at least, formative, pivotal experience can parallel exper-
iment, the latter seen, in their collective view, less as reliable solace of
predictability than as the natural grace of “What next?”7
So it was that Emily Dickinson grew “rich in conversation” (her
words and emphasis) not just with such friends and loved ones as brother
and soul mate Austin but with writers of belles and of bonnes lettres
alike. Whether or not she typically agreed with what all these others
“often thought,” she of all people, perhaps, would have discerned their
4 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

meanings behind their masks (compare Pope, “Essay on Criticism”

[1711], line 298). In however mordant a fashion, she would undoubt-
edly have approved whatever all these others “well expressed” (com-
pare Pope, “Essay on Criticism,” line 298). Their language, clearly,
possessed the power to please her. Thus, as though in common cause
with such wordsmith-presences-in-waiting before the “inward eye” or
“bliss” of her “solitude,” and whether or not she always consciously
contributed to such communal copy, Emily Dickinson presided espe-
cially over her own society of dead or living poets, philosophers, and
scientists (compare Wordsworth, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”
[1804], lines 21–22). Even when her participation was subconscious,
this imaginative, intelligent woman and these codialogists, figuratively
and literally so called, relished how their metaphorical, epistemological,
and scientifically methodical approaches to knowledge did not so much
limit as release possibilities for well-being through understanding.
What did such an enigmatically happy achievement of this collec-
tion of talent, this Dickinson-culminated but cumulative concentra-
tion of the fully curious, mean, if not their delighted and profitable
absorption in their shared stance of smart optimism? If only on the
principle of the “invisible suffusion” of all these “afterlives” through-
out her poems of their climate, Dickinson and these others mutu-
ally verified their faith in progress, their outlook of meliorism.8 This
group quest for known unknowns, unknown knowns, and unknown
unknowns sustained her even in her most nonadventurous bouts of
lassitude, thereby feeding her various personae of postexperience or
of aftermath on her not-so-muted hope that humankind will sur-
vive and thrive in “the world / Of all of us.”9 The “unhope” of
“waiting” less “for Godot” than for “the horror, the horror” or the
“blood-dimmed tide” of Modern- to post-Modern-era nihilism or
violence was what Hardy, Beckett, Conrad, and Yeats, respectively,
began to express “Full soon” (this last phrase is Wordsworth’s pre-
sciently lamenting adverbial).10 The worldviews of these Moderns,
however, were scarcely the same as that of Dickinson. For all the
advancement of science in the century-just-passed, she and her age
boasted more confidence in imagination, more robustness of sense-
based reason, and more brio of sense-driven method than was ever to
be evident in the paralyzed skepticism on her turn-of-the-twentieth-
century horizon, notwithstanding the depressing aspect of mid-
nineteenth-centur y Darwinism. Although Dickinson eerily foreknew
the pessimism of the twentieth century, she nonetheless, to conflate
her language with that of Wordsworth, “dwel[t] in Possibility - ”
(Fr466, line 1) of “something evermore about to be” (and about to
 Introduction 5

be good) in the late Romantic era.11 With a little help from her coun-
terparts in philosophy/science as well as poetry, she discovered that
hope-against-hope sufficed, if not for goodness, beauty, and truth,
then for all that she needed to know about her milieu, and perhaps
even for all that she could ever envision concerning reality itself.
The sort of dialogue to which these opening paragraphs have
referred enrich Emily Dickinson’s art of knowledge, as distinct from
her “art of belief” (Roger Lundin’s more religious than philosophi-
cal or scientific label for her poetry will receive the respect it is fully
due). With regard to belles lettres, in particular, please hear a word
at the outset about a major method of this book, a recurrent proce-
dure that has already begun to operate. Dickinson would have been
familiar with many of the literary references and would have recog-
nized many of the literary echoes woven throughout this book12;
she foreshadowed all of the quotations of, and allusions to, Modern
literature. Consistent with the idea that each quotation, like each
allusion, forms part of Dickinson’s dialogue, authors, titles, dates,
and line numbers will continue to be provided, except where they
would unduly clutter the text. Then, as has already been the case,
these full disclosures will appear in the notes, though authors’ names,
for the convenience of readers, will usually remain in the text (if only
in parentheses). Allusions, by definition, will stay unidentified, but
readers can catch them, if only through Google. If readers can regard
the arc from Romantic to Modern as itself a huge but unified poem—
that is, as cultural poetics—then these quotations and allusions will
appear less taken out of their immediate contexts in belles lettres than
integral to grasping literary history as an organic whole.13 This aes-
thetic kind of dialogue within Emily Dickinson’s rich conversation,
as distinct from her no less stylistic for being purely philosophical or
scientific mode of exchange, will tend to situate her poetry closer to
Blake’s than to Stevens’s.
To be sure, just as the lavish sibilants of Shakespeare’s “sessions
of sweet silent thought” rival those of “The Soul selects her own
Society - ” (Fr409, line 1), so this latter line, from Dickinson’s verse,
comprises her signature statement of choosing “her own company”
(Leiter 202)—that is, of “prefer[ring] not to” associate with other
people (Melville’s phrase).14 Nevertheless, as though her hundreds of
otherwise widely differing love poems all embraced the proverb “Love
is to be at one with one alone,” “The Soul selects her own Society - ”
can also signify, if only on a subliminal level, “the selection of a per-
manent earthly beloved” (Vendler 190).15 Even more comprehen-
sively for present purposes of interpreting her art dialogically, these six
6 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

striking words can ultimately state that, if only through “the power of
weak ties” (compare Ruef), not a few other individuals can well fill the
circle of Emily Dickinson’s acquaintance. Consider, for instance, what
the speaker of this poem, as distinct from “The Soul” who “selects,”
observes—namely, that

I’ve known her - from an ample nation -

Choose One -
(Fr409, lines 9–10)

Do these lines logically indicate that, besides sometimes selecting one

beloved, “The Soul” sometimes picks out no one and sometimes taps
more than two, as though her goal were to oscillate between solitude,
however virtually populated, and community, however trending small?
In any case, just as “red life” streamed in Dickinson’s veins and her
less “blood-dimmed” than blood-bright imagination saw “into the
life of things” or of otherness (behold Keats, Yeats, and Wordsworth,
respectively, standing at her side), so Dickinson’s personae breathe in
time to her inscribed but vital others.16 And just as she held “sessions
of sweet silent thought” in “a room of [her] own” at the Homestead,
so she did this for the express rationale of sending out her “letter to
the World” to come (Fr519, line 1), her poetry to emotionally and
intellectually compatible readers then unborn.
For Emily Dickinson and her “cloud” of fellow-“witnesses” to the
human condition, life was as significant for letters as letters for life
(compare Heb. 12:1). Consequently, the Myth of Amherst—the “lady
whom the people call the Myth” (Leyda 2:357; Mabel Loomis Todd’s
emphasis)—will henceforth refer less to Dickinson’s diehard reputa-
tion as a recluse than to her legendary status as a poet for all seasons.17
A large measure of her greatness as an author lay in the defining,
creative sense, the conversational dynamic, in which she thought and
wrote globally and for all times, as well as locally and at her time.18 As
her strategy for acquiring the fair guerdon of her proper renown, she
won her gamble on her audience-connecting but challenging combi-
nation of less-is-more hymn form with deep but wide-ranging subject
matter.

* * *

Can literature migrate from belles to bonnes lettres and back? Can
poetry, philosophy, and science, though scarcely interchangeable,
overlap? Can the common-sense writers in these three disciplines
 Introduction 7

discern an obscure and tenuous but palpable and appreciable line

that runs from things through thoughts to words and back? Can the
poetry of Emily Dickinson at one extreme of this linguistic range of
nuance and philosophical and scientific discourse at the other illus-
trate a single frame of reference? Can the aesthetic of her gemlike
flame aspire to the condition of philosophy and science in the sense
that metaphors and models alike generate knowledge from and seek
truth through experience?
Addressing these fundamental questions, the remainder of this
introduction can outline the case for certain master figures of belles
and of bonnes lettres as leading but neglected members of Dickinson’s
cast of characters. For her, thanks largely to the direct as well as indirect
influence of her partners in dialogue, “the unforced force of the better
argument” would yield better poetry than any such all-too-humanly
tempting but unsubtly conventional and woefully destructive com-
mand as “Stop in the name of the law!”19 No more than poets of
her world would philosophers and scientists of that world coerce. No
less than philosophers and scientists in her world would poets there
persuade. Just as Dickinson’s precursors and contemporaries in liter-
ary history proved primary for her practice, if not all-important to her
thought, so philosophers and scientists prominent, too, among her
signifying others proved primary for her thought, if not all-important
to her practice. Thus, even from the beginning of this book, close
reading of Dickinson’s key concepts can and should proceed in earnest
with a particular view to whether or not and to how these presiding
ideas filled the air of her select society “meetings.”
Since a bard of Dickinson’s undisputed stature deserves no less than
placement in as broad a context as possible—that is, within the inter-
national atmosphere of her intersubjective achievement—a leisurely,
if not lavish, overview of the historical, interdisciplinary argument to
follow is in order. At stake throughout the delight here taken in this
near-communitarian approach to her poetic innovation is whether or
not her philosophically and scientifically as well as lyrically dialogical
exchange is central to her art. It is. For the Myth of Amherst and
her opposite numbers in belles and bonnes lettres, literature stands for
experience and experiment alike. Thus, for instance, the metaphor- and
model-producing power of her imagination aligns a sizeable category
of her scientific speakers with the laboratory skills she strengthened in
her garden and her greenhouse (a facsimile edition of her herbarium
has recently appeared).
Dickinson entered into conversation, first, with exemplars of
Anglo-American Romanticism, stipulated (consistent with the scope
8 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

of Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters) as stretching from the

late eighteenth century to her time and place. If Blake, Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Carlyle, Tennyson, and Emerson caused
Dickinson “the anxiety of influence” that named Harold Bloom’s
theory of literature (Bloom has just refined his terms in The Anatomy
of Influence [2011]), the language of these deep denizens of belles
lettres nonetheless lived in her high art. If such among her literary
precursors and contemporaries as these eight authors of poetry or of
belletristic prose or of both overburdened her at times with their less
courteous and espousing than overbearing and perpendicular mascu-
linity, she nonetheless rejoiced in and blessed their endowments of
strength.20 Their talents she deemed worthy of her own compound
of androgynous—recall: “room of one’s own” (emphasis added)—
excellence in creativity. If the tender hearts of Blake, Emerson et al.
intensified Dickinson’s pleasure in aesthetic form, she nonetheless
thrived on how their tough minds increased her profit from aesthetic
content. This cherished benefit of her association with these gifted
others underlay how Carlyle’s picture on her bedroom wall copre-
sided at her society gatherings in her room with a subtle view of the
world.21 Her toughness excelled that of her fellow-Romantics, for
she showed scant sign of the sentimentality or humorlessness that
from time to time beset, if not such high-to-late Romantics as these,
then rhymesters in their orbits and their wakes.
Featuring sometimes Carlyle and sometimes other codialogists of
his ilk at the head of her seminar table, Dickinson moderated debate
centering on whether or not and on how the road of experience leads
to the palace of wisdom. “Yes, it can, through the both/and logic, ‘the
everlasting nay and yea,’ of life as well as of art, including the energy in
the laboratory,” tended to answer Dickinson and her select society of
partners in belletristic conversation. It is as though they took their cue
from Carlyle when it was his turn to speak. He explored throughout
the clever prose of his Sartor Resartus (1831) his conundrum less of
art-versus-life in decadent favor of the former than of the alternate
nay and yea of art and of life alike. Among these others with whom
Dickinson often enjoyed the mutuality, as distinct from always feeling
the anxiety, of influence, she sought to describe the love of paradox,
the passion of one’s inner English major for life/art principles like
“the everlasting nay and yea,” as what best defines being human. To
anyone who would listen, she said, “[A metaphor] won’t bite. My dog
Carlo now . . .” (L34).
For Dickinson and her peers in Anglo-American Romanticism,
the A=B of metaphor—Wordsworth’s Lucy was a “violet by a mossy
 Introduction 9

stone”—and of model—Newton’s light was a particle and a wave—

illustrated how paradox was the simple produce of the common day, as
well as of uncommon creative incandescence (compare Wordsworth,
“She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways” [1799], line 5). Like a Blake/
Wordsworth composite, with which duo, however well acquainted
she was with its works, Dickinson appeared to be in consultation,
she understood that one’s “Poetic Genius”—Blake’s phrase for inner
English major—lifted “the burthen of the mystery”—Wordsworth’s
magic (emphasis added)—without dispelling the mystery.22 Like an
embodiment of Shelley, whose less stylistic than thematic, yet whose
striking and uncanny, parallels with Dickinson will form another motif
here, she well acquainted herself with the liberating power of skeptical
paradox at which he excelled (Pulos; O’Neill). Whether or not, like
him, she exposed the “fraud” of rigid system, and whether or not, like
him, she opposed the “woe” of oppressive authority, she nonetheless
resisted, in both these cases of her Shelley-like mode of imagining and
of thinking, the logic of either/or (compare Shelley, “Mont Blanc”
[1816], line 81). Although she seldom ever predictably agreed with
other members of her society of either belles or bonnes lettres, and
although she could often beat them at their own game of paradox,
the poet who chose “not choosing” (compare Cameron Choosing)
preserved at least a remnant of freedom for all. To bring about this
positive result of her game of riddling, she worked in tandem with all
these other fellow-enthusiasts of enigma.
The poet for whom there was “no frigate like a book” (Fr1286,
line 1) underwrote her society of belles lettres with the both/and logic
of positive paradox. How she and these others comprehended con-
traries! Nay/yea, ignorance/knowledge, falsehood/truth, pessimism/
optimism, despair/hope—all such binaries constituted the play of their
earnestness and the seriousness of their fun. For Dickinson, it was less
dialectic of and more oscillation between these tough and tender nodes
or poles of human experience:

Experience is the Angled Road

Preferred against the Mind
By - Paradox - the Mind itself -
Presuming it to lead
Quite Opposite - How complicate
The Discipline of Man -
Compelling Him to choose Himself
His Preappointed Pain -
(Fr899)
10 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

Perhaps Dickinson’s suspension of meaning between the nihilism of

indeterminacy and the Romantic-era possibility of guilelessness can
yet keep options open for that not-so-select society of partners in dia-
logue called her posterity.
Although Dickinson coveted the aspiration of Blake, Emerson et al.
to the ideal and otherworldly—that is, although she envied their phil-
osophical and theological transcendentalism—she relished, above all,
their epistemological savvy.23 She acquired her love of paradox from
their search for how to know. She watched their coalescence, thrilled
at their interpenetration, of subject and object. This “Solution sweet”
preserved subject/object independence, yet yearned for subject-object
interdependence (compare Keats, “The Eve of Saint Agnes” [1820],
line 322). Thus the role of mind in nature felt ambiguous to the Myth
of Amherst, sometimes heady and sometimes vertiginous, precarious,
unlikely, or ironic:

Perception of an Object costs

Precise the Object’s loss -
Perception in itself a Gain
Replying to it’s price -
The Object absolute, is nought -
Perception sets it fair
And then upbraids a Perfectness
That situates so far -
(Fr1103)

Dickinson’s observer-participant conundrum foreshadowed that of

Heisenberg but harked back to that of her Romantic-era forebears
and fellow-laborers in the vineyard of knowledge and truth, energiz-
ing her creation of her similarly sense-substantial but even more pre-
cisely perception-calibrated art. The scientifically methodical as well as
empirically philosophical contribution made by her Anglo-American
Romantic heritage “gild[ed] the lapses of [her] time” (compare Keats,
“How Many Bards” [1817], line 1). That is, she enriched her study
and composition with belletristic exchanges concerning whether or
not mind matters as lord of nature, or as part of nature, or as both.24
Although Dickinson would occasionally cotton to the intermittent
predilection for the philosophical and the religious transcendental
among the Anglo-American Romantics, she mainly emulated their
more characteristic modulation from sense-procedural sophistication
to precocious and prescient scientific savvy. The précis in appendix A
of this book can indicate how previous installments in this ongoing
 Introduction 11

series of volumes on English-language Romanticism described the

collective effort of the Anglo-American Romantic imagination to rec-
oncile philosophical and religious language. This book, though, yields
to a difficult fascination with Dickinson’s empiricism per se, including
her scientific knowledge. A view to her philosophically and theologi-
cally transcendental idioms continues to obtain here, as a secondary
commentary to keep the discussion dramatic—that is, as a subtext in
the persistent spirit of inclusive conversation-in-perpetuity. Volume 7
in this series of arguments, tentatively entitled Emily Dickinson’s Rich
Conversation: Poetry and Faith, is planned, and will overhear her
evangelical accent per se, as distinct from pursuing her role, if any,
in the empirical/evangelical dialectic of Romantic Anglo-America.
At present, however, somewhat unlike what Volume 5 said (Brantley
Experience), and hence as a partial palinode, in the sense of one’s dia-
logue with one’s self, it appears that Dickinson separated her evangeli-
cal yearning from, and depreciated that obscure desire in favor of, her
empirical voice of ascendant, up-from-the-grassroots authority.
Emily Dickinson’s transatlantic significance, moreover, highlighted
the philosophically interdisciplinary component of Anglo-American
bonnes lettres. She matriculated at the Common Sense School of
Scottish philosophy in “sessions of sweet silent thought” in father
Edward’s library, an influence in such clear scholarly focus that it need
figure here only tacitly.25 What is less well known is that Dickinson read
about philosophy, too, and was aware of its English-language roots in
the seventeenth century. She even knew of ancient Greek philosophy,
as the next segment of this introduction will point out.
Here is a mouthful of what Dickinson’s poetry in league with
philosophy and science means. The rational empiricism of pioneer
of British empiricism John Locke (1632–1704) discovered a circu-
itous but less roundabout than clearly marked route into Dickinson’s
works through the Locke-inflected influence of founder of British
Methodism John Wesley (1703–1791) on the American evangelism
of his transatlantic revival legatee Charles Wadsworth (1814–1882).
Readers curious about Wesley’s self-portrait as “a philosophical slug-
gard” at times more interested in the school of Locke than in being
an itinerant minister, and hence about the philosophical/scientific
nature of his intellectual influence, as distinct from his well-known
role as a warm-hearted revivalist, may wish to peruse appendix B.
Part I of this book will make clear that Dickinson read the Locke- as
well as Wesley-tinged sermons of Wadsworth, a renowned clergyman
whom she called, among her other honorifics for him, “my dearest
earthly friend” (L807). Readers interested in the emotional as well as
12 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

intellectual aspect of her love for Wadsworth, and perhaps even of

his for her, are invited to consult appendix C, for one’s inquiring
mind may wish to entertain the possibility of their romance, however
cerebral. The emphasis in the body of this book, however, without
losing sight of the emotional content of their friendship or of a pos-
sible love interest, lies, fair warning, on the primarily intellectual basis
of their long-term conversation. A comparison/contrast between
Wadsworth’s sermons and Dickinson’s letters and poems will account
for her less metaphorical/evangelical than model-driven/empirical
approach to reality, and hence for her more naturally than spiritually
experiential “poetry of earth” (compare Keats, “The Poetry of Earth
Is Never Dead” [1817]).
Wadsworth, whom Dickinson also called “My Clergyman” (L790),
wittingly as well as unwittingly served as Wesley’s similarly well-known,
equally protean, yet as such almost entirely unacknowledged protégé.
These twin giants, the one of British and American Methodism and the
other of the First and Second Great Awakenings in America, valued
as well as spiritualized empiricism, for even for them “to write against
something” was also for them “to take their bearings from it.”26 Their
versions of evangelical faith proved as tough as tender, for neither of
these leaders of the Anglo-American revival was anywhere near as con-
cerned to use his private religion of the heart as a cushion against reason
and the senses as one might think. Each was intent, instead, on wel-
coming sense-based reason as the starch-giving, stiffening agent, the
method or method-ism, of his belief, and perhaps even as the suspend-
ing mechanism of his disbelief, however elusive actually seeing God
turned out to be in each man’s otherwise thoroughgoing religion. Each
refreshed the formulae of his heart-religion through his state-of-the-art,
all but scientific or proto-William James/anthropological understand-
ing of empirical, outward, or “Earthward” experience of the soul.27
Wesley’s and Wadsworth’s Locke-derived rational empiricism stayed
up-to-date or ready on their naturally as well as spiritually experiential
common ground to negotiate with their dominant evangelical witness
to immediate and traditional revelation.
For Dickinson’s part in this quasi-scientific, variety-of-religious-
experience perspective on “faith” as “the substance of things hoped
for,” the “evidence of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1; emphasis added),
Dickinson’s empirical leanings did not so much come to terms with,
or heighten, as do battle with her nostalgically evangelical yearnings.
She interpreted Locke and Wesley through Wadsworth, and perhaps
even through her other nearby, philosophically ministerial partners in
discussion (who will receive further notice). In the end, however, she
 Introduction 13

imbibed her empiricism neat, not necessarily in the sense that she read
Locke all the time, yet certainly in the sense that her personae, with
their trenchant empiricism, harked back to his views (recall “Experience
is the Angled Road” and “Perception of an Object costs”).
“He buys me many Books—but begs me not to read them—because
he fears they joggle the Mind” (L261). So the poet wrote about her
father to one of her best friends, her most highly literary “Preceptor”
(L265), Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Less through Edward
Dickinson, perhaps, than through her “dearest earthly friend” and most
intriguingly religious counselor, Wadsworth, she thanked the ultimate
empiricism of Locke for making her more philosophical, less religious.
Her graduation from the Common Sense School had the same effect.
Through Wadsworth’s Locke- as well as Wesley-inspired prose, and
through Wadsworth’s emphasis on the empirical Wesley, Locke’s Essay
concerning Human Understanding (1690) gave subliminal, subtextual,
subversive, and efficient sanction to Dickinson’s outsized search for
reason—as well as for sense-based metaphors and models of reality.
With these images she countered and resisted, if only to keep in play,
what she reluctantly but honestly came to think of as the experientially
attractive but otherwise all too purpose-driven, in-the-dark-whistling
theology of her still-esteemed, always-beloved clergyman.
Undoubtedly it pained Dickinson to parse Wadsworth’s prose in
any such pejorative way. But that possible interpretation of his ser-
mons (however mixed with her abiding affection for them) will be an
implication of this book. Although Dickinson admired Wadsworth’s
Locke-consistent, sense-based acts of genuine, this-worldly faith, she
usually did not share (however often she tried to embrace, however
much she was tempted by) his Wesley-derived, sense-analogized leaps
of otherworldly, cloud-cuckoo faith. She was persuaded less by her
fellow-intellectual-evangelical’s kerygmatic appeal than by his skepti-
cal streak. This Dickinson, counterintuitively speaking, richly became
something of an agnostic-if-not-atheistic Christian, and, speaking in
the same appropriately paradoxical manner, this Dickinson strangely
turned into a Christian agnostic-if-not-atheist. Judging by her veiled
reports in her letters and poems, and based on Wadsworth’s own
supple hints in his 75 published sermons, it was like preacher, like
poet, both harboring not-so-secret doubts about the personal-
ity, power, justice, mercy, and existence of God, “The missing All”
(Fr995, line 1). This exquisitely gerundive, participial, ambiguous
epithet, to which chapter 1 (segment 7) will return in detail, was one
of Dickinson’s kinder, gentler, least sarcastic names for the Deity,
whenever the poet’s back was up.
14 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

A comparison/contrast between Dickinson’s letters and poems

and the writings of her clergyman and of his mentor Wesley can indi-
cate, perhaps even more explicitly than her conversation with the
Romantics, just how she valued sense-grounded reason for its own
sake. She embraced empiricism probably with greater enthusiasm, and
surely with less trepidation, than Wesley and Wadsworth, and hence
with a pivotal, decidedly imaginative result for literary history. Of
course, Dickinson was as far as possible from being polemical about
philosophy-versus-faith. Still, from the standpoint of her flexible but
proud empiricism, and with an attitude fitting for the forceful but
unforced and unforcing openness of art, she conversed in more than
just effect with these near-allied twin ministers of the transatlantic
revival. Although the God who fled out of her door would come back,
if only fleetingly, in her window, Locke nonetheless played Epicurus
to her Lucretius (compare Greenblatt Swerve). Dickinson discovered
anew, for her time and place, the relation between what is thought in
philosophy and what is said in literature, and between what is thought
in literature and what is said in philosophy (compare Steiner on just
this subtly category- or genre-bending nexus during the twentieth
century). Dickinson’s rising faith in experience did not just talk with,
and temper further, but even talked back to, and further tested, the
falling remnants of her Experiential Faith.
Dickinson’s transatlantic significance, finally, highlighted a scientifi-
cally interdisciplinary component of Anglo-American bonnes lettres,
as chapters 1 and 2 will emphasize. For example, as just a single fore-
taste here, such a foremost British practitioner of “natural philosophy”
(Locke’s and Wesley’s synonym for science) as evolutionary biologist
Charles Darwin (1809–1882) ranked high within the poet’s select
society of partners in scientifically methodical inquiry. Darwin’s admis-
sion to Dickinson’s inner circle of fellow-artists and fellow-experimen-
tal intellectuals set up a major phase of her development in just how
aesthetic thought can make common cause with empirical practice.
If her interaction with such avant-garde science as Darwin’s trended
even more extraordinary than her truck with rationally empirical phi-
losophy and empirically tinged evangelical religion, so be it. Darwin’s
impact on her works paralleled the fair treatment received by his On
the Origin of Species (1859) in New England venues of debate. In New
England journals to which the Dickinson family faithfully subscribed,
and which embraced, with respect for the insecure feelings of otherwise
well-informed traditional religious opinion-makers, an accurate under-
standing of natural selection as knowledge, if not truth, Dickinson, her
brother, and her sister, Lavinia, eagerly read think-tank pieces about
 Introduction 15

Darwin (Eberwein “Outgrowing Genesis?”; Keane Emily; Kirkby

“‘We thought’”; Peel).
To anticipate the findings of part I in this regard, the poet reversed
Wadsworth’s subordination of Darwin’s theory of natural selection
to natural and revealed religion, and she appeared to know, notwith-
standing Darwin’s word selection, that his achievement does not so
much assume agency as demonstrate randomness. In this respect, she
probably disagreed (though unwillingly) with her friend Wadsworth.
Notwithstanding Wadsworth’s conservative inclination in the evolu-
tionary controversy (shades here of the Wilberforce/Huxley confron-
tations during the 1860s) and in part because Wadsworth offered to
that orthodox effect a stout stance in contrast with Dickinson’s mount-
ing receptivity to Darwin’s science, Wadsworth lived in Dickinson’s
mind as well as in her soul and heart. She responded among her sci-
entific as well as philosophical and literary codialogists to Darwin’s
intellectually wholehearted but emotionally fraught challenge to reli-
gion (his wife, Emma, after all, was an evangelical) by out-Darwin-ing
Darwin, by emphasizing his terms as her means of trying Christian
doctrine and of trying out evangelical experience. By counteracting
Darwin’s unintended but inexorable disenchantment of nature and of
human life, she also parried his inadvertent but home-striking thrust
at “poetic faith.”28 She consciously turned her inner-English-major
guilelessness-plus-paradox-attunement into Darwin-savvy but still
somehow lyrical and musical sallies of the imagination during her late-
Romantic era. So she became at least as remarkably scientific as she has
remained philosophically religious or religiously philosophical.
Anglo-American Romantic authors, rationally empirical philoso-
phers, empirically oriented preachers, innovators of physical science,
and pioneers of life science worked together, in effect, to broaden
and to deepen the writings of Emily Dickinson. Her art, in turn,
culminated and enhanced this heritage of belles and of bonnes lettres
alike. All these signs of her personae, and of her others, agree that the
imagination took its rise and footing from sense perception, and not
so much from instinct, emotion, intuition, mysticism, the Holy Ghost,
or the muse. Locke, Wesley, Wadsworth, and Darwin, too, possessed
vision. The Romantics and Dickinson, too, schooled theirs in expe-
rience. In the Anglo-American setting, the Romantics, Dickinson,
Wesley, and Wadsworth were scarcely more likely than Locke and
Darwin to leave sense-based reason and the scientific method out
of the writer’s equation. They all went so far in their habitat as to
sharpen their skills at language on their quasi-joint assimilation of
precise laboratory procedures.
16 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

Their mastery of scientific method obtains, no matter how much

late-Romantic Dickinson still had in common with the tradition of
religious/prophetic vision and of scripture-revelation alike (com-
pare Doriani). Preference for inductive observation over deductive
logic applied as closely to the Romantics, Dickinson, Wesley, and
Wadsworth as to Locke and Darwin. Dickinson’s personae spoke in
these terms, sometimes against and sometimes to or for her others.
Her others, in this manner, contributed their multiple perspectives to
her method-in-madness kind of sequestration—that is, to the clois-
tered but fully dust-and-heat-aware virtue of her aesthetic experience
in her own room at the Homestead.
Did Emily Dickinson’s lyrical monologues begin and end in dra-
matic dialogues concerning whether or not sense data can satisfy one’s
need to know what is naturally true? Yes, but no matter how much
she and her attendant “cloud of witnesses” to the human condition
doubted that sense data impinged on the spiritual sense, neither she
nor her fellow-watchers-in-the-night ever pretended that such data
could slake their thirst, quench their desire, for whatever might be
spiritually true. Her poetic dialogists, in large measure because of their
exchanges with these others, remained optimistic in their quest for
knowledge, and rarely, if ever, did they give up their hope of truth,
however elusive they all found truth to be. Dickinson and her fellow-
writing prodigies made empiricism and science the foundation of their
substance and of their appeal alike. The lead in her chorus, the obbli-
gato over all her singers—consisting of her poetic self-projections and
of those inscribed others as “rich in conversation” as she—was her
empirical voice. This canonical idiom coexisted uneasily but fruitfully
with her stubbornly persistent evangelical vernacular. Faith in experi-
ence and in experiment, in her case, though scarcely always in the
instances of her others (at least for anywhere near as much of the time)
overdrove the converse—namely, the experience and the experiment
of faith.
This momentous modulation of the Myth of Amherst occurred over
the course of her 30-year career and grew out of, and perhaps even
happened because of, her interactive language. However “awash” was
her age “in the sea of faith” (compare Jon Butler), her art of knowl-
edge (compare her “art of belief”) resulted from her group effort, as
opposed to any group-think or to any solipsism on her part (compare
Schulz on the collective as well as individual propensity of human-
ity to be wrong). The works of Wordsworth, Emerson et al., and of
Locke, Wesley, Wadsworth, Darwin et al. declared themselves along-
side hers. Wadsworth provided an especially conversational, two-way
 Introduction 17

bridge from her social circle to her ever more select, yet still inclusive,
society of Anglo-American master figures. “Master,” significantly,
looks prominent among her edgy but less irony-laced than laudatory
designations for her men friends (Lease makes this point). Ghostly
presences of belles and of bonnes lettres alike felt palpable to her.
What was true of high art, for Dickinson, was also true of exposi-
tory prose, for her—that is, not just that substance and style are one
and the same but that, as Harold Bloom has observed in another
context, “[i]maginative literature [one would here stipulate belles and
bonnes] is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness. We read not
only because we cannot know enough people, but because friend-
ship is vulnerable” (How 1). As reader and writer, Emily Dickinson fit
these interpersonal comments. She enjoyed conversation among, took
a turn on the dance floor of dialogically inscribed and human-defining
language with, “empiricists” like Wordsworth and Wadsworth and
empiricists like Locke and Darwin.
This book is of a piece. It highlights dialogue throughout. It makes
philosophy and science overt in part I and covert in part II. At the
same time, it tries not to be as thesis-ridden as perhaps some previous
arguments in the series were.
Part I will specify that by no means alone did Emily Dickinson
gather knowledge from experience and draw near truth through
experiment. Without losing sight of French rationalism and German
idealism as influences on Anglo-American Romanticism, and while
keeping the empirical/evangelical dialectic of Romantic Anglo-
America in play, part I will concentrate on British empiricism and
science as the transatlantic substance of Dickinson’s dialogical expres-
sion and the transatlantic evidence of her appeal.29 Nor, as part II
will elaborate, did Dickinson ask entirely by herself what to make of,
and how to cope with, those disenchantments of existence that fol-
low experience gone awry and experiment at dead end. Accordingly,
part II will acknowledge that the loss of others and of otherness in
Dickinson’s poems of postexperience or of aftermath was severe, and
made her generic poet’s perennial quandaries of disillusionment and
disaffection especially excruciating dilemmas in her case. This daunt-
ing condition of Dickinson’s art persisted, no matter how bravely she
contrived to overcome it. Nothing stopped this poet, though. Even
the self-reliance of her overall triumph, if not that of Emerson’s, was
in part other-directed.
Emily Dickinson’s rich conversation about poetry, philoso-
phy, and science can go on—that is, her art of knowledge can still
address whether or not the creative imagination that once flourished
18 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

primarily on religion-as-ground can in any brave new world of rea-

son and the senses survive (witness public university STEM-subject
mania). Her poetry is made up of voices defining “Wonder - ” not
only as “not precisely knowing” but also as “not precisely knowing
not - ” (Fr1347, lines 1–2). She declares this “condition” “bleak”
but “beautiful” (compare Fr1347, line 3). Thus her canon consti-
tutes curriculum vitae.

* * *

Did the personae of Emily Dickinson choose their sparring partners

from among philosophically and scientifically inclined speakers in
belles and in bonnes lettres alike? If so, as this book maintains, the
others who proved significant to her would surely have agreed that she
stayed front and center in their common enterprise. Emily Dickinson’s
rich conversation contained the multitudinous voices of her dialogical
art. If her poetry is one part group biography of communal know-
ing, it is another part embodiment of her aesthetic and intellectual
life. Accordingly, before emphasizing how this poet combines the
expressive function of her art with the pragmatic or audience-oriented
hemisphere of her imagination—this blended purpose may well be the
most original stylistic contribution made by her art of knowledge—
one should first pay attention to her expressive function per se.
To be sure, one of Dickinson’s personae is a male cigar smoker
(Fr107). Others are characters buried alive (e.g., Fr448). Nevertheless,
“Wild nights - wild nights!” (Fr269) intimates the poet’s lesbian
fantasy for her sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson.30
Thus the poet and her speakers can appear interchangeable. If at the
core of her art of conversation is the flesh-and-blood poet as discus-
sion leader, this book is right, pace New Criticism, sometimes not
to distinguish between the speaker of a poem and this artist whose
self-portrait is philosophically and scientifically as well as aesthetically
delineated.
“When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse—it does not
mean—me—but a supposed person” (L268). Although this thumb-
nail version of Dickinson’s aesthetic (disclosed to Higginson) can seem
anything but autobiographical, “When I state myself” heralds her con-
viction that “the Representative of the Verse—” is she. The comma
that follows “myself” violates the rule against separating the reflexive
pronoun from the restrictive qualifier, slows the pace of the reading,
and draws out Dickinson’s insistence that her lyrics concern her condi-
tion. Her declaration signifies “not that her poems were totally free
 Introduction 19

from autobiography but just the opposite—that there was more of her
personal situation in them than she would care to have made public”
or than meets the eye (see Shurr 130). Even “a supposed person” by
that logic denotes a facet of her: the distinction between the real one
who supposes and the fictional one who is supposed tends in the case
of this poet to fall into abeyance or to rise into suspension. Although
Dickinson can seem to maintain complete separation of life from art,
she wants to know if her “Verse is alive” and to “think it breathed”
(L260). As a “real woman, lineal indeed / From Pyrrha’s pebbles
and old Adam’s seed,” she and her others enliven her personae (com-
pare Keats, Lamia [1820], lines 332–38). She suggests that artifice
entails “yeasty” “self”-fashioning, to quote Gerard Manley Hopkins
(emphasis added), as well as mere “self-fashioning,” to quote Stephen J.
Greenblatt (emphasis added), though with more Romantic-era self-
apotheosis, on her part, than Hopkins’s implication of Original Sin
would countenance.31
The multivocal quality encouraging such paradoxical reading
between the lines of Dickinson’s art-versus-life conundrum finds
excellent match in Robert Browning’s similarly double-edged princi-
ple: “I’ll tell my state as though ‘twere none of mine.”32 Browning’s
formulation, too, would seem to highlight the difference between
him and the “supposed person” of his “Verse—.” His subjunc-
tive mood, however, goes contrary to the fact of his poet-persona
identity: his state is what his poetry tells his readers about. For
Browning, again to use Dickinson’s language, any “Representative
of the Verse—” proves congruent with that speaker’s poet-creator,
as though there were an Iago in Shakespeare. The lack of such a pos-
sessive construction in Dickinson’s dictum as Browning’s word mine
calls attention to the covert, subliminal, or subversive sense in which
her art remains hers.
One thinks in this connection, albeit whimsically, of an ironic
instance of popular culture, Miss Piggy’s “Moi?” Although the
Muppet’s rhetorical question poses as her wry self-effacement, her
trotter-on-sternum, eye-rolling gesture makes her fans receive her
meaning loud and clear: “Yes, now that I think of it, ‘Moi!’ with a
vengeance, and, for that matter, ‘Me, Myself, and I!’” Dickinson’s sub-
jectivity, too, highlights wryness and sarcasm: unlike Miss Piggy, how-
ever, or perhaps even like her after all, the poet intends no uncertain
degree of high-serious appeal. Just as Dickinson “withdraw[s] into the
several isolations of her closet while ceaselessly soliciting the other”
(Werner 36), so her composite of selfhood-and-dialogue constitutes
her intellectual-and-cultural outreach.
20 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

The riddle of Dickinson’s not-so-feigned, not-so-separate presence

runs throughout her life/art conundrum, from her nominative “I” at
one pole, through her intensive “myself” at the heart of her meaning,
to her coyly objective but scarcely withheld “—me—” at the end of
her statement. The thin disguises of her personae can thus reveal the
contours of her selfhood. Yes, poets and their speakers can dwell apart,
can occupy mutually exclusive, antipodal realms, and Dickinson’s self-
projections, too, can don the demeanor of art for art’s sake. Yes, any
given mode of her expression, her empirical voice included, can adopt
the belletristic conceit of an autonomous, isolated character hermeti-
cally sealed from the inaccessible poet and her others, and Dickinson’s
readers, accordingly, may declare to her personae, “We know that you
are scarcely the poet herself. We acknowledge you for yourselves alone,
and not for your marks of either your creator’s DNA or her expatiat-
ing consciousness.” At the same time, though (and herein lies the
chief, unabashed assumption of this book) her readers may exclaim to
her speakers at no inconsiderable length,

We recognize you as the loose federation of the lyric genius who rivals
Wordsworth’s egotistical sublimity. With apologies to the New Critical
resistance to autobiographical significance, we can appreciate the fact
that your creator, like Whitman, can “contain multitudes,” and that
her poetry, like Wordsworth’s and Whitman’s, can constitute her “own
personal expanse” of intentionality and, for that matter, of self/other-
referencing simultaneity.33

If this latter response seems unlikely, and perhaps even if it speculates

to a fault, it nonetheless keeps faith with the vitality of Dickinson’s art.
Her speakers do not so much mediate as illustrate and lay bare her dia-
logue with the Romantics, Locke, Wesley, Wadsworth, and Darwin.
The implicit “we” of her self-expression becomes, if anything, more
intriguing than its explicit “I.”
Charles Wadsworth will loom so large in Dickinson’s “we” that in
advance of comparing his prose and her poetry it appears advisable
to survey the empirically inflected historical context and the cultural
ramifications of their “marriage of true minds.” First, the early-
Enlightenment correspondence between the Rev. John Norris and
Mary Astell adopted a Christian-Platonist, anti-Locke stance. Failing
to “carve out a position” between Norris and “the Empiricism of
Locke,” Astell concluded that “Sensible Congruity” (Norris’s phrase)
between soul and body amounted to “materialism.”34 Then, during
the 1720s and 1730s, the exchange between John Wesley and Mary
 Introduction 21

Granville Pendarves (later Delany) mapped out a pro-Locke route

to experiential faith, and hence preserved a role for rational empiri-
cism in Christian feminism.35 After 1738, when Wesley’s “heart was
strangely warmed” and his American as well as British revival was
aborning, Jonathan and Sarah Pierpont Edwards breathed in the
Wesley/Pendarves atmosphere of religious “epistemology”: George
Marsden recognizes the spiritual-sense component of the transatlantic
revival and of the Edwards’ rich conversation.36 Finally, former min-
ister Ralph Waldo Emerson and his key discussion partner, Margaret
Fuller, grounded their revival-modulated Transcendentalism in the
revival-central but empiricism-analogized doctrine of the spiritual
sense (Hankins). Wadsworth and Dickinson occupied a crowning posi-
tion on this arc of social progress. In fact, especially considering that
the nineteenth-century alliance between ministers and their women
parishioners suffered a scandalous end during the 1870s, because of
the affair between the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher and Elizabeth Tilton,
Wadsworth and Dickinson climaxed the drama at its proper best.37
This historic series of intellectual conversations between Anglo-
American divines and their protégées sheds light on the empirical as
well as evangelical content of Dickinson’s passionate esteem for the
man whom she called, above all of her other glowing Wadsworth-
designations, “My Clergyman” (L790). Wadsworth’s sermons and
Dickinson’s poems culminated nearly two hundred years’ worth
of Anglo-American male/female dialogue about philosophical
and scientific as well as religious methodology.38 There was clearly
something about the combination of rational empiricism and heart-
religion—was it receptivity/openness to experience of all kinds
natural as well as spiritual?—that proved conducive to advancement
and enhancement of the more than merely cultural link between
the sexes. Of course, Wadsworth and Dickinson were significantly
religious writers, in his case especially so.39 This book adds Arminian
evangelicalism—the proexperiential emphasis on the doctrine of free
will, on the soul’s own role in, and responsibility for, its salvation—
to what Alfred Habegger, Jane Eberwein, and others have written
concerning the fraught relationship between Dickinson’s poetry
and predestinarian, non- or antiexperiential, Puritanism/Calvinist
evangelicalism.40 Still, consistent with how the works of Wadsworth
and Dickinson bear witness to faith and, in her case more often than
in his, profess faith in experience, his sermons include analogues to,
and sources for, her concretely experiential, natural as well as spiri-
tual vision. The 1,125 pages of his 75 published homilies serve in
this book, in advance of further and more religiously oriented uses
22 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

to be made of these sermons in a future study, to amplify Dickinson’s

empirical voice. She steeped herself in philosophy and science in a
manner commensurate with, and perhaps even in large measure
because of, his interests.41
Dickinson read Wadsworth less to seek the sense-related or sense-
analogized ground of religion, whether natural or revealed, than to
stand on the epistemological ground of sense-based knowledge. Their
composite “heart [leapt] up” when it was strangely warmed by inward
faith, but also “when [they beheld] / A rainbow in the sky”—that is,
when the preacher and the poet read hope and promise in, into, con-
tingencies (compare Wordsworth, “My Heart Leaps Up” [1802], lines
1–2). Anyone for whom sermon interpretation has formed an element
of historical, interdisciplinary criticism would testify that Wadsworth’s
prose compares favorably with the readable Wesley’s, outstripping the
repetitious and convoluted Edwards’s.42 Wadsworth’s prose made
up a pleasing frame of reference for the grand end of “selving” in
Dickinson’s life of writing (compare Hopkins, “As Kingfishers Catch
Fire” [1881–1883], line 7). Concerning more than just religion,
Wadsworth’s sermons placed the mind as well as the soul-and-heart of
the Myth of Amherst in context.
To apply Emerson’s language to the Wadsworth/Dickinson dia-
logue, and to underscore the most pertinent word of that language,
Emerson’s call for “every man to be so much an artist that he could
repeat in conversation what had befallen him” (“The Poet” [1842]
in Murphy 1:925; emphasis added) appealed, in effect, to this man
and to this woman. One should adjust Emerson’s gendered prose.
In mutual language both comprehensive and comprehensible, the
preacher and the poet directly and indirectly reported to one another
on their natural and spiritual experience. His contribution to homilet-
ics provides a foil for her art. Of course, the two could part company,
and did so on more than one occasion. Still, the substance, style,
and wit of Wadsworth’s sermons can also animate one’s approach
to Dickinson’s paradox of experience and faith. The sermons will
comprise one of the most important strategies of this book, and of
the next in the series—namely, establishing explanatory parallels to
her language of experience. The Wadsworth glosses on her poetry—
the method of reading her poems in the light of particular passages
from his works—supply an intersubjective method for relating her
spiritualized to her “naturalized imagination,” and for emphasizing
the latter.43
Understood as intellectual autobiography, Dickinson’s art marks a
path back to Locke and across to Darwin by way of the Romantics,
 Introduction 23

and through Wesley and Wadsworth. The context from Blake to

Wordsworth to Whitman can give meaning to the sincerity of her
select society of partners in discussion. Just as her empirical voice
echoes evangelical thought and practice, so she hums the “spilt reli-
gion” (T. E. Hulme’s phrase) of Romanticism. Donne, Herbert, and
Crashaw, too, grapple with “the new philosophy [science]” that “calls
all in doubt” (Donne’s language in An Anatomy of the World [1611],
line 205), but the Romantics rank among Dickinson’s nearby, and
most temperamentally and aesthetically similar, partners in science.
Her personae fashion themselves not as “sicklied o’er” with the “pale
cast” of revival idiom but as colored with the blush of Romantic-era
earth-poetry, for, to italicize and expand on her words, her speakers
sound like “Scientist[s] of [Poetic] Faith” (Fr1261, line 12; empha-
sis added). Just as, among the ghostly but stirring presences of her
art, Wordsworth counts as her chief literary dialogist, so Wadsworth
emerges as her main partner discussing Locke and Darwin. Wesley
serves as her figurative partner discussing Locke; Darwin epito-
mizes her partners discussing science. The intersubjective thread of
Dickinson’s life-writing is thus the quality of mutual verification.
Empirically philosophical principles in league with scientifically
methodical procedures make up prime topics of Dickinson’s con-
versation with others. This dramatically dialogical aspect of her lyric
mastery squares with John Emerson Todd’s grasp of her “scenarios”
or groupings of personae seeking to solve existential conundrums
together. Subject/object coalescence or interpenetration and such
scientific challenges to all and sundry denizens of the nineteenth cen-
tury as how fossils illuminate natural selection can mean, for her,
that two or more heads are decidedly better than one. The young
discipline of cognitive science provides an analogy that stresses the
think-tank dimension or “subtle para-conversations” of scientific
pursuit.44 Dickinson pioneers such collective genius, thereby merit-
ing what Blake calls the “Enthusiastic Admiration” due to great art in
general. Although that response might seem an insufficiently cerebral
assessment of an art of knowledge, Blake’s criterion of “Enthusiastic
Admiration” nonetheless constitutes what he boldly proclaims as “the
first principle of Knowledge & the last.”45 A definition of individual
genius—namely, “instinctive and extraordinary capacity for imagina-
tive creation, original thought, invention, or discovery” (OED)—serves
well for Dickinson’s mutual kind of genius except that to “instinc-
tive and extraordinary” one might add a humbler but no less talent-
acknowledging phrase: “yet also experience-based, methodical, and
group-oriented.”
24 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

A portrait penned in the mid-1860s by New York journalist and

longtime friend of Dickinson Joseph Lyman cries out for explanation
and interpretation in any claim of a social role for this lyric genius as
the presiding member of her and her fellow-writers’ philosophically
and scientifically select society:

A library dimly lighted, three mignonettes on a little stand. Enter

a spirit clad in white, figure so draped as to be misty[,] face moist,
translucent alabaster, forehead firmer as a statuary marble. Eyes once
bright hazel now melted & fused so as to be two dreamy, wonder-
ing wells of expression, eyes that see no forms but gla[n]ce swiftly
to the core of all thi[n]gs, very firm strong little hands, absolutely
under control of the brain, types of quite rugged health[,] mouth
made for nothing and used for nothing but uttering choice speech,
rare thoughts, glittering, starry misty figures, winged words. (Qtd. in
Sewall Life 2:425)

Lyman’s tone would seem to make Dickinson’s works sound like any-
thing but brainy seminars or forensic chorales. Her “choice speech,
rare thoughts, glittering, starry misty figures, winged words” appear
to signal narrowly, privately lyrical soaring, from solitude into some
vague stratosphere of the empyrean perpendicular. She is scarcely
as ethereal or, for that matter, as diminutive, however, as Lyman’s
portrait makes her out to be: just as she knows that he takes her
measure, so he must know that she takes his, desiring not his gaze
but their mutual understanding. Whether or not Lyman responds
“correctly,” others can, in the conversational, dialogical spirit of her
select society.
The “choice speech” of Lyman’s Dickinson and of the Dickinson
of this book is an emblem of “rugged health” in the sense that her
poetry incarnates, amplifies, and augments the protean human land-
scape, communicating with her hearers and readers less about politics,
sex, and religion, for a change, than about literature, philosophy, and
science. Thus to dwell between the lines of Lyman’s word-picture is to
discern that Dickinson’s unseen exists not “in here” or “up there” but
within humankind and matter. Lyman’s compound/complex com-
prehension of his “subject” matter and of her subject matter draws
on her interior “wells of expression” and intimates her twin cores—
namely, her tender mind and her liberated spirit. Consistent with
Shelley’s “unremitting [and all but dialogical] interchange / With the
clear universe of things around,” however, Lyman also unwittingly, or
wittingly, discloses for all to see and participate in, the surgical preci-
sion of the poet’s hand-to-eye coordination—that is, her tough mind
 Introduction 25

or robust empiricism plus laboratory skills (compare Shelley, “Mont

Blanc” [1817], lines 39–40).
The lyric pragmatism of Emily Dickinson, the deeply felt message
of her philosophical and scientific imagination (“emotional thought”
was the first label given to her published works) inheres in the sig-
nature poem of this outreach—namely, “Experiment escorts us last”
(Fr1181).46 This first line of the poem alone, to say nothing of the
whole lyric until the discussion of it in chapter 2 (segment 2), encap-
sulates how her art of knowledge transports “us,” including her select
society of twenty-first-century partners in conversation, to the point of
realizing that trial and error blessedly define humanity. As if in reply to
Wordsworth, for whom “our destiny, our being’s heart and home” can
in certain of his moods be otherworldly “infinitude” or the “invisible
[transcendent] world,” Dickinson pins her hopes on “Experiment”
instead, as though this personification were her ultimate partner in
dialogue (compare Wordsworth, The Prelude [1850] 6:602–04). The
only ten other words of this miniature poetic manifesto of her outlook
will suggest, if a crucial part of chapter 2 succeeds, that her speakers
and their others tread softly, if at all, from means to ends, case to con-
clusion, and humble method to arrogant system.
Although the poet listens and adjusts to other voices coming to
her from other rooms, and although she respects these among her
personae, Dickinson’s empirical voice sings over, as well as in har-
mony with and with dissonance against, her chorus of literary figures,
philosophers, ministers, and scientists. She remains a recluse only in
Wordsworth’s sense. The Recluse: or, Views of Nature, Man, and Society
(1798–1850), unfinished at Wordsworth’s death, retreats from the
world not to escape the world but rather to gain distance from it, the
better to acquire and offer perspective on it (note well Wordsworth’s
other proto-Dickinson word: Society). The experience-philosophy in
Dickinson’s background, and the physical and life science of her time
and place, carry her and her readers along the road to knowledge,
and this “us,” this cultural history in league with reader-response to
her poetry, keeps accumulating wisdom, and so goes on growing in
stature.
On the one hand, Dickinson’s cryptic statement of purpose, “My
Business is Circumference” (L268), can signify that her rounds encom-
pass rarefied endeavor or fierce, otherworldly aspiration. Just as Jesus
“must be about [his] father’s business” (Luke 2:49), so the Myth of
Amherst must be “out opon Circumference” between yearning for
transcendence and attaining it (Fr633, line 7).47 Her lyrics sometimes
say that what her eyes fall short of perceiving exists as reality slanted
26 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

toward her from a world elsewhere. Harking back to some of Shelley’s

personae, some of her speakers, too, can

dart [their] spirit’s light

Beyond all worlds, until its spacious might
Satiate the void circumference.
(Shelley, “Adonais” [1821], stanza 47, lines 454–56)

Like Shelley’s speakers in certain moods of theirs, moreover, some

of hers can rise to be “pinnacled dim in the intense inane,” the
cobalt dynamic of empirical “transcendence” or astronomical sci-
ence (compare Shelley, Prometheus Unbound [1820], act 3, scene 1,
line 204).48
On the other hand, notwithstanding how Dickinson’s poems of
astronomy will form a focus of chapter 1, her personae tend to arrive at
such distant goals of inquiry more rarely than Shelley’s. Perhaps even
Shelley, whose transcendentalism mixes with skepticism (Notopoulos;
Pulos), would agree with Dickinson that the certainty of the abso-
lute and of the science of the stars differs from, and not only can
but probably should yield to, the slant truths of sublunary contin-
gency. Dickinson’s relatively small number of purely religious poems,
whether unworldly or this-worldly in their orientation, figures in this
book. “My Business is Circumference” means above all, however, that
the industriousness of her habit of composition negotiates the philo-
sophical and scientific spheres of her experience and influence.
To be sure, the poet acknowledges that “[p]hilosophy don’t
know” (Fr373, line 6) and, with equal doubt about the scientific
method, admits that “[t]his timid life of Evidence / Keeps pleading -
‘I dont know’ - ” (Fr725, lines 15–16). Nevertheless, she can seldom
stop “[p]luck[ing] at a twig of Evidence - ” for material knowledge
(Fr373, line 3). She would preserve a core of realism. She would rarely
jump to conclusions about the afterlife for which she hungers but in
which she refuses to take unexamined, unwarranted consolation. If
the religion of father Edward accompanies her at the point where
her knowledge ends, it does so belatedly, inconstantly. Her speakers,
with her ascendant criterion of experience eclipsing the waning moon
of her faith, can sound Job-like, defiant, and, if in the margin of her
works theology whispers, echoing her nostalgic religious concerns,
it feels rearguard there, beleaguered. Her personae, more often than
not, emanate from her naturalized imagination, confidently but subtly
deploying their collective sense perception in paradoxically subject/
object interchange, colloquy.
 Introduction 27

After the manner of Matthew Arnold, Dickinson’s philosophy-

and science-minded speakers and their conversational counterparts in
belles and bonnes lettres of the Anglo-American world exercise their
keen observation in the laboratory of their free mental play. To conflate
the second epigraph of this chapter with a meta-poetical lyric of hers,
Dickinson’s “paper and pen” proves “better far than nothing” (L63) at
“tell[ing] all the truth,” however “slant” or nuanced (Fr1263, line 1),
to her loved ones, friends, fellow-writers past, present, and future,
and readers then and now. Her verbal self-projections tell some of the
direct truth about these various addressees. That is, her insight into
motivation (see John Cody) becomes acute enough to make her a psy-
chological as well as philosophical and scientific discussion leader. Her
personae and those of her others, however, make up, above all, an all
but externalized community that takes phenomena in stride and some-
times at face value. Insofar as her ideas of sensation and her models of
reality mingle with those of her epistolary and poetic recipients, the
personal and the interpersonal, for her and for them, are not so much
the political or the religious as the philosophical and the scientific.49
Dickinson’s elevation of the pragmatic (read: audience-oriented)
and the expressive (read: autobiographical) functions of art over its
mimetic, near-realistic, and objective, purely aesthetic functions justi-
fies her reputation for originality.50 For Anglo-American Romantics
like her, aesthetic innovation has more to do with recombining
already-existing elements than with creation ex nihilo. Of course,
her philosophical and scientific interests preserve and concretize her
mimetic urge and inform and enhance her formalistic finesse. Still, her
power to amalgamate these offices—mimetic, pragmatic, expressive,
and objective—and her emphasis on the expressive and the pragmatic,
reinforce her all-seasons prowess as conversation starter par excellence.
Her inner-than-the-bone lyric selfhood issues in the centrifugal force
of her dialogical aesthetic (compare Fr334, line 14).
Although Dickinson’s style can seem obscure—one might well
ask: how can this poetry pass for conversation?—her goal of finding
“fit audience . . . though few” turns out, counterintuitively, to please
at least those general readers who like conundrums (compare John
Milton, Paradise Lost [1674] 7:31). Her enigmas invite solutions—
that is, one can scarcely too often bring to mind her round reminder
of one’s all too timid inner English major that “[A metaphor] won’t
bite” (L34). The give and take of her riddles exceeds her devis-
ing. Her life-writing is her gregarious form of empirically minded
problem-solving. Her initiates can respond to her puzzles as sensibly
as her contemporaries.
28 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

To borrow a metaphor from astronomy, then, Wordsworth,

Emerson, and Dickinson et al. pull Locke, Wesley, Wadsworth, and
Darwin et al. into singularity, and vice versa. These literary figures,
philosophers, ministers, and scientists suffer scant loss of either light
or energy on either side of the equation, perhaps even when one
side appears to be absorbed into the other. The next two chapters
will pay equal attention to masters of belles and of bonnes lettres.
Part II will say less about empiricists, evangelists, and scientists, and
more about Dickinson’s fellow-authors on the Romantic to Modern
arc, yet will answer yes to whether or not the well-earned optimism
and wise hope of her reliance on experience and on experiment can
survive in her postexperiential category of poems. Thus, even where
(ironically) tacit in her rich conversation, bonnes lettres stays opera-
tive there, too, like the one half of a binary star system only tempo-
rarily occluded.
In the conclusion of this book, finally, Locke, Wesley, Wadsworth,
and Darwin et al. will reappear explicitly. They will do so again along-
side the Romantics, as in part I. Insofar as the creative imaginations of
such masters of bonnes lettres possess as much authority as those of
such masters of belles lettres, the former group holds “lamps unto the
feet” of the latter, and “light[s] the path” of the Myth of Amherst in
particular (compare Psalm 119:105). As her doubt about Experiential
Faith increases, and because of this growing skepticism, she recasts her
faith in experience. She thereby offers to those among her partners in
dialogue still holding fast to their idea of Experiential Faith her reaf-
firmation of their select society’s fundamentally rational, sense-based
epistemology.
In sum, Emily Dickinson engages written language, to put it mildly.
Of course, if “dialogism” entails “the spoken world of folk conscious-
ness,” so does her dialogical art, though the sung world of hymns,
too, is audible in her mix of oral culture.51 Still, as background to
novel-writing, “dialogism” scants the inscribed world that her lyric
imagination also reflects and enlarges.52 Many of her speakers, like the
less reclusive than communicative author herself, internalize, echo,
answer to, and reply to printed voices of elite and popular culture.53
She proves “rich in conversation” with all these fellow-lovers of lan-
guage who are most vital to her in their published forms of belles
and of bonnes lettres alike. This love of books obtains, perhaps even
when she thinks of Shakespeare’s dialogical characters as her partners
in an almost more oral than written kind of traditional conversa-
tion, for, like a good Romantic, she reads Shakespeare in her room,
does not see him on the stage. Literary figures, philosophers, and
 Introduction 29

scientists grow prominent, more than ministers, among members of

her “Royal” Society, New England chapter.54 Sometimes belles lettres
and sometimes bonnes lettres characterize philosophy and science, for
her, for she encounters these latter disciplines directly, and as they
(a) impress her from between the lines of her literary precursors and
contemporaries and (b) toughen the theological prose in which she
elects to immerse herself.
 Part I

G a th e ring Ex pe rien c e
 Chapter 1

P r o claiming Empiric ism

Why did Charles Lamb label Wordsworth’s poetry “natural meth-

odism”?1 Perhaps Lamb’s low-key, lower case orthography meant less
that Wordsworth was Methodist than that the warm-hearted this-
worldliness of Wordsworth’s personae borrowed authority from John
Wesley’s this-as-well-as-otherworldly heart religion. So, too, could
Emily Dickinson’s perspective on the transatlantic revival be low-key,
lower case, and at the same time alert to poetic possibility in the
genius of the revival for the here and now, for spiritual-yet-temporal
immediacy. Almost as though she knew that Wesley’s emphasis on
spiritual experience built on his understanding of sense perception
(Brantley Locke 37–102), the Myth of Amherst reversed his process
and turned her Experience of Faith, intermittent, into her faith in
experience, trademark. Her lyrically dramatic expression of herself in
relation to her others and in the presence of nature harked back to
Wordsworth’s down-to-earth adaptation of the Methodist brand: she
bequeathed to her readers an art less of belief than of knowledge and
more of epistemological/scientific witness than of revival testimony.
If Emily Dickinson’s late-Romantic version of “natural meth-
odism” muted the voice and secularized the message of heart
religion, her poetry for that reason proved all the more decidedly
admirable for its credibility and all the more mutually verifiable for
its authenticity. She could mix experience and faith scarcely better
than she could reconcile them. She could balance experience and
faith rather more readily than she could subordinate the former
to the latter. Even when she enjoyed faith, as she did on occasion,
she gave the last word to experience. She capitalized “Experiment”
not so much because she managed somehow to locate pure and
34 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

simple transcendentalism in the concept—far from it—as because

she trusted, honored, venerated, and engaged—personified—the
contingent but complex and satisfying, the as-if-interpersonal, real-
ity of this world (compare Fr1181, line 1; see also the discussion of
“Experiment escorts us last - ” in chapter 2). Reluctantly, at first, but
with greater and greater cultural maturity and with more and more
intellectual honesty, she comprehended the big difference between
what Elizabeth Barrett Browning would have called the “childhood’s
faith” of high Romanticism and the “lost saints” of late-Romantic
adulthood (compare Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese,
43 [1845–1846], lines 9, 11). Perhaps Dickinson associated this very
idea, this very language, with the picture of Barrett Browning on her
bedroom wall. Dickinson did not acquiesce in that big difference
but spun the straw of that transcultural trend of gradual desiccation,
that descent from the strange warming of the up-leaping heart to its
dry salvages, into the liquid-lyric gold of an even more thoroughgo-
ing “poetry of earth” than Keats’s or Wordsworth’s (compare Keats,
“The Poetry of Earth Is Never Dead” [1816]).
This chapter and the next are offered in a spirit of tactical recanta-
tion of the faith-favoring emphasis in all five previous installments
of this series of arguments. Did the evangelical expression of Anglo-
American Romanticism outdo the empirical language that also
resounded there? The provisional answer here is probably not. The
series has hitherto made the empirical thesis perhaps overly depen-
dent on the evangelical antithesis of Romantic Anglo-America’s stab
at synthesizing experience and faith, not so much through the magi-
cal powers as through the sleight-of-hand of the creative imagina-
tion. This book, for its part, moves from the strategy of dialectic to
the quite possibly more aesthetically defensible, the certainly more
modestly imaginative, position of dialogical explanation. Yet mystery
remains, for Dickinson’s lesson that “[a] metaphor . . . won’t bite”
(L34) entails less systematic interaction between poles of materialistic
determinism than oscillating interplay among incandescent prospects
of this world. The rich conversation of Emily Dickinson’s art allows
experience its fighting chance against, its efficacious alternative to,
faith, notwithstanding this poet’s nostalgia for, nay, her love of, her
evangelical heritage.
The fifth volume of the series—namely, Experience and Faith: The
Late-Romantic Imagination of Emily Dickinson (Brantley 2004; paper
2008)—assumed that her poetry subsumes philosophy and science
under religion. That theory remains explanatory, but the present
book, without necessarily taking the opposite for granted either, yet
 Proclaiming Empiricism 35

for the sake of fresh argument nonetheless, explores the practically

critical results of shifting focus among Dickinson’s less dialectical than
oscillating and dialogical interdisciplinary interests. In the present vol-
ume, the full series-set of critically analytical terms (from empiricism
to evangelicalism) endures but with her religious concerns as distinct
subset this time (and for a change). In this sixth installment of the
series, emphatically lower case “natural methodism,” if “emphatically
lower case” poses no very insurmountable challenge of indigestible
counterintuition, abides to describe her late/belated Anglo-American
Romanticism as made up of only one part Experiential Faith, perhaps,
but of two parts philosophy-science.2 Her “natural methodism” recon-
sidered the transatlantic revival less by choosing epistemology and the
laboratory, rather than spiritual discipline or religious training, than
by weighing the latter in the light of the former. She achieved this
realistic reassessment of her religious heritage without entirely losing
sight of faith as in itself an oscillating/dialogical subelement of her
imagination. Her “natural methodism” did not so much reduce the
role of the transatlantic revival in Romantic Anglo-America as make
sense-based reason the test of a poetic faith modeled on, but not in
any final sense beholden to, experiential faith (no capitals).
According to the check of her case conducted throughout the
remainder of part I, Dickinson was the better poet, though not the
more flamboyant or the more relentless writer, for soft-pedaling her
inner synthesizer. She recognized, with Keats (whose words follow
here), that “the fancy cannot cheat so well,” cannot square contrar-
ies so efficiently, “[a]s she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf” (compare
“Ode to a Nightingale” [1819], lines 73–74). Nor, perhaps, by her
overall implication, if not by Keats’s, should any other-directed as
well as self-respecting, tough as well as tender Romantic-era author
even try. The properly hard-driving marks of this poet’s imagination
were two in number. First, the both/and logic of her perspective on
paradox meant that her all but salutary stance of faith in experience
overmatched, if only by a technical knock-out, her would-be-saving
experience of faith. Second, the I/thou dynamic of her appeal to
conundrum spread the word of Experiment, albeit with serpentine
wisdom as well as with dovelike harmlessness.
As this book took shape, the word processor made a very good
point every time it tried to correct Lamb’s lower case. Even methodism
uncapitalized, after all, plays on the name of John Wesley’s revival,
and so occupies pride of religious place in Lamb’s adjective-noun
combination. Thus natural methodism can still call for, can yet jus-
tify, a judicious, selective, and subtle interpretation of Wordsworth’s
36 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

poetry as religiously transcendental-izing in impulse, if not in ten-

dency. Can this locution of Lamb’s, despite his reinforcing of its
earthward direction through his joining of the word natural to the
word methodism, work across the ocean to fix the religious in the
empirical, thereby bidding fair to span the traditionally unbridge-
able gulf between experience and faith? Whatever the answer, Lamb’s
concept can continue in these religious as well as philosophical and
scientific terms to tantalize the student of Romanticism as the boldly
evocative, thoroughly expounding metaphor that it will likely remain
for as long as one can foresee. Whether or not natural methodism is
to be so regarded—that is, as delicately upper case in effect, as well
as deliberately lower case in fact—Anglo-American Romanticism in
general and Emily Dickinson’s in particular will whisper throughout
even this empirically oriented volume as a literature of experience
both natural and spiritual.
This chapter and the next, accordingly, do not presume to pre-
clude a future go of the series to the exclusively religious aspect of
Dickinson’s Romanticism, for, after all, the series was “doing reli-
gion” long before the post-9/11 turn-to-religion-in-academe pro-
claimed by Stanley Fish. This book, in fact, anticipates just such an
installment. Perhaps Volume 7 will ask less how Dickinson’s evan-
gelical idiom relates to, and supersedes, her empiricism, than in what
sense, if in any, this idiom stands alone, worthy of analysis in its own
right.3 Such a sally of practical criticism could even yet discover that
evangelical faith of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries accounted
for a distinct quality, a pure idiom, of this poet’s witness to the truth,
in contrast with her testimony of wisdom. Her “art of belief,” apart
from however often it conducted dialogue with empirical philosophy
and scientific method, could yet appear to stand alone again, as it has
not so long ago done throughout Roger Lundin’s understanding of
Dickinson’s religious poetry in its twentieth-century as well as imme-
diate theological context.
That having been said, it is proper to emphasize Lamb’s e. e.
cummings-like lowercasing, Lamb’s Rudolph Bultmann-like demy-
thologizing, of the Methodist Movement. Like all other previous vol-
umes in this sequence of arguments, the first, Wordsworth’s “Natural
Methodism” (Brantley 1975), strongly misread the initial m of Lamb’s
word methodism as upper case. The current book, if not the long run
of this skein, takes Lamb at the face value of his low-key, lower case
orthography, applying his phrase to Dickinson’s poetry as she would,
by back-grounding the religious and foregrounding the philosophical
and scientific concerns of her personae. Just as Lamb’s phrase “natural
 Proclaiming Empiricism 37

methodism” appears to signal his admiration for Wordsworth’s philo-

sophical and scientific acumen, as distinct from his religious yearning,
so any lingering religious implication of Wordsworth’s “natural meth-
odism” need scarcely entail honorific assessment of Wordsworth’s
thought and practice. With some justification, after all, Francis, Lord
Jeffrey, long ago called Wordsworth’s poetry “the mystical verbiage of
the Methodist pulpit” (14), and Jeffrey’s proper usage of the capital
letter intended no compliment to this poet. Even when read as low-
ercasing with a vengeance, natural methodism can seem too oxymo-
ronic, too epistemo-religious or religio-epistemological, for its own
good. Lamb’s implicit boast of experience/faith gap-closing, however
subliminal it might remain, appears a consummation stoutly to be
resisted, feeling neither likely in the great scheme of things nor, con-
sidering, say, the prudence of church/state separation, desirable in
this real world of potential fanaticism.
Without too closely reading two words, the forms and contents of
Anglo-American Romanticism, especially Dickinson’s, can yet shine
in the light of Lamb’s uncannily articulated though uncapitalized
and idiosyncratic expression for a cross-culturally defining compound
trait. Lamb’s down-to-earth, epistemology- and science-sounding
adaptation of the Methodist marque applies even more tellingly to
the naturalizing contribution of Dickinson’s late-Romantic perspec-
tive on the transatlantic revival than to her chief high-Romantic-era
precursor Wordsworth’s. Make no mistake, Dickinson muted the
voice and secularized the message of heart religion in the name and
to the benefit of art. Her eye altering thus altered all. The empirical
warp, as opposed to the evangelical weft, of her tightly woven inter-
connections with other weavers of the Anglo-American Romantic
web highlighted the texture of her works, and changed the pattern
of literary history.
Dickinson’s empirical voice acquired edge and volume from belles
lettres but, more surprisingly, from bonnes lettres, or the arc from
intellectual history to popular and elite culture connecting John Locke
and John Wesley to Charles Wadsworth, Dickinson’s “dearest earthly
friend” (L807), and Charles Darwin. Although sense-based reason
and the scientific method figured in transatlantic evangelism, the
rational empiricism of Locke and the evolutionary biology of Darwin
challenged religion. Locke and Darwin disenchanted poetry to the
point where Dickinson could at times appear more philosophical and
scientific than literary! Wadsworth’s Wesley-inspired use of the proto-
scientific language of Locke, his view of experience as the best means
of knowing what is naturally and spiritually true, resonates with, and
38 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

sounds most like, Dickinson’s empirical tone. Wadsworth’s sermons

represent the least-studied aspect, constitute the least-studied context,
of her dialogical art of knowledge.
Dickinson’s conversation with Wadsworth asked not just to what
extent the poet stood on the preacher’s solely evangelical ground but,
more importantly, how her and his empirical procedure or faith in
experience checked their evangelical yearning or experience of faith.
The intellectual and cultural arc that extended from Locke and Wesley
to Anglo-American writings of many kinds, ended with prose stylist
Wadsworth and lyric master Dickinson, as historic a pair in the way
of their world as Locke and Wesley in the way of theirs. Reveling in
the claim-testing swagger of constructive skepticism, Wadsworth and
Dickinson kept their options open, including choices made through
sense perception, as well as through faith and imagination. Their free
will evangelicalism pertained to rational empiricism in concert with sci-
entific method. In dialogue with Wadsworth, yet with greater tough-
mindedness, Dickinson found enough paradox in nature alone to
remystify the universe and the earth. Perhaps she even thereby enjoyed
her generous portion of the existential given, and perhaps, too, she
even thereby received secular grace from the world of thoughts and
things. Finally, she attained these values while at the same time main-
taining her less heady than dignified posture regarding physical and
life science. The poet talked with, and back to, the preacher about the
spectrum from steam technology, through geology and astronomy, to
the healing arts and natural selection.
This chapter will respect the trend among some scholars to connect
the empirical language of mid-nineteenth-century authors primarily
to the advancement of science at that immediate time. For example,
Robert Scholnick’s pioneering essay on Walt Whitman’s immersion
in state-of-the-art science, and Robin Peel’s complete study of Emily
Dickinson’s, have shown how these poets turned out to be method-
ologically up to date not only in their metaphors of earth but also
in their models of reality. In such a spirit of historical nearness, this
chapter will suggest that Dickinson’s conversation with Wadsworth
formed a vital but unexpected part of her informal education in both
the philosophy and the science of her day. Perhaps this intellectually
biographical/dialogical motif can supplement and broaden what is
already known about the focus and the cutting edge of her formal
scientific education at midcentury. This chapter will also empha-
size, however, that no less than her conversation with Wadsworth,
her lively interchange with Wordsworth (and company) kept her in
touch with, and inspired her to reimagine, the eighteenth- as well as
 Proclaiming Empiricism 39

nineteenth-century, philosophical as well as scientific tradition of

sense-based reason in the Anglo-American world.

* * *

As a very young woman, Emily Dickinson showed herself to be a well-

informed though not necessarily a just-yet-empirically-vociferous afi-
cionado of philosophy. At 14, writing to fellow-student Abiah Root,
she recognized the distinction between Plato and the chief persona
of his dialogues: “We’ll finish an education sometime, won’t we? You
may then be Plato, and I will be Socrates, provided you won’t be wiser
than I am” (L5). At 20, writing to her brother, Austin, and replay-
ing the pairing of Plato with Socrates, she spoke of philosophy-cum-
mythology, if not of philosophy-cum-religion, in the same breath, in
this flurry of sentences: “I had a dissertation from Eliza Coleman a day
or two ago—I don’t know which was the author—Plato, or Socrates—
rather think Jove had a finger in it” (L57). Thus satirizing Coleman
for subordinating philosophy to religion, and thus expressing regret
regarding her friend’s shortcomings as a partner in philosophical discus-
sion, the latter comment suggests how schoolgirl Dickinson would one
day become the Socratic-satirical gadfly-poet. Relative to Plato’s phi-
losophy, Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) lies
proximately behind Dickinson’s love of philosophy in general and the
epistemology of sense-based reasoning in particular. In terms consis-
tent with poetry, her tradition of empiricism calls the plays of her “fine
mental chaos,” to borrow a richly ludic as well as faintly scientific phrase
from how British Romantic novelist Thomas Love Peacock thought of
the high-Romantic aesthetic (qtd. in Swingle 71). As though coordi-
nates on the arc from Locke and Wesley to Wadsworth and Dickinson
comprise a cultural poetic, this segment will set up a sounding board
for the empirical voice heard throughout the Dickinson interpretation
in this chapter and in the next. Before devoting the remainder of part
I to close reading like this, it may be helpful to encapsulate the histori-
cal, interdisciplinary, and biographical reasons (arising from belles and
bonnes lettres alike) for describing Dickinson’s imagination as philo-
sophical and scientific in background and in outlook.
With regard to bonnes lettres, first (as being first in time for this
study), the founding document of British empiricism contends that
simple ideas or ideas of sensation form the mind’s account of what the
senses bring, and so solve experiential problems of mundane existence.
Locke asks, modestly, can one know, and if so, how and what, or does
one simply believe philosophically in preference to religiously? Locke
40 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

travels the road to knowledge by trusting the reasoning component

of his sensationalist epistemology. Grounding the mind in sense-data,
his set of stages would present the working opposite of French ratio-
nalism and of German idealism, both of which were beginning, in
the seventeenth and in the eighteenth century, to declare the mind’s
independence of, and superiority to, sense impressions. Locke’s ratio-
nal empiricism contrasts with the pure rationalism of Plato, as well as
of Descartes, and, for that matter, differs from such staples of Kant’s
philosophy as his sense-suspicious disposition. On the other hand,
despite Locke’s inductive procedure, his Essay not only assumes, but
also engages in, considerable lordship of mind over universe. Without
deducing, or leaping to, world-transcendence, he soars to the point
of it, as where his masterwork savors just how much more the mind
can comprehend than his contrasting but equally characteristic view of
mind’s limitation by the senses would seem to allow:

Nor let anyone think [simple ideas or ideas of sensation] too narrow
bounds for the capacious Mind of Man to expatiate in, which takes its
flight farther than the Stars, and cannot be confined by the limits of the
World; that extends its thoughts often, even beyond the utmost expan-
sion of Matter, and makes excursions into that incomprehensible Inane.
(Locke Essay 2.7.10; Nidditch 131)

Dickinson’s seven-word version of these fifty-four words, “The Brain

is wider than the Sky - ” (Fr598, line 1), captures Locke’s expansive
content in laconic form and, evoking less vertical than horizontal vast-
ness (contrast “wider” with “farther than the Stars”), beats Locke at
his game not of transcendental but of empirical philosophy.
Significantly, Locke’s governing concept of tabula rasa rolls trip-
pingly off the tongue of über-Methodist Wesley:

For many ages [Wesley writes], It has been allowed by sensible men,
Nihil est in Intellectu quod non fuit prius in sensu. That is, “There is
nothing in the understanding which was not first perceived by some of
the senses.” . . . [T]his point has now been thoroughly discussed by men
of the most eminent sense and learning, and it is agreed by all impar-
tial persons, that although some things are so plain and obvious, that
we can hardly avoid knowing them as soon as we come to the use of
our understanding, yet the knowledge even of those is not innate, but
derived from some of our senses. (Jackson 7:231)

Thus Wesley reconfirms his sometimes recessive but stubbornly reas-

sertive heritage of straightforward and straight empiricism. From
 Proclaiming Empiricism 41

June 5, 1782, through June 30, 1784, in 30 issues of his serial, The
Arminian Magazine, he devoted 91 pages to his extracts of 28 passages
from Book One and from Book Two of the Essay and gave 6 pages
to his remarks on 24 excerpts from Book Three and from Book Four
(see the table of reference in Brantley Locke 224–25). This remark-
able detail should ever renew Wesleyan scholarship: a contemporary
analogy would arise, if, a big if, the Reverend Rick Warren were to
expect his flock to read his very own edition of Martin Heidegger or
of Emmanuel Levinas! Wesley, for his part, reported on Locke’s ideas
of sensation to his “parish,” “all the world” (Wesley’s words qtd. in
Hurst 141), and this world extended in time and place, accordingly,
to the philosophical and scientific, as well as to the religious, climate
of the Myth of Amherst.
Wesley’s Locke-inspired philosophy, in brief (but recall also appen-
dix B), ranged from his sense-based reasoning to his educational the-
ory and practice. With respect to the former, first, he concludes:

No sooner is the child born into the world, than he . . . feels the air with
which he is surrounded, and which pours into him from every side, as
fast as he alternately breathes it back, to sustain the flame of life; and
hence springs a continued increase of strength, of motion, and of sen-
sation; all the bodily senses being now awakened, and furnished with
their proper objects. (Wesley Sermons 176)

Thus Wesley’s ideas follow Locke’s Some Thoughts concerning

Education (1693). The preacher, in tribute to the philosopher, held
that the design of an ideal pedagogy counterbalanced the bias of
nature. Locke’s very wording, in fact, appeared in Wesley’s written
rules for his Kingswood School, an empirically philosophical experi-
ment in Christian education.4 In the fourth year of the curriculum
there, Wesley appropriately, if somewhat startlingly, required Locke’s
Essay, which, as the second title in this series argued (Brantley Locke),
underlay his experience-oriented—that is, his sense-tested, as well as
merely sense-analogized—heart religion.5
The Locke-derived foundation of Wesley’s experiment at Kingswood
merits further attention in light of Samuel Pickering’s John Locke and
Children’s Books in Eighteenth-Century England (1981). That root
grew educational stem and flower in the nineteenth century, with
Dickinson’s theme of intellectual development a prominent blossom.
The 14-year-old girl’s “thoughts concerning education” in her letter
to Abiah Root are ultimately Locke-relevant, as well as possibly Plato-
centric.
42 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

Just as Wesley preached Locke-understood ideas of sensation to

his flock, so Wadsworth’s sermons evoked Locke: “Sensations,”
Wadsworth writes, “are the image, or form, of a thing in the mind”
(Sermons [1869] 23). Wadsworth even recalled the arcana of empirical
philosopher and Bishop George Berkeley: like Berkeley, Wadsworth
holds that “a complete idea must also be the image of a whole thing,
and not merely one of its parts” (Sermons [1869] 23).6 The sugges-
tion that ideas were somehow both independent mental entities and
the products of shaping forces lent weight to the revival-doctrine of
soul-competence in the world. Such philosophical fare was a more
bracing tonic for Wadsworth’s flock than would have been, say,
a rather passive evangelical teaching of the post-post-Modern world—
that is, that Jesus likes to find parking places for shoppers.7 The both/
and logic of Wadsworth’s subject/object subtlety (his image in the
mind, after all, is a thing there) harks back through Wesley to Locke:
“Ideas,” Locke writes, “are Perceptions in the Mind” and “modifica-
tions in the Bodies that cause such Perceptions in us” (Essay 2.8.7;
Nidditch 134). Wadsworth’s echoing parallels Romantic-era reimag-
ining of paradox.
To be sure, the attitudes that Wadsworth and Dickinson shared
could seem anti-intellectual in their wickedly antiprofessorial bias.
Using an antiexperiential, if not a rather anti-Locke, Presbyterian
diction, Wadsworth complains of “Scholarship,” viewing it, “by a
dread necessity, as predestined to be valetudinarian” (Sermons [1884]
231; emphasis added). “Nay,” he continues, reflecting, incidentally,
Wesley’s insistence that the clergy be red-blooded men, a scholar
“must be a creature of the delicate frame-work and the unbronzed
cheek and the lily fingers, and . . . like heavy ordinances, such an intel-
lectual will recoil on its mounting and shatter a puny frame-work”
(Sermons [1884] 232).8 One thinks in this connection of Theodore
Holland, son of Dickinson’s friends Elizabeth and Josiah Gilbert
Holland (please recall, in this regard also, that these parents may
have served as intermediaries for Dickinson’s correspondence with
Wadsworth).9 When Dickinson hears that Theodore has passed his
oral examination at Columbia University Law School, Dickinson is
delighted, writing, “I am glad if Theodore balked the Professors—
Most such are Mannikins, and a Warm blow from a brave Anatomy,
hurls them into Wherefores—” (L901). If one would expect her to
take issue with what smacks of Wadsworth’s sexist language here, one
would be mistaken, for though she was an early feminist (Bennett) she
and Wadsworth appreciated humor based on stereotypes of manhood
(she sometimes called herself “Uncle Emily” [e.g., L315]).
 Proclaiming Empiricism 43

Nevertheless, although Dickinson agreed with Wadsworth on

the superiority of robust men to effete academics, she also con-
curred with his theory of education, which harked back not simply
to Wesley’s Kingswood but even to Locke’s Some Thoughts concern-
ing Education. Wadsworth defines “education,” in Locke’s terms, as
“simply a drawing-forth, a development, not knowledge or erudition
forced into the mind, but the mind itself, quickened, strengthened,
trained unto thoughtful, practical activity” (Sermons [1905] 231;
Wadsworth’s emphasis). In a manner reminiscent of Dickinson’s
teenaged aspiration to “finish an education sometime,” Wadsworth
declares that “there is none whose education is,” or by his implica-
tion ever should be, “finished” (Sermons [1869] 331). He proclaims
that “[e]very man to whom God hath given an intellect should have
enough self-knowledge to understand thoroughly its peculiar pow-
ers” (Sermons [1869] 14). He laments that “[m]any men practically
ignore their intellectual faculties,” that “some . . . never think at all,”
and that these “live among feelings,” “prefer[ring] to buy thought
as they buy groceries, second-hand and diluted” (Sermons [1869]
114–15). Consonant with Wadsworth’s views, Dickinson asks of her
literary preceptor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “How do most
people live without any thoughts [?],” adding, “There are many
people in the world (you must have noticed them in the street)[.]
How do they get strength to put on their clothes in the morning[?]”
(L342a).10 Thus, in 1870, a year after Wadsworth has, Locke-like,
lambasted people who purchase their thought secondhand, she,
Locke-like, too, advocates earning thought firsthand, and surely she
appreciated the rhetorical flair that comes across in Wadsworth’s
conclusion: “So the popular press roars and foams a grand Niagara
of sentiment and water!” (Sermons [1869] 115).
So Dickinson’s readers can gain a clear sense of the kind of empiri-
cal thought that attracted her by comparing her writings to those of
philosophically sage, empirically savvy Reverend Wadsworth, whom
she could have met, one may recall, through her partner in philo-
sophical discussion, Eliza Coleman.11 As the rest of part I will con-
tinue to indicate, Dickinson subscribed to Wadsworth’s Locke- as well
as Wesley-like standard for clergy and for laity alike. Locke, Wesley,
Wadsworth, and Dickinson thought that all people should heartily
endorse sense-based reasoning and faithfully strive for up-to-date
knowledge of empirical philosophy and of science, wherever this sort
of intelligence might lead. Who knows, these four horsemen of evan-
gelical empiricism or of empirical evangelicalism, however welcome
or unwelcome they would have found the oxymoron of such a label,
44 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

might just have accepted even those findings of twenty-first-century

climate science that appear to threaten science-averse evangelicals.
At any rate, Dickinson’s down-to-earth, downright empirical
instructors taught her well, in part, no doubt, because of the reception
granted to empiricism by such simultaneously normative and trend-
setting proponents of religious values as Wesley and Wadsworth. At
Amherst Academy, Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, and Amherst
College, where she may have attended lectures by Dickinson fam-
ily friend and eminent professor of natural history and divinity, later
president, Edward Hitchcock, Dickinson, like other young women of
her locale, benefited from scientific training.12 Thanks to the legacy
that her teachers of science inherited from the empiricism of Locke, as
well as due to their own strengths and virtues, these preceptors of the
poet-to-be eschewed pedantry, intellectual pride, overly refined game-
playing, and the ascetic, sterile will-o’-the-wisp or bugbear of mind/
body dualism. As a result, her education never ceased, nor did she ever
lessen her respect for empirical procedures. To say little here of the
other pole of her late-Romantic exposition or expedition—namely,
the experiential faith that Dickinson struggled constantly to reach—
her experiential philosophy and her science made a crucial difference
to her image-making power, as distinct from her spiritual sense fore-
shadowed by her sense-based reason.
The rest of part I will continue to indicate, as well, that a sample
of Dickinson’s poetic personae carries their education forward step by
step. Many, if not most, of these lyric speakers advance their educa-
tion from strength to strength. This combination of exaltation and
humility, of headiness and earthward-ness, is of the very essence of
this poet’s Anglo-American sense, as distinct from any mere sensibil-
ity on her part. That sense of hers is anticipated in the first instance
by what one ought to think of as the exalted humility of Locke and
of Wesley, too. And that sense of hers is in the end paralleled by the
paradoxically earthward headiness of Wadsworth, on one hand, and of
her fellow-Romantic-era authors, on the other.13
Consider, as the final background to Dickinson’s thought and
practice, and as a foretaste of her almost more than merely metaphori-
cal conversation with her Romantic- to Modern-era fellow-writers,
how Percy Bysshe Shelley relates to John Locke. For one thing, in
a clear allusion to the first of the two passages from Locke’s Essay
quoted earlier, Shelley boasts of “darting [his] spirit’s light / Beyond
all worlds” and into the “intense inane.”14 For another, as the other
Essay passage implies through subject/object paradox, Locke may
have approved, too, of Shelley’s “clasp” of the “pendulous Earth.”15
 Proclaiming Empiricism 45

Of course, Dickinson’s dramatic dialogists can sometimes venture

(her words) “out opon Circumference - ” of selfhood, world, and
universe (Fr633, line 7). Such speakers of hers can become as exalted
as the long Romantic Movement could inspire them to be. Still,
like the other, humbler aspect of the Locke/Shelley composite, her
inscribed self-projections can often approach the “intense inane” as
mere “speck[s] opon a Ball - ” (Fr633, line 7), and then they may well
prefer to come back down to earth (compare Robert Frost, “Birches”
[1916]).16 Thus, like the empirical imaginations of Locke, Wesley, and
Wadsworth, and like those developed in their wakes by such high- to
late-Romantic exemplars as Wordsworth and Emerson, Dickinson’s,
too, sometimes cherishes and impels and sometimes underwrites,
with the modesty that Anglo-American Romanticism can also model,
the sense-based means of epistemology. That same exalted humility
applies likewise to the corresponding sense-driven method of science
in the Anglo-American eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Without losing tender-minded overtone, as in Platonic or French
rationalism, German idealism, or, for that matter, the evangelical faith
embedded in her Anglo-American context, Dickinson’s empirical voice
demonstrated the richest payoff of her experience-laden worldview—
namely, her almost scientifically tough-minded tone. Her spirit of
experiment prevailed even on the interpersonal level of her existence.
Her poetically reasoned transposition from sense-based means to
sense-driven method transformed her ideas of sensation and reflection
into “finely explicit” (Bloom Shakespeare 7) models of reality—that
is, poeticized hypotheses for physical and life science. Thus reaching
back to Locke, the late-Romantic paragon of Anglo-American letters
did not simply “dwell in Possibility - ” of empirical truth (Fr466, line 1).
She also realized the facsimile of scientific knowledge.
Of the “Anglo-Saxon” age in which he and Dickinson thrived,
Wadsworth exclaims, “We live in the harvest time of mind and
thought,” adding, “The development of the mental follows the law
of material development” (Sermons [1869] 292). In his celebration
of mechanical inventiveness, Wadsworth rejoices that the telegraph
“has demonstrated the great possibility. And to Anglo-Saxon thought,
a great possibility is a great certainty” (Sermons [1869] 293–94;
Wadsworth’s emphasis).17 His down-to-earth as well as ethnocentric
philosophical optimism suggests that Dickinson’s words “I dwell in
Possibility - ” can refer to the pause between an idea of sensation
or reflection and the thing it produces, as in how the Romantic-era
imagination is believed to yield the thing imaged. According to this
brash duo’s reading of history, and despite how quaintly this binational
46 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

predilection now strikes the ear, “a great possibility is a great cer-

tainty” for better, not worse, in Britain and the United States.
Do the words “I dwell in Possibility - ” signal “totally self-contained
experience” (Walker 21)? Does this signature sentence of Dickinson’s
life of writing imply the either/or choice between existence and aes-
thetics, as though Dickinson’s imagination were “deadlocked” and her
life/art dilemma “irresolvable” (Robinson 34)? Does this saying of hers
struggle between “a Poeian constriction” “I dwell in Possibility - ” and
“an Emersonian expansion” “I dwell in Possibility - ” (29)? If “Paradise”
in line 8 of Fr466 is “the farthest space conceivable,” and if the poet’s
“mind can expand to include it” (Juhasz Undiscovered Continent
19–20), her not so enclosed earthly garden can also encompass the
Anglo-American setting for human advancement in both knowledge
and well-being. With something of Wadsworth’s triumphalism, she glo-
ried in steam technology, and with something of his strangely humble
exaltation, yet with little—or none—of his at times complacent theol-
ogy, she approached geology and astronomy.18 Finally, if scarcely with as
much sky-wide brain as she could bring to bear, and with only outdated
support from her literary, philosophical, religious, and scientific tradi-
tions, she struggled to sustain her epistemological brio in the face of
modern-era medicine and of modern-era evolutionary biology. Through
it all, and more incisively than even the mordant Romantics, on one
hand, and the mordant Locke, Wesley, Wadsworth, and Darwin, on the
other, Dickinson believed that the realm of observation and reflection,
no matter how dubious the progress or dehumanizing/dispiriting the
message, rendered superfluous the “pure serene” as a false lure. That
phrase of Keats’s from “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”
(1816, line 7) is honorific in context, a way for him to name the tran-
scendent realm of literary discovery, but can serve here pejoratively to
prefigure Dickinson’s growing disdain for the tender excess of axiom-
atic rationalism and of top-down idealism alike.

* * *

Wadsworth’s praise of steam technology, first, can sound unmistak-

ably like Dickinson’s. At the same time, however, his tribute can
serve to throw her genius for substantive and stylistic condensation
into especially bold relief. “Steam—that fantastic shape that played
aerial and useless before the eyes of old dreamers—” has become
in Wadsworth’s modern vein “man’s Titanic servant everywhere:
chained in the dark caverns of the earth, fettered to the wheels of great
machinery” (Sermons [1869] 292). Wadsworth marvels, in particular,
 Proclaiming Empiricism 47

at steam “harnessed on the thoroughfares of traffic; rushing through

the valleys; leaping on the mountains; marching on the seas—God’s
own wingèd wind unto man’s chariot, bearing him over all the brute
forces and forms of nature, in imperial dominion conquering and to
conquer” (Sermons [1869] 293). Dickinson’s 12-word paean to all
kinds of steam power, similarly, envisions virile engineering. Her per-
sona suitably hisses the message of fire-generated energy (her f’s and
l’s, and even her v, too, embody flapping, licking flame):

Force Flame
And with a Blonde push
Over your impotence
Flits steam.
(Fr963, lines 9–12; emphasis added)

This enthusiasm for steam power, like Wadsworth’s, evinces no antici-

pation of the post-Titanic-disaster irony that marks the hubris and the
nemesis of the Modern world (see Howells).
To be sure, some such complexity enriches Dickinson’s ode to the
steam locomotive:

I like to see it lap the Miles -

And lick the Valleys up -
And stop to feed itself at Tanks -
And then - prodigious step
Around a Pile of Mountains -
And supercilious peer
In Shanties - by the sides of Roads -
And then a Quarry pare
To fit its sides
And crawl between
Complaining all the while
In horrid - hooting stanza -
Then chase itself down Hill -
And neigh like Boanerges -
Then - prompter than a Star
Stop - docile and omnipotent
At its own stable door -
(Fr383)

The speaker’s social consciousness, after all, intimates that the train by
no means necessarily brings good things to life. Nevertheless, though
48 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

Dickinson’s more than merely two-handed engine can seem to pose

obscure but palpable threat, her liking of it still comes through loud and
clear. Despite the satirical undertone here, the admiring tone rings.
Just as Wordsworth’s “Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways” (1841)
gives rails pride of place among products of cultural poetics, so “I like
to see it lap the miles - ” is meta-poetical, for Dickinson’s lines speak
of poetry-in-motion as a work of art. Turner’s train comes to mind
more readily than even Lincoln’s rail line litigation. Dickinson’s pro-
phetic train, her “Son of Thunder” or preacher of rumbling progress,
exemplifies, for better or worse, the evangelically tinged Romantic-era
imagination of the Anglo-American world. Wordsworth’s just refer-
enced sonnet, surprisingly and rather uncharacteristically, proclaims
“Railways” as Imagineering advancement. More closely than the
attention that Wordsworth divides among three different Isambard
Kingdom Brunel-like engineering marvels of the late-Romantic
industrial message, however, the subject matter or empirically tinged
late-Romantic prophecy of Emerson’s “Nature” (1836), too, applies
to Dickinson’s poem. “What new thoughts,” Emerson writes (though
not explicitly claiming prophecy), “are suggested by seeing a face of
country quite familiar in the rapid movement of the railroad car!”
(Murphy 1:845–46). Dickinson’s train, likewise, defamiliarizes valley,
mountain, hill, and star, though less through the bells and whistles,
the wheels within wheels, of wild-eyed Romantic progress prophets, if
such ever purely existed, than through the sheer good description, the
robust empirical imagination, of the midcentury Turner-train vision
before her not-so-lying eyes.
As though the trained, disciplined physical eye is all artists need
for defamiliarization (Russian formalists, unite), Dickinson’s empiri-
cal voice takes on the form, boasts the power, of a more than merely
Wadsworth-related, an equally Anglo-American Romantic endorsed
or sponsored concentration on the rise, complexity, and progress of
the Industrial Revolution. Speaking of Wadsworth, though, “I like to
see it lap the Miles - ” signals the poet’s strikingly Wadsworth-related
pride in her father, who, as director of the Amherst and Belchertown
Railroad, brought the world to Amherst, and vice versa (see L72).
Wadsworth’s comparison of a man like Edward Dickinson with a train
like the one in Dickinson’s poem applies to the poet’s industrial art.

Patience and earnestness, conservatism and progress [Wadsworth writes].

These must be found together in the character of the truly successful
man. These qualities are not opposites; they are only different manifesta-
tions of perseverance. They answer respectively to the steam power and
 Proclaiming Empiricism 49

the brakes of a train. Without the first life has no movement at all; with-
out the last it moves only to disaster and destruction. (Sermons [1905]
182; Wadsworth’s emphasis)

The fact that Dickinson’s train moves has as much to do with the earnest
and progressive spirit of her father and of the Industrial Revolution as
with the “sexual advance” of the “male” (Philip 74–75). The fact that
Dickinson’s train halts has as much to do with the patient conservatism
of her father and of his Whig Party’s stop-and-start, slow-but-sure plans
for moderate American expansion as with the “symbolized . . . journey
of death” (Downey 28).
“I like to see it lap the Miles - ” might be “about poetry and about
itself” or might concern “the differences in traditional masculine and
feminine consciousness in the nineteenth century” (William Freedman
31). Pertaining to the latter possibility, dominating “locomotive” versus
“landscape subject” comes through (Wendy Martin 134–35) to compli-
cate Dickinson’s conversation with Wadsworth (does her poem take issue
with his Anglo-American bluster?). This well-known poem, however, can
best be understood as addressing certain straightforward, sturdy values
of the nineteenth century or what Wadsworth would call “different”—
that is, antiphonal more than opposing—“manifestations of persever-
ance,” be they progressive, conservative, personal, or cultural.

* * *

Did Edward Hitchcock influence Dickinson’s attention to the new sci-

ence of geology, as Richard B. Sewall has argued (Life 2:452–53)? Yes,
but Wadsworth also wrote about geology in ways parallel to her views
of this protoevolutionary methodology. With a little help from friend
Wadsworth, perhaps, she balanced the vast reaches of geological time
with the pressing needs of her brief span of life. Without diluting facts,
she came to terms with, and made the best of, the harshly impersonal
force of this physical science.
In a surprisingly tough-minded, refreshingly prescient grasp of geo-
logical issues, Wesley had asked, “What is at the center of the earth?”
and “What, for that matter, does one know of its surface?” (Jackson
13:492–93). Wadsworth built on the empirical interrogative posed by
his religious forebear. Dickinson’s “dearest earthly friend” asks and
answers other geological questions.

For tell me where, either in Creation or Providence, God thus hurries

to conclusions? How many ages were consumed in the slow progress
50 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

whereby this planet became fitted for human habitation? Why, the
very fuel consumed in your houses is the slow product of countless
years. And the tiny gem of your adornment was crystallized only in
an immensity of generations! Jehovah’s law of work is no hurrying or
headlong progress. He wins slowly, and in circles of immense sweep!
A thousand years are but as a day in the majesty of his movements.
And in all this quiet and slow progress how truly Godlike he seems!
(Sermons [1869] 14)19

Dickinson’s “Business” of “Circumference” (L268) is in part to

explore, though without as much divine reference as Wadsworth
indulges in, the “circles of immense sweep” wherein earth takes time
to crystallize gems.
Here is a poem in which Dickinson, like Wadsworth, suggests
that later is better as eons go forward, for spiritual as well as natural
reasons:

The Day that I was crowned

Was like the other Days -
Until the Coronation came -
And then - ‘twas Otherwise -
As Carbon in the Coal
And Carbon in the Gem
Are One - and yet the former
Were dull for Diadem -
I rose, and all was plain -
But when the Day declined
Myself and It, in Majesty
Were equally - adorned -
The Grace that I - was chose -
To me - surpassed the Crown
That was the Witness for the Grace -
‘Twas even that ‘twas Mine -
(Fr613)

The second stanza recalls a passage in which Wadsworth’s geological

language supplies him with an analogy to sacred life: “The value of
a gem is not in its composition, but in its crystallization. Even the
diamond is composed mainly of carbon, and differs from the black
coal of our furnaces only in this mysterious transfiguration . . . But
the spiritual man has through gracious crystallization become a
 Proclaiming Empiricism 51

gem, reflecting Divine light, and thus fitted for a diadem” (qtd. in
Sewall Life 2:452–53). In line with Wadsworth’s analogy, as Sewall
acknowledges, the poem engages in a more than simply geological
colloquy with his prose. One recognizes, for instance, the speaker’s
“ritualism reminiscent of New England baptism” (Rowena Revis
Jones 40).
For the poet, if not for the preacher, though, just as carbon changes
into diamond, so plainness becomes beauty of otherworldly holiness
and of this-worldly love alike. Is the “Crown” more emphatically hers
for being as real as symbolic? Perhaps, for the final stanza can appear
to say this to the point of making those difficult but fascinating lines
look like they are about an actual “marriage” as much as they can
concern an allegorical one. “The Day that I was crowned” appears
to transpose Wadsworth’s chord of spiritual loveliness into the wel-
come and affecting but true to life and minor key of natural grace.
Dickinson’s both/and logic here can come across as the have your
cake and eat it, too, vision of a marriage made in heaven but for the
earth. Thus, just as later is better in Wadsworth’s geological prose, so
in Dickinson’s poem plainness grows earthy, attractive. Although, as
Rowena Revis Jones implies, Dickinson’s persona paradoxically values
inner social meaning more highly than she rates the external symbols
and trappings of her new bond of love (40), the focus of the poem
entails an alternately, even a simultaneously, religious and romantic
interconnection. Geological science hovers as secular seal on this inti-
mation of two-way attachment.
“The Day that I was crowned” appears more than merely “the
heretical assumption of autonomous being” (Keller Only 290). The
psychosocial and the psychosexual, if mutually consenting, tinges of
this contribution of Dickinson’s earth-real as well as spiritual discus-
sion can feel palpable to readers of this poem. Whether or not, in
Locke’s terms, her speaker entertains a simple idea or, what may be
more, an idea of sensation concerning Wadsworth’s persona, she
“was chose - ” as much by human as by spiritual agency, if only in the
realm of virtual reality. In light of the physically scientific imagery
of the poem, “was chose - ” shines as an oddly backwoods, home-
spun, down-to-earth predicate that signals for the poet’s self-pro-
jection here how the personal is scarcely ever as much the religious
or the political as the philosophical and the scientific. As though it
were somehow scientifically methodical to do so, she understands
geology rather tenderly. Toughness remains in her implication,
however, of a more than merely religious marriage—that is, in her
52 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

inconvenient but deeply desired truth of a marriage in fact, if not

through sacrament.

* * *

With Dickinson’s poetic use of astronomy the views of Wesley vibrate.

The clergyman commits himself to empirical analysis of the stars, in a
manner consonant with his theological inquiry.

The omnipresence or immensity of God, Sir Isaac Newton endeav-

ours to illustrate by a strong expression, by terming infinite space, “the
Sensorium of the Deity.” And the very Heathens did not scruple to say,
“All things are full of God.” Just equivalent with his own declaration—
“Do not I fill heaven and earth? Saith the Lord.” How beautifully does
the Psalmist illustrate this! “Whither shall I flee from thy presence?”
(Jackson 6:388; compare Ps. 33:5; Jer. 23:24; Ps. 139:7)

The divinity symbolized by, or equivalent to, Dickinson’s Northern

Lights may seem less present than Wesley’s God, but her god, the
ultimately astronomical object of her veneration, and hence the pan-
theistic rather than theistic character of her belief here, remains as
mysterious as Wesley’s God.20

Of Bronze and Blaze -

The North - tonight -
So adequate - it forms -
So preconcerted with itself -
So distant - to alarms -
An Unconcern so sovreign
To Universe, or me -
Infects my simple spirit
With Taints of Majesty -
Till I take vaster attitudes
And strut opon my stem -
Disdaining Men, and Oxygen,
For Arrogance of them -
My Splendors, are Menagerie -
But their Competeless Show
Will entertain the Centuries
When I, am long ago,
An Island in dishonored Grass -
Whom none but Daisies, know -
(Fr319)
 Proclaiming Empiricism 53

What Wesley and Dickinson have in common between his passage and
her poem, the former in part a tribute to chief astronomer Newton
and the latter wholly an ode to the Aurora Borealis, is the quality of
humility, Wesley’s spiritual and Dickinson’s natural.21 Just as the per-
sona in Wesley’s prose sounds reverential rather than apotheosized, so
his tribute to God’s astronomy foreshadows the reduced, secularized
idiom through which Dickinson’s speaker can sound more modest
than heady.
Can Dickinson’s poetic use of astronomy, here, in any sense pass
for orthodox humility, in the opening and closing lines of the poem?
Perhaps, for if her praise of the Aurora Borealis is less conventionally
religious than Wesley’s hymn in prose, it is also no less filled with awe
and even more filled with fear. Denominating the Northern Lights as
“adequate,” a shrewd, understating choice of words meaning not so
much sufficiently inspiring as abundantly sublime, impressively “dis-
tant,” she implies that these lights can recall and derive authenticity
from the remote, serene, and inaccessible God of Deism. “[P]recon-
certed,” “sovreign,” the Aurora Borealis also evokes, for the poet,
the predetermining, inscrutable God of Calvinism. Since Dickinson’s
Northern Lights, to borrow the language of Keats, can stay “far
above” “All breathing human passion” (“Ode on a Grecian Urn”
[1819], line 28), her persona’s self-abasement before natural sublim-
ity can compare with Wesley’s humility before his infinitely superhu-
man God. No more than Dickinson, after all, is Wesley predictable, for
he oscillates between his usual Arminian deity of dialogical interaction
and his other, Calvinist God of aloof, inviolate majesty. Confessing
that her poems sink to the level of trick-performing circus animals
when compared to the pinnacled brilliance of celestial bodies, to say
nothing of any further-off Reality that might transcend even stellar/
universal appearance, Dickinson adopts a tone of “dust and ashes” like
Job when prostrate before the Creator of Leviathan (Job 42:6).
On the other hand, the speaker can contemplate and even perceive
reality, no matter how large, as though she takes reality on, becomes
and affects it. This heady trait leaves her initial, near-religious humil-
ity behind, and goes for the egotistical sublimity at the heart of this
poem.22 After “the North - tonight / Infects” the persona’s spirit with
disdain for all below, she can appear chummier with the stars than
Wesley was in his most astronomical dreams. Is this familiarity pecu-
liarly American, notwithstanding that Briton Wordsworth invented
egotistical sublimity? Perhaps, for compare Emerson, who writes of
“that wonderful congruity which subsists between man and world;
of which he is lord, not because he is the most subtile inhabitant, but
54 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

because he is its head and heart, and finds something of himself in

every . . . fact of astronomy” (“Nature”; Murphy 1:854). Dickinson’s
singer, similarly, however divine Northern Lights have seemed to her
to be, and however divine they may appear to her to be again, subor-
dinates them, in the middle stanza, to her I AM THAT I AM.
The word Infects, though, anticipates the persona’s return to
human earth in the closing lines, where she falls with such finality
that she goes all the way underground forever, heady no more. Hers
is now humility naturalized, of the earth, and, albeit partaking of the
dignity inherent in the common fate (“Death is the distinguished
thing,” said Henry James), this humility is nonetheless still without
any of the spiritual leavening to be found in Wesley’s. With regard
to lower case reality implicit in the last lines, Dickinson’s alternate
word for “Daisies” (the six-feet-under speaker will push them up) is
“Beetles” (see Franklin’s variorum), which capitalizes as horrifyingly
chthonic her Humiliation: if there is a god of nature, he/she/it loves
teeming beetles best. Thus, just as lowly beetles might seem a joke
on the speaker and even on the exalted stars, so Dickinson’s diction
of “alarms, “Men,” “Oxygen,” Grass,” “Daisies,” and “Beetles” is
tough-minded, stays a far cry from any complementary but rather
too glibly comforting notion of benign or benevolent transcendence,
whether theological or philosophical. When one reads “Of Bronze
and Blaze - ” in the philosophical and scientific terms that this book
regards as Dickinson’s predominant models, then the speaker emerges
as much more fearless-objective than overreaching-subjective, more
unswervingly empirical than idealistically deluded, and more psycho-
logically and creatively dead-ended than egotistically sublime. Her
science thus tells her what is, not what ought to be. If “their” (line
15) refers to the Northern Lights, then the persona’s poems are as
“dishonored” as the poet, and even if “their” refers to her poems,
the poet remains defunct and would surely, Woody Allen–like, prefer
to have achieved immortality by not dying than to have realized it
through her works.
It remains a question whether or not the humble, Wesley-like
tone or the arrogating, Emerson-like overtone of “Of Bronze - and
Blaze - ” proves the more attractive feature of the hymn. Either way,
Dickinson’s range of attitudes here enriches her speaker’s response to
astronomical truth. Her oscillating persona “expatiates farther than
the Stars” and “makes excursions into the incomprehensible Inane”
but also submits, equally Locke-like, to these very forms and forces of
external reality (the planet on which she lives is not just constellated
but oh, so local). Thus her empiricism naturalizes her idealism and
 Proclaiming Empiricism 55

secularizes her reverence. Her identification with the Aurora Borealis

constitutes an all the more memorable instance of Anglo-American
Romanticism for being at once and paradoxically inebriated and sober.
Even the egotistically sublime Emerson writes that “the stars awaken
a certain reverence, because though always present, they are always
inaccessible” (“Nature”; Murphy 1:826; please note the naturalized
Arminian/Calvinist distinction). The desacralized but deep humility
in “Of Bronze - and Blaze - ” accords with that same emphasis among
many of Dickinson’s works, including such not-so-well-known poems
of astronomy, properly to be considered in this context, as “She went
as quiet as the Dew” (Fr159).
The poem calculates a deceased woman’s worth, alludes to French
astronomer Jean-Joseph Leverrier, who “discovered” the planet
Neptune, in 1846, and develops philosophical perspective on mortal-
ity through a precise understanding of astronomical imagery23:

She went as quiet as the Dew

From an Accustomed flower.
Not like the Dew, did she return
At the Accustomed hour!
She dropt as softly as a star
From out my summer’s eve -
Less skillful than Le Verriere
It’s sorer to believe!
(Fr159)

Charles Wadsworth, without exactly being in dialogue with this speaker,

unknowingly (in this case) provides a context for Dickinson’s poem,
and perhaps even a framework for disputing it, observing philosophi-
cally and scientifically that “[t]he old Astrology . . . hath ripened into a
grand practical science, till our Astronomy [Wadsworth means by “our
Astronomy” how such British practitioners as William and Caroline
Herschel enhanced astronomical concentration within the scientific
emphasis at Amherst College] elevated the race into the region of
most useful philosophy and loftiest knowledge of God” (Sermons [1869]
292; emphasis added).24 By contrast with Wadsworth’s point, and as
if in debate with it, Dickinson’s version of the mathematically exact
science of astronomy fails to “elevate the race” but instead situates
her speaker’s wisdom on the uncelestial but self-respecting and even
honorable level of a tragic conundrum. That is: the all too useful, the
tough rather than tender, philosophy of precious but ephemeral life.
The new astronomy of which Wadsworth writes, with emphasis on
56 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

the cerulean (not the object of scientific experiment so much as the

emblem of divine certainty), would seem to disclose first one and then
another sidereal entity, but never to subtract any. Dickinson’s imper-
manent woman, on the other hand, dropped out of the sky in almost
more than a manner of speaking, for she is as cancelled as Dickinson’s
astronomy says a star can be.
To be sure, Dickinson’s quietly going woman (it is not that, like
Icarus, she proudly presumes on sublimity) bids adieu to generations
of readers for as long as they can endure. Nevertheless, the no less sci-
entifically accurate for being psychologized astronomy of “She went
as quiet as the Dew” demonstrates only that she was “here today, gone
tomorrow.”25 Does the speaker stay consistent, here, with the sharply
observing character, the closely observed result, of Anglo-American
empiricism in its astronomical mode? Yes, more than Wadsworth’s
star-gazing does, for, though in fairness it could be said that his view
is more comprehensive, while hers offers only half a loaf, hers wears
better, is less formulaic, is edgier, more emotionally intelligent.
More or less vividly in all these respects, yet as one poet appeals
to another even more powerfully than Emily Dickinson reaches out
to “My Clergyman” (L950), “She went as quiet as the Dew” recalls,
finally, Wordsworth’s most anthologized elegy on Lucy (1800), which
reads:

A slumber did my spirit seal;

I had no human fears;
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.

On the one hand, Wordsworth’s lyric and Dickinson’s resemble one

another in their respect for empiricism as the proclamation of what
counts. Since Lucy “neither hears nor sees”—that is, since she has
lost everything immediate, vivid, worthwhile, and human—Words-
worth’s speaker mourns her; he is far from being in any heady mood
to identify either himself or her with long-running stars as grand fig-
ures of persistent existence. In Dickinson’s case, similarly, the tangible
regularities of dew and flower that come and go comprise her high
premium on sense experience as life itself, and her corresponding rec-
ognition of the absence thereof as death on a cosmic scale parallels
 Proclaiming Empiricism 57

her perspective on stars as ever disappearing, never recoverable. On

the other hand, the two elegies differ, for, though both deploy astro-
nomic imagery, Wordsworth’s does so for consolation, Dickinson’s to
express grief. Rolling “round in earth’s diurnal course,” Lucy illus-
trates permanence according to the first law of thermodynamics, and
her pluperfect status (witness the past participle rolled) makes this
Everywoman decidedly constellated—that is, almost as mythically as
naturally ongoing. By contrast, just as the woman who “went quiet
as the Dew” leaves no more trace than an extinct star, so astronomy
serves the persona here, all too instructively, all too astringently, only
to register oblivion.26

* * *

As though the sublimity of astronomy “cannot cheat so well / As

[it] is fam’d to do, deceiving elf” (recall Keats), and as though the
impersonality of technology and of geology were finally unpoetic,
Dickinson turned the attention of her empirical imagination to life
science. She was “toll[ed] . . . back” from Aurora Borealis not to her
“sole self,” which would be expected procedure for any Romantic-era
writer indulging in the “usual suspect” of subjectivity, but to the rela-
tively disenchanted but salutary, the increasingly disenthralled, topic
of the lowly place of humankind on earth (compare Keats, “Ode to a
Nightingale” [1819], line 72). The most individually applicable ver-
sion of her eighteenth- to nineteenth-century empirical heritage, first,
was the healing arts. Dickinson sought out the remedies of medi-
cal science in the spirit of Wesley and of Wadsworth—that is, with a
mixture of skepticism toward, and gratitude for, what doctors, with
variable results but improved method (Bynum), were patiently con-
tributing to the pragmatic sum of human knowledge.
Just as Wesley faults “the four Greek sects, the Platonic, Peripatetic,
Epicurean, and Stoic,” for not making “any considerable improvement
in any branch of natural philosophy,” so he ranks empiricism as the facil-
itator of medical progress (Jackson 13:483). With a Locke-like twist on
the search for scientific language (recall Wesley’s abridgment of Book
Three of Locke’s Essay), he writes: “When physicians meet with disor-
ders which they do not understand, they commonly term them ner-
vous; a word that conveys to us no determinate idea, but it is a good
cover for learned ignorance” (Curnock 5:496). Wesley’s cheaply printed
Primitive Physick (1747) joined the dozen or so most widely read books
in England and America from 1750 to 1850 (Rousseau). Wesley’s title
signifies not outdated or crude supposition but foundational common
58 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

sense based on observation. His blunt preface praises Greek doctors in

the scientific terms of the British Enlightenment: “The Trial was made.
The cure was wrought. And Experience and Physick grew up together”
(vii). Although the preface deplores medical practices in general (these
often “set Experience aside”), it rejoices that “there have not been
wanting from Time to Time, some Lovers of Mankind . . . who have
laboured to explode out of [physick] all Hypotheses, and fine-spun
Theories, and to make it a plain intelligible Thing, as it was in The
Beginning: Having no more Mystery in it than this, ‘Such a Medicine
removes such a Pain’” (ix). When Wesley asks, “Has not the Author
of Nature taught us the use of many . . . Medicines?” he invokes theism
in the process of scientific inquiry (xi; Locke’s empiricism, for that
matter, invokes theism, too [Spellman; Waldron], and it is also worth
remembering that “empiric” is an eighteenth-century [post-Locke]
synonym for “doctor” [OED]).
In explicit homage to Wesley’s medical ideas, albeit without apply-
ing them as much to religion, Wadsworth recommends a principle of
Primitive Physick: “We do not wonder that that most sagacious and
Scriptural man, John Wesley, declared that ‘cleanliness is next to god-
liness’” (Sermons [1905] 169; Wadsworth’s emphasis). Wadsworth’s
wit is diverting:

That this science is, as yet, imperfect and uncertain, the truest physician
is himself the first to acknowledge . . . In other words, the [false] physi-
cian is very much like Walter Scott’s Irishman, who, coming to a street
where there was a great row, seized his stick, and looking up to heaven,
cried, “The Lord grant I may take the right side!” And rushed in and laid
about him. (Sermons [1905] 170; Wadsworth’s emphasis)

Despite this criticism, Wadsworth warns against too much levity

directed doctors’ way.

This is, just now, rather the popular view of the matter [Wadsworth
writes]; . . . but . . . Medical science, if as yet imperfect, is immensely
important, upon the first principle of experiment and induction.
(1) It has mastered the anatomy, or whole mechanism, of the body.
(2) Physiology—all the functions of the organs and tissues. (3) Materia
Medica—the effect of every drug on all conditions of diseased organs;
and Hygiene, whose laws of health are as reliable as gravitation. By
thousands of years of patient observation it has done all this; and if
there be a practical lunatic on earth, it is he who confounds the true
physician with the quack, and true medicine with nostrums. (Sermons
[1905] 170–71; Wadsworth’s emphasis)
 Proclaiming Empiricism 59

“Men in this generation,” Wadsworth concludes, “ought to outlive

the old patriarchs,” adding, “First, because the use of machinery
relieves them of most of the wear and tear of labor, and secondly,
because medical science enables them to set many diseases at defi-
ance” (Sermons [1905] 158). Wadsworth’s keynote of Wesley-derived
confidence in medical science comes through in these lengthy but
revealing quotations, though Wesley would not have made the point
at the expense of the patriarchs.
To be sure, Dickinson recognized that what Wadsworth called
“medical science” was in an infant state even as the nineteenth cen-
tury was drawing to a close. In 1881, the death of William Stearns,
the consumptive son of Amherst College president and Mrs. W. A.
Stearns, dashed his loved ones’ hopes for his high-altitude cure at
Colorado Springs, Colorado. Nothing remained to be done but
for Dickinson to pen, in May of that year, one of the most com-
passionate among her exquisite letters of condolence (see L694).
Later, in August of 1884, bitterness colors her comment on her
own terminal illness (she died on May 15, 1886, at 55, perhaps of
Bright’s disease): “The doctor calls it ‘revenge of the nerves,’ but
who but Death had wronged them?” (L907). Thus, like Wesley,
she rejects medical mumbo jumbo, attributing her illness instead
to losing beloveds, including Wadsworth two years before (he died
on April 1, 1882). Nevertheless, generally resisting the temptation
to condemn medical practice, Dickinson endorsed the experimen-
tal effort of her mother, Emily, in 1856, and of her good friend
Samuel Bowles, in 1861, to find relief from hypochondria and sci-
atica through the “water cure” of a Dr. Dennison of Northampton,
Massachusetts (L182, L241). One thinks with pity in this regard, yet
surely with no present-ism, of Keats and of Tennyson, in whose lives
the “water cure” figured painfully (Motion 312; Robert Bernard
Martin 137).
Dickinson prized what Wadsworth called “great principles of exper-
iment and induction” in medical science. Her rigorous and skeptical
but descriptive and positive attitude toward doctors comes across in
an 1851 letter to Austin:

I am glad to know you are prudent in consulting a physician; I hope

he will do you good; has anyone with neuralgia, tried him, that recom-
mended him to you? I think that warmth and rest, cold water and care
[well-observed remedies in Primitive Physick], are the best medicine for
it. I know you can get all these, and be your own physician, which is
far the better way [his advocacy of this “better way” is why Wesley the
60 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

eighteenth-century WebMD made the basics of medicine available for

every man and woman to be his or her own Empiric, again to use the
Locke-resonant OED-synonym for doctor]. (L66)

Thus, if Dickinson’s stance seems not quite scientific, her suspicion

nonetheless appears prudently empirical. When she questioned pre-
scription, she did so with open-minded, receptive tones of trial and
error. She even exemplified quiet scientific cooperation with the doc-
tor in a mutual search for the cure. From her mix of medical observa-
tions and reflections, she rarely precluded potential benefits.
No triumphantly ironic attitude qualifies Dickinson’s genuine sor-
row over the death, in 1880, of Dr. David P. Smith, a lecturer at the
Yale University Medical School who was frequently consulted by the
Dickinson family. Dickinson writes to Elizabeth Holland, “—[I] grieved
for Dr. Smith, our Family Savior,” adding enigmatically, “living Fingers
that are left, have a strange warmth—” (L683). The image of the dying
Dr. Keats’s still-“living hand” comes to mind, for as Keats prophesied on
his deathbed in a manner consistent with the conflation of his physician/
poet roles,

This living hand, now warm and capable

Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.
(“This Living Hand” [ca. 1819])

Keats was one of Dickinson’s favorite poets (Diehl Dickinson 15–19),

and it is tempting to think not only that she learned from the dashes
and the 85 percent quotient of lucid monosyllables here, but also that
she imputed the sentiments of these very lines to “our Family Savior.”
She wished to see Dr. Smith alive again, and pressed home the unbear-
able poignancy that Dr. Smith’s fingers, cold in death, would ever-
more lack their scientific, as well as perhaps Christ-like, power to keep
the hands of others warm, living.
Like Wesley and Wadsworth, Dickinson sought out “true med-
icine” and “the true physician.” For several months of 1864, her
quest succeeded. Even after her reclusive tendencies had set in,
around 1860, she sojourned in Boston as the patient of an early
ophthalmologist, Dr. Henry W. Williams. If he did not improve her
 Proclaiming Empiricism 61

condition, he nonetheless did her some good, and he caused her no

harm (Guthrie).

* * *

What was Dickinson’s attitude toward whether or not, and how, she
and her fellow human beings fit into Charles Darwin’s method of
natural selection? Her lyrics run the gamut of emotions from bemused
hope and precariously controlled insouciance through despair to calm
acceptance. First, however, again after the manner of Wesley and of
Wadsworth—Wesley being especially prescient in this regard—she
showed herself capable of meditating on evolutionary biology as a
species of rather surprisingly joyful wisdom.
As observer-participants in Methodist heritage know (Collier
34–35) but as few, if any, mainstream academic historians have rec-
ognized, Wesley prepared ground for Darwin’s theory, as odd as
that might sound to anyone familiar with the ongoing resistance to
Darwin’s legacy among early-twenty-first-century evangelicals of an
American stripe. Like Darwin, except for the religious reference, and
as a foreshadowing of his evolutionary biology, Wesley’s substantial
abridgment of Charles de Bonnet’s Contemplation of Nature (1764)
emphasizes that God gradually but progressively develops nature
through organic and human forms (Barber 74–77).27 Thus, in the
long run-up to On the Origin of Species, Wesley’s natural philosophy
figured more prominently than one might expect, perhaps even from
such a scientifically cutting-edge evangelical as he turned out to be.
This fearless aspect of his primarily religious leadership needs to be
much more widely acknowledged, and far more often contemplated.
As though reflecting and building on Wesley’s bold but secondhand
and somewhat naïve conflation of divine agency with an early version
of natural selection, Wadsworth’s attitude toward evolutionary biology
feels in a “New Englandly” manner (compare Fr256, line 15) blithe
but more than a little defensive. Affecting a relaxed and humorous
tone concerning the then-explicit issue of Darwinism, mid-nineteenth-
century Wadsworth pauses in his homiletic defense of Christianity just
long enough to joke that “[i]f any man will continue to believe that he
is only an improved beast, we will not quarrel with his genesis, but only
wish him joy of his grandmother” (Sermons [1884] 2).28 One thinks
here of the Huxley-Wilberforce exchange during the 1860s, which
rather misleadingly centered on the sense in which human beings were
more akin to apes than to angels.29 “The humor that pleased Mark
Twain” when he heard Wadsworth preach “was close to the ‘roguery’”
62 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

that Dickinson “cherished” in Wadsworth, and “often indulged in”

herself (Sewall Life 2:251–52). The preacher and the poet would no
doubt have shared a response to Darwin genuinely bemused, and
amusing, but also more than a little nervous.
Dickinson’s Wadsworth-like squib “Science is very near us—I
found a megatherium on my strawberry” (Prose Fragment 102,
L927) familiarizes Darwin’s theory but retains an element of the
ominous threat posed to humanity by natural selection. On the one
hand, since a megatherium is “a huge extinct sloth” (L927n), its dis-
appearance is solacing, as if to say that a gigantic identical sloth, homo
sapiens, survives as yet, if not as a large bug that attacks her flow-
ers, then as the gardener who plants but imperfectly tends them. On
the other hand, notwithstanding her smile at Darwinism, the poet’s
megatherium also implies the frightening prospect of extinction for
humankind. “Science is very near us” indeed—that is, all too close
for comfort. Thus, if Dickinson’s empirical voice can sound anything
but concerned about evolutionary biology, she can also appear quite
worried about it. In her book, the tough-minded Darwin ultimately
proves a scarcely intimate partner in discussion, and perhaps even a
powerfully inauspicious, not to say foreboding presence, as far as her
poetic faith and her fundamental optimism were concerned.
Despite the underlying Darwinian method of “A Science - so the
Savans say,” this poem illustrates the lighthearted mood with which
Dickinson is sometimes capable of taking Darwin in stride, and sounds
as delicately lyrical as this poet practically ever declares herself to be:

A science - so the Savans say,

“Comparative Anatomy” -
By which a single bone -
Is made a secret to unfold
Of some rare tenant of the mold -
Else perished in the stone -
So to the eye prospective led,
The meekest flower of the mead
Upon a winter’s day,
Stands representative in gold
Of Rose and Lily, manifold,
And countless Butterfly!
(Fr147)

Like “the meekest flower of the mead,” “countless Butterfly” tem-

pers toughness established by stanza one, for as these lines progress,
 Proclaiming Empiricism 63

the speaker turns her eye toward living species.30 The “representa-
tive flower (perhaps herself) stands, after the Emersonian manner of
each and all, as typal synechdoche of the whole of nature” (Keller
“Alephs” 310–11); thus the monodrama exemplifies in its dialogical
manner the most upbeat, most carefree quality of Dickinson’s lyric
program or Romantic-era agenda.31 The poem remains no less sweet
for Dickinson’s having “surely learned [from Edward Hitchcock] her
lesson” in the protoevolutionary science of “geology and fossil find-
ings” (Wolff 196–97).32 To the name of Hitchcock one would add
those of Wesley and Wadsworth, whose lessons of an evolutionary
kind, owing to the robust epistemology and constructive skepticism
of British empirical philosophy, as well as to their Christian faith, in
one sense need disturb no one’s equilibrium. Just as Wesley antici-
pated the truths of evolutionary biology with sangfroid, and just as
Wadsworth contemplated them with nerve and blithe spirit, so the
Dickinson of “A Science - so the Savans say,” as of Prose Fragment
102, on one level of its meaning, stays at once evolution-minded and
relatively untroubled. For this Dickinson, the age of Darwin coex-
isted with late-Romantic lilt, as though the latter could withstand
the former.
Another Dickinson, however, who wrote Prose Fragment 102
at the other level of its meaning, recoiled from Darwin’s science,
alarmed by, and struggling with, whom or what Tennyson discovered
at the source of harsh particulars—namely, “Nature, red in tooth and
claw / With ravine” (In Memoriam 56:15–16).33 Dickinson’s cry that
“Darwin does not tell us” “Why the Thief ingredient accompanies
all sweetness” tells us that it does so for reasons of Darwin’s science
(L359; emphasis added). Although Darwin’s science by no means
turned out entirely irreligious (Brown), that science reduced God,
at best. As Emerson laments, with a proto-Dickinson blend of sar-
castic blasphemy and sorrowful anger, “Providence has a wild, rough
incalculable road to its end, and it is of no use to try to whitewash its
huge, mixed instrumentalities, or to dress up that terrific benefactor
in a clean, white shirt and white neckcloth of a student in divinity”
(“Fate” [1852] qtd. in Whicher 333). In the form of natural selection,
Darwin’s science applied Ockham’s razor to God’s very existence. The
cryptic, caustic comment that Dickinson made to her late-life love-
interest Judge Otis P. Lord, with whom she shared a skeptical streak
(Guthrie), leaps to mind as central to her grasp of just what Darwin
signified for the second half of the nineteenth century and thereafter:
“Mrs Dr Stearns called to know if we didn’t think it very shocking for
[former Union General and candidate for Massachusetts Governor
64 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

Benjamin F.] Butler to ‘liken himself to the Redeemer,’ but we [Emily

and Lavinia? Emily and Austin?] thought Darwin had thrown ‘the
Redeemer’ away” (L750). Thus if, as the result of evolutionary biol-
ogy, God is dead, then Butler’s apotheosis of himself, though only in
the heat of political campaigning, represents the sole kind of divinity
still feasible in the late-Romantic period, no matter how much this
development might have scandalized “Mrs Dr Stearns.”34 Dickinson
could never kill God off lightly, for she might agree with Dostoyevsky
that without God, all is permitted, but, with a touch of bitterness, she
rather waggishly enjoyed, and even relished, Darwin’s intended or
unintended discard of Jesus as divine.
Many of Dickinson’s empirical personae grew quite shocked by
their recognition that Darwin spells the death of God, and hence the
end of Redemption. This Darwin-haunted speaker, for instance, faces
galling disenchantment:

The missing All - prevented Me

From missing minor Things.
If nothing larger than a World’s
Departure from a Hinge -
Or Sun’s Extinction, be observed -
‘Twas not so large that I
Could lift my Forehead from my work
For Curiosity.
(Fr995)

“The distinctive feature of this poem,” Sharon Cameron writes, “is

its impersonality, the largesse with which departure characterizes not
only psychological reality but also physical and natural fact” (Choosing
170–71). One could well replace “largesse” with “chill.” “The real
subject of the poem,” Heather McClave writes, “is the continuing
sense and the definitive act of missing”; “clearly,” she adds, “this is
what sets the terms of [the speaker’s] existence, so that the mind has
some choice in the drama of happenstance” (4–5; McClave’s emphasis).
The choice that the mind has, however, yields cold comfort. To con-
flate Dickinson’s words with those of Dylan Thomas, after the death
of “The missing All,” or God, “there is no other death,” for all would
then be death already (compare “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by
Fire, of Child in London” [1937], line 16).
A serviceable sort of redemption may be implied in the intensity
with which the speaker remains absorbed in her creative work of com-
posing poems. She recalls the tradition of work as efficacious. This
heritage extended from Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics and the
 Proclaiming Empiricism 65

Book of Ecclesiastes to Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1814),

as in Byron’s well-known words: “’Tis to create, and in creating
live / A being more intense” (CHP 3:46–47). Melville provides an
analogy, where Ishmael dispels despairing, suicidal thoughts of mor-
bidity and of godless nihilism, by doing what he does—that is, by
going to sea, no matter what (see the discussion in Delbanco 136).
Ishmael can match even the droll, antic disposition of Dickinson’s
concentration on her work, as indicated by her poem “The missing
All - prevented Me.”
The disappearance of species in “The missing All - prevented Me”
and, for that matter, the vanishing of worlds in this poem, seem bad
enough. The extinction of God, however, looms worse still.35 In the
poet’s mind, even wholesale loss of any other kind would feel less
cataclysmic. Dickinson’s nonchalance marks her undertone of gallows
humor. She intimates her horror at the prospect of anything-but-kinetic
vacuum. “The missing All,” with lower case m and upper case A, occu-
pies limbo between insignificance and awe, but hollowness spreads, if
“missing,” as gerund, belongs to the speaker’s lassitude.
The deliberated, upper case importance of “Me,” in the phrase
“prevented Me,” can well disturb the peace of readers. The capitalized
pronoun appears to arrogate godhead. Does the persona, like General
Butler, self-apotheosize, substituting her own creativity for that of a
God now gone, now dead, and buried with the fossils? If yes, then she
does so without pride, and with discreet, touching gesture, averting
her glance from cosmic disaster. Just as Dickinson desired the God
of her father, so this speaker would rather not be God. Her stance,
though plucky or full of aplomb, lands the poem 180 degrees away
from Wesley’s mot, “The best of all is, God is with us” (qtd. in Hurst
141), and Dickinson’s Deus Absconditus, or Deity Moribund, makes
all other departures negligible. As she memorably observes elsewhere,
“Parting is all we know of heaven, / And all we need of hell” (Fr1173,
lines 7–8), but, without God’s presence, all seems absent anyway, or
so Dickinson implies, in her signature response to the most ominous
implications of Darwin’s science.
Grace seldom leavens Dickinson’s poems of evolutionary biology.
What one might call her acquiring grace, a paradoxical combination
of claiming merited favor (recall her Arminian heritage) and receiv-
ing, however intermittently, unmerited favor (witness the Calvinist
tradition) is fitfully evident in “The Day that I was crowned,” already
discussed, and in some poems to be considered in part II. It remains a
distinct possibility, however, that this concept is nothing more theo-
logically precise than a secularized version of grace; her poems of
66 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

evolutionary biology, in any case, perplex and retard anything like

what Wesley understood as the prevenient grace of an always already
present God. In these poems, as in Darwin’s Origin, species just
are, while they last, and no divine whitewashing can alleviate, either
through what these personae can make happen or through what hap-
pens to them, this cold, brutal fact of existence. This canon-within-
the-canon of Dickinson’s art of knowledge by no means equates to
all she wishes to learn, yet appears to be “all / [She] knows on earth”
and all there is to know (compare Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,”
lines 49–50). As the result of composing these poems, of burning
through “the fierce dispute” between Darwin’s science and “impas-
sioned clay,” did she entertain the likelihood that Darwin bore as
much responsibility for the decline of poetic as of religious faith, as
he himself might have acknowledged (compare Keats, “On Sitting
Down to Read King Lear Once Again” [1818], lines 5–6)?36 To
repeat Tennyson’s language, for it is the best of all poetic encapsula-
tions of evolutionary biology, Darwin’s “Nature, red in tooth and
claw / With ravine” relegated Dickinson’s lyric impulse to the “bit-
tersweet” (compare Keats, “On Sitting,” line 8).37 In Keats’s terms,
Darwin taught her, forced her, to “leave melodizing” on the “wintry
day” of his astonishing, yet scarcely all that welcome, range of life-
science discoveries, thereby giving her the nineteenth-century means
of becoming a realist poet of Shakespearean proportions (compare
Keats, “On Sitting,” line 3).
For Dickinson, the natural law of Darwin’s evolutionary biology
defeated any haughty regard, on her and on her readers’ part, for the
role or position of humankind in any larger scheme of things. The
relentless and irresistible force of natural selection, as far as she and
her select society of tough-minded fellow-searchers and -researchers
were concerned, beat human measures against, say, the rodent kind,
for, in her natural law, as in Darwin’s, even the despised rat occupied
a strangely ineluctable place of legitimacy. Notice how resignedly one
of her poetic laboratory reports can forbear to punctuate the equilib-
rium of the rat, no matter how strongly the speaker might appear to
wish to do so (Stephen Jay Gould understood evolutionary biology as
“punctuated equilibrium”):

Hate cannot harm

Foe so reticent -
Neither Decree prohibit him -
Lawful as Equilibrium
(Fr1369, lines 7–10)
 Proclaiming Empiricism 67

And even a phylum so alienated from, and so much at enmity with,

humankind as the detestable, rebarbative fly failed to alter or dislodge
the poet’s brave acceptance of scientific reality as all the more ulti-
mate for differing from any human-centered concept of rightness or
fairness.38 “Of their peculiar calling,” she declares of flies in her not
so much studiedly neutral as grudgingly respectful tone, “Unqualified
to judge,” adding, in not-so-subtly attenuated Calvinist idiom, “To
Nature we remand Them / To justify or scourge” (Fr1393, lines
13–16). Thus Dickinson described species as meticulously, and with as
little regard for human agendas of interpretation, as Darwin depicted
the objects of his life-form attention on Galapagos, or as David Hume
critiqued causation. Perhaps she did so, above all, as Wesley, the fol-
lower of Locke as well as of Jesus, showed his all but Darwin-like, and
by now not-so-surprising, reverence for science.
By way of concluding this segment, here follows Wesley’s most
striking passage of an empirically philosophical, scientifically rigorous
kind, one with which Dickinson would have agreed:

I endeavor [Wesley affirms] not to account for things, but only to

describe them. I undertake barely to set down what appears in nature;
not the cause of those appearances. The facts lie within the reach of
our senses and understanding; the causes are more remote. That things
are so, we know with certainty; but why they are so, we know not. In
many ways, we cannot know; and the more we inquire, the more we
are perplexed and entangled. God hath so done his works, that we
may admire and adore; but we cannot search them out to perfection.
(Jackson 14:301; compare Eccles. 3:11)

Although Dickinson appeared scarcely so “certain” even that “things

are so,” much less “why they are so,” these words of Wesley’s antici-
pate her Darwin-informed worldview. Wesley here rebukes, before the
fact, the anti-intellectualism of much twenty-first-century American-
evangelical creationist discourse, there being, it bears repeating, little
such British expression nowadays. Like Wesley as well as Darwin,
Dickinson wrote things down, respected them apart from the writing
down, and, without assuming causation, reached nonirritably for an
array of possible explanations for all these natural and, as often as not,
living things. Like other Romantic-era authors of the Anglo-American
world, and like Locke, Wesley, Wadsworth, and Darwin, Dickinson
acknowledged the perplexity, viscosity, and entanglement of truth, yet
knew it would “hold - ” (Fr343, line 10). “The Truth,” as she told
it slant but wise and whole, “is Bald - and Cold - ” (Fr343, line 9),
68 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

but she took both the violent mutability and the plodding sameness
of the world in stride—that is, with composure and poise, if not with
a grain of salt. Casting her objective eye on life, on death, she passed
on, started over. She set the example of heroic imagination and of
courageous intellect alike.

* * *

To come full circle, the “natural methodism” of Romantic Anglo-

America, as distinct from Natural Methodism there, inspired Emily
Dickinson to subordinate spiritual discipline, for which Methodism
and the two Great Awakenings are well known, to the intellec-
tual discipline of Locke and of Darwin alike. Among her protean
shapes, the mature poet assumed the guise of a philosopher, not so
much of a “transcendental realist” kind, as David Van Leer under-
stands Emerson to be, as of a rational empiricist kind, as Brantley
(Coordinates and Anglo-American) understands Emerson to be. In
effect, Dickinson took Charles Lamb’s point: she would have found
in his low-key, lower case phrase a gentle rebuke of, a modest cor-
rective to, nineteenth-century transcendentalism, whether literary,
philosophical, or religious. As recorded throughout this chapter, her
empirical voice sings of knowledge based on natural experience, as
opposed to faith based on intuition, mysticism, traditional revelation,
or spiritual experience (immediate revelation). Thus, like her fellow-
writers in English-language belles lettres, the Myth of Amherst held
to the truth of imagination.
To be sure, more often than in Dickinson’s poetry “natural meth-
odism” in the rest of Anglo-American Romanticism can inflate to
Natural Methodism. This distinction points to her late Romanticism.
Nevertheless, her poetry was scarcely without resource, recourse,
inasmuch as she turned Natural Methodism upside down, or, to shift
the language to imported (but more usual) phrasing, she returned
to earth the Transcendentalism, the Natural Supernaturalism, of
Coleridge, Carlyle, or Emerson. She conceived of “natural meth-
odism” as the best part—that is, as the sense-based foundation—of
Anglo-American Transcendentalism of whatever kind, for, perhaps
even better than her co-Romantic-era participants in “the free play
of the mind,” she came to understand that “ideal form” begins, and
ends, in sense perception.39 If one may alter Coleridge’s formula, she
suspended little disbelief, because she cultivated much skepticism.40
As a result, her art of knowledge can feel more creditable than her
art of belief can appear credible. This distinction holds—no matter
 Proclaiming Empiricism 69

to what degree these hemispheres of her imagination subsisted on

her select society of conversational sparring partners, belles as well as
bonnes. The sonority of belles lettres, in particular, augments the his-
torical, interdisciplinary “audition” of her singing—that is, her dra-
matically lyrical self-projection as “Scientist of Faith” within a chorus
of such others (Fr1261, line 12; emphasis added).
Dickinson did not profess as much poetic faith, then, as one might
expect from the lyric genius that she remained. In company with her
others, yet more intrepidly, she found “what to make of a diminished
thing” (compare Robert Frost, “The Oven Bird” [1916], line 14).
More consistently than these others, with relatively restrained, less
blue-nostalgic-sad than boldly minimalizing resort to the formulaic
supernaturalism of her religious culture as a whole, she mainly gener-
ated art from nature. With no false modesty, she concluded (a) that
her “poetry of earth,” too, was anything but a reduced form of art and
(b) that, also like Keats’s, hers more than sufficed as art. Of course,
her letters and poems were sometimes intuitional or mystical. Her
idioms, moreover, included not just the sound of revealed religion
but even the spiritually experiential emphasis of the transatlantic
revival, and hence the immediate-witness mood of Romantic Anglo-
America’s Natural Methodism (if not of her “natural methodism”).
Still, as Lamb must have thought was the case with Wordsworth’s
language, Dickinson’s granted privilege at once to the role of mind
in nature and to the influence of nature on the mind. Whether or not
she ever chose matter over mind—“Theme this but little heard of
among men”—her tough, not-so-subjective Romanticism would have
resisted the Euro-continental drift that approximated all Romanticism
to Descartes’s French-rationalist elevation of mind over matter, or to
Kant’s insistence on the German-idealist perpendicularity of Natural
Supernaturalism (compare Wordsworth, Prospectus to The Recluse
[1814], line 67).
To be sure, the leap that this chapter has taken across space and
time could look, to say the least, anachronistic. Nevertheless, the
Anglo-American “sense” for which Locke and Wesley alike quali-
fied as prime movers proved a subtler near influence on Wadsworth
and on Dickinson alike than even his Presbyterian allegiance and her
Congregational affiliation. The Reverend Phineas Densmore Gurley
of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, Washington, DC (vis-
ited by President Abraham Lincoln) represented a counterpart to
the Presbyterian faith of Gurley’s just as well-known contemporary
and fellow-Presbyterian Theological Seminary graduate Wadsworth.
According to Ronald C. White, Jr., Gurley straddled the fatalism of
70 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

John Calvin and the evangelical New School’s emphasis on free will,
an Arminian rather than Calvinist development within nineteenth-
century Presbyterianism. Wadsworth’s paradoxically quasi-Methodist
faith, too, derived from the free will theology that Wesley learned
from Arminius, and then passed on to the Second Great Awakening,
in which Wadsworth and Dickinson participated, and which, in its
spiritual sense, corresponded to the reliance of philosophical empiri-
cists on experience and of scientists on experiment.
In sum, just as the capital letters often used by Emily Dickinson
would seem to contradict, yet really paradoxically respected, Charles
Lamb’s instigation of lower case modesty in literary persuasion, so
her ballad- and hymn-like stanzas ironically lent formalistic authority
to her inchoate, and most un-hymn-like, data base. Of course, her
art of knowledge remembered the fleeting philosophical transcenden-
talism of Wordsworth’s lyrical ballads and the dominating religious
transcendentalism of the Wesley brothers’ hymns. Still, although the
religious emphasis of Wesley and of Wadsworth remained their para-
mount concern, and although Dickinson’s spiritual subtheme stayed
audible in, as well as subsidiary to, her philosophical and scientific
leanings, natural philosophy burgeoned from Locke and Wesley
through the Romantics to Wadsworth and Dickinson. The arc from
eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century natural philosophy to mid-
and late-nineteenth-century science (“natural philosophers, after
1833, . . . were to be called scientists” [Gaull “Conjecturing” 68])
described, for instance, the discovery of transatlantic weather, “the
birth of Anglo-American meteorology” (Gaull “Conjecturing” 68).
Thus Dickinson’s version of “natural methodism” did not so much
evoke the otherworldliness of the transatlantic revival or of Romantic
Anglo-America as sanction and triangulate the here and now of British
empiricism, Anglo-American Romanticism, and evolutionary biology.
Not just like Wadsworth the “natural methodist,” as distinct from
Wadsworth the Natural Methodist, but even like Wesley the “philo-
sophical sluggard,” as distinct from Wesley the “itinerant Preacher”
(Telford 2:68), Dickinson the philosopher-poet became something of
a scientist, too. Her imagination trusted in induction. She paid hom-
age neither to the mind alone nor to a world elsewhere so much as to
her home-ground of thoughts and things.
 Chapter 2

G uid ing Expe riment

British Romantic philosopher William Godwin’s rededication to

his nationally cultural birthright of sense-based epistemology consti-
tuted a dramatic palinode, for him, and aptly prefigured the “New
Englandly” intellectual position of his descendant Dickinson (compare
Fr256, line 15). In 1797, four years after he had espoused French
rationalism, in An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, Godwin reaf-
firmed British empiricism, in The Enquirer: “We proceed most safely
[Godwin writes], when we enter upon each portion of our process, as
it were, de novo . . . There is danger, if we are too exclusively anxious
about consistency of system, that we may forget the perpetual atten-
tion we owe to experience, the pole-star of truth” (Enquirer vi, viii).
Dickinson, similarly, dwelled on the possibility of empirical findings
but, hastening to no rash judgment, avoided overconfidence in pre-
dicting them. Not only like the imagination of Godwin but also, as
Elizabeth Dolan has recently and thoroughly shown, like those of his
wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, of his and Mary’s daughter, Mary Shelley,
and of Charlotte Smith, Dickinson’s was both empirically philosophi-
cal and scientific. Perhaps even more than this British quartet of writ-
ers, yet without forgetting the insight, as expressed by Nietzsche, that
“[a]s the circle of science grows larger, it touches paradox at more
places,” the Myth of Amherst expected experiential and experimen-
tal discoveries to approximate truth, however unwelcome, as well as
knowledge (see The Birth of Tragedy [1872] qtd. in Putnam 12).
“We cannot hope for truth, only for ever richer (humanly created)
meanings,” post-Modern anthropologist Clifford Geertz declares,
adding, “indeed, an embarrassment of meanings; for such is the inde-
terminacy of the signs we use, uncontrollably proliferating meanings are
72 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

present in the slightest, least considered utterance” (qtd. in Tallis 3).

Entertaining, in riposte, the not necessarily untroubled but nonethe-
less hardy perennial idea of “a fundamental attunement between the
human mind and the universe,” skeptical reviewer Raymond Tallis
asks of Geertz, “What is the truth status of the assertion that truth
has dissolved into meaning?” (4). “Doubtful,” Dickinson would
answer. From her and her dramatic dialogists’ thought-and-word
experiments, adjustment of mind to the universe—that is, the prom-
ise of realizing brain/world coalescence and of conceiving intellect-
cosmos interpenetration—can arise as testing of stable truth, and not
merely as recording of changeable and bare, albeit teeming, mean-
ings. Thus, perhaps even as Dickinson sidesteps naïveté (she never
found the stable truth), she can “march breast forward,” can strive
and thrive, and so, in the hope of arriving somewhere real (though
not without the strain of getting there), fights on (compare Robert
Browning, “Epilogue to Asolando” [1890], lines 11, 19).
To be sure, as chapter 1 has already indicated, Dickinson’s techno-
logical, geological, and astronomical forays “out opon Circumference”
and “into the intense inane” were nagged by such bouts of her recurring
pessimism as her medically and biologically forced descent back down
to earth again. Moreover, as part II will everywhere and consistently
acknowledge, Dickinson’s pre-Modern mode can often render the con-
structive skepticism of Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Shelley-influencing
William Drummond destructive, whether or not her optimism survived
in the end, and however often her hope did triumph (compare Pulos;
Swingle). Nevertheless, just as chapter 1 has balanced her post–Civil
War, post-Darwin gloom with her ebullient, pre–Civil War atmosphere
(Lundin first made this useful distinction), so this chapter will show
how she displayed neither paralyzed skepticism nor static states of unbe-
lief but, instead, maintained equal measures of dynamic and salutary,
though astringent, naturalism. This poet stayed afloat.
The previous chapter concluded that Emily Dickinson held in equi-
poise and kept in play the natural philosophies and the scientific imag-
inations of the Romantics, Locke, Wesley, Wadsworth, Darwin et al.
Dickinson’s devotion to sense-based reason and the scientific method
captured and capped the “philosophy of enthusiasm” ascendant in the
temporal experience of Wordsworth, Emerson et al. and the spiritual
experience of Wesley and Wadsworth.1 Thus, whether she encoun-
tered people face-to-face, on the page, or “inner than the bone” of
her binational DNA (compare Fr334, line 14), Dickinson reinforced
her partners in conversation and her readers to favor the explana-
tory powers of experiential philosophy and of the laboratory over
 Guiding Experiment 73

the testimonial witness and the new-evangelical song of Experiential

Faith. This chapter will emphasize (a) her signature lyric of empiri-
cism, “Experiment escorts us last - ” (Fr1181); (b) her prime example
of subject/object oscillation, “On a Columnar Self - ” (Fr740); and
(c) her miniature poetic manifesto of philosophical and science-driven
theology, “Apparently with no surprise - ” (Fr1668). Thus, adding to
the practical criticism in the last chapter and climaxing with her trade-
mark contribution to the august tradition of theodicy, this chapter is
intent on formulating some hitherto only implicit historical, inter-
disciplinary, and biographical principles of interpreting Dickinson’s
poetry henceforth.
The next segment will feature a close but wide-ranging reading
of “Experiment escorts us last - ” (Fr1181). The third will contrast
“On a Columnar Self - ” (Fr740) with German idealism, thereby
bringing out the Anglo-American quality of Dickinson’s grounded
subjectivity. Finally, in the fourth segment, a larger than eighteenth-
to nineteenth-century perspective on Dickinson’s impulse to theo-
dicy will emerge—that is, a broad, global approach to her dilemma
of reconciling physical and moral evil with the time-honored view
of a God who “so loved the world” (John 3:16) that He saves it.
The chapter will fill out the group sketch begun in chapter 1, with
Dickinson remaining at the center and her others forming, through
the auspices of her select society, the composite, presiding, inward,
and outward genius of “the dogged aggregation of phenomena.”
This meaty, mouth-filling phrase, as opposed to “abstract reason-
ing” or “complicated mathematics,” can serve, here, to characterize
Dickinson’s group effort to acquire as much knowledge as possible,
and perhaps even to approach, if not the truth itself, then what may
well be strangely more, the truth of the collective imagination.2

* * *

Dickinson personifies the scientific method thus:

Experiment escorts us last -

His pungent company
Will not allow an Axiom
An Opportunity -
(Fr1181)

To paraphrase: Like the sense-based means of epistemology, the

sense-driven method of science can stay by our sides long after all
74 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

our other props have fallen into abeyance, and proven as chimerical
as our tragic predisposition to closed-system, sense-superior abstrac-
tion. By substituting method for system (Dickinson would have it
so), “Experiment” can guard against such theoretical extremes as how
“the economics profession,” nowadays, “devotes itself to the math-
ematical modeling of delusional harmonies” (Gray 29). “Experiment
escorts us” suggests that laboratory procedure (a) points out what
we might not otherwise observe; (b) attends us like a mentor and as
protection against deductive, syllogistic reasoning; and (c) like a lov-
ing friend or true lover delivers proof against falsehood. Thus, in the
predicate “escorts us last - ,” last signifies that “Experiment” will be
there, for us, all the way out to the edge of doom.
It is not that “Experiment” will help us only at last, as in grudgingly,
perfunctorily, belatedly, or as a mere afterthought. Nor is it the infer-
ence here that it is about time, high time, that “Experiment” helped
us, at long last. Rather, in the context of Dickinson’s empirical voice
as a whole, the piquant, spicy, “pungent company” of “Experiment,”
curiously strong, makes us visionary, in the concrete, eyesight-specific
meaning of this word, as though the poem transposes into a secu-
lar key the “visionary” chorus, the spiritual “company,” of Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). “Experiment escorts us last - ” can teach
Dickinson’s fellow-dialogists, avant la lettre, that even the empirical
quintessence of logical positivism need sacrifice no subtlety, mystery,
or enchantment to the demands of sense perception.3 Instead, like
imagination in this poet, “Experiment” in this poem can appear to
her “us” as more credibly creative for being Vulcan-like, sweaty, even
naturalized not spiritualized.
To be sure, the poem can seem to constitute pejorative charac-
terization of empirical procedures. Dickinson’s alternate word for
“escorts,” after all, is “accosts” (see Franklin’s variorum), suggest-
ing that empiricism can be threatening and that Darwin’s science can
assault one’s self-esteem. In not allowing “an Axiom,” personified,
“An Opportunity,” typified, to join the dance of “all the [embodied]
Truth - ” (compare Fr1263, line 1; emphasis added), “Experiment,”
only-too-humanized, can seem intolerant, exclusionary, as though sci-
entific method owed no dialogical courtesy to either rationalism or
idealism as a way-of-knowing legitimate in its own right and up to a
point. Nevertheless, these layers of negative valence prove secondary,
relating mainly as devil’s advocates to this speaker’s primary, favor-
ably presented, and highly recommended composite of sensationalist
epistemology and scientific method. The “voice of seasoned skepti-
cism,” heard by Richard B. Sewall in “Experiment escorts us last - ”
 Guiding Experiment 75

(“Teaching” 49), is a far cry from scientism. The poem means less
that the scientific method is the only justifiable access to the truth
than that test sites provide the best of all possible “slant[s]” on the
truth (compare Fr1263, line 1; emphasis added). Science, personi-
fied, develops into the rather modest winner of the competition for
intellectual acceptance bestowed by the select and adjudicating soci-
ety of “us” in the world of thoughts and things. To modify Sharon
Cameron’s phrase for Dickinson’s love of paradox, the poet does not
so much “choose not choosing” either the word accosts or the word
escorts as give the nod to the latter for reasons of its positive import,
its gallant effect (see Choosing Not Choosing).
Of course, “escorts” in Dickinson’s time by no means so readily
connoted the salacious, the scandalous. Still, Dickinson recognized
and considered the downside of science, as though she were aware
of a twofold implication, first, that laboratory results can be for sale
and, second, that they can be no more repeatable, and perhaps even
no more respectable, than one-night stands. “Experiment,” after all,
can seem to behave like a jealous, possessive lover, in not allowing
“An Axiom” to dance with “us,” and can appear to act like that out
of an almost psychological sense of the insecurity of his own posi-
tion. Thus, Dickinson can seem to ask: Is scientific method as seduc-
tive, as deceptive in its way, as the overweening, all-too-heady systems
of rationalism and of idealism? Or, on the other hand—and much
more in keeping with the argument here—does she think of the sci-
entific method as the president, so to speak (honorifically), of her
Royal Society of fellow-researchers? The latter interpretation, on bal-
ance, stays primary here. We can keep the former in view, however, as
this chapter proceeds—if only to keep things honest (just as any PhD
defense committee might include members outside the department
in question, for the corrective purpose of their different, opposing, or
complementary points of view).
“Experiment escorts us last - ” conveys the untheoretical, down-
to-earth, and anything but destructively skeptical outlook of a
poet-persona as loyal to the one who brought her to the dance as
“Experiment” remains faithful to her and her philosophically and
scientifically receptive others. The poem implies that despite being
reductive, despite doing violence to the widespread perception
of humankind’s importance in the grand scheme of things, ratio-
nal empiricism and science alike can resist tender-minded rationale
for hermetic thought, whether logical or illogical. This experiential
and experimental brand of reasoning and of imagining can keep in
play, and perhaps even can include, the mathematical, rationalistic,
76 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

intuitive, or idealistic strain of knowing, yet surely cannot tolerate

the pseudoscientific, speculatively psychological, top-down political,
fanatically religious, or hothouse-aesthetic way of “knowing.” The
face value of “Experiment escorts us last - ” denotes concisely and
in no uncertain terms that what one sees is what one gets, whether
one knows it or not. This speaker brings into focus how other such
Dickinson dialogists are to be overheard, or heard and conversed with.
As this self-projection of the poet would acknowledge, “Experiment”
can prove limited in scope and in outcome, but Dickinson’s breath-
ing of trial and error here, like the “voice” of Shelley’s “great moun-
tain,” retains power (again to apply Shelley’s words to her case) “to
repeal / Large codes of fraud and woe.”4 It is no accident that the
very poem (Fr256) in which Dickinson announces her perspective as
“New Englandly” (line 15) acknowledges the simultaneous and con-
sequent possibility that her outlook is Anglo-American: witness the
all but self-fulfilling fantasy in line 8, “Were I Britain born.”
As a global means of broadly reading this signature lyric of
Dickinson’s empirical voice, it remains to survey this persona’s philo-
sophical and literary heritage from Locke to Emerson, with special ref-
erence to their scientific idiom. It may be helpful to quote the words
of Locke, Emerson et al., the better to dramatize their dialogical rela-
tion to Dickinson. The background of empirical philosophy, first,
tilled ground for the scientific emphasis of a poem like “Experiment
escorts us last - ,” the carefully chosen language of which can carry
the freight of this venerable tradition. Locke’s Essay says that solidity,
resistance, inertia, extension, figure, shape, and divisibility can stay
accessible to, though independent of, sense perception (see Brantley
Locke 73–77); thus Locke’s confidence in correspondence between
matter and mind rests on his subscription to primary qualities as the
rock-solid reality that Dickinson’s “Experiment” persona also per-
ceives. “Experiments and historical observations we may have,” Locke
warns, “from which we may draw advantage of ease and health, and
thereby increase our stock of conveniences for this life; but beyond
this I fear our talents reach not, nor are our faculties, as I guess, able
to advance” (qtd. in MacLean 137; emphasis added). Despite the
earlier-quoted Essay passage on making excursions “far beyond the
Stars” and into “the incomprehensible Inane,” Locke would have
approved of Dickinson’s modest but firmly trusting means of carry-
ing her education forward (recall chapter 1, segment 2) by questing
for the sake of questing, and with scant expectation of arrival. One
may read “Experiment escorts us last - ” in just such a low-key, yet
keen, manner.
 Guiding Experiment 77

Wesley, too, foreknew “Experiment escorts us last - ”: “Reason and

experiment,” he writes, bring about “gradual improvement of natural
philosophy,” for “not single persons only, but whole societies [note
well the Royal- as well as Methodist-Society implications of this per-
haps more science- than religion-related, and certainly this Dickinson-
appropriated, word], apply themselves carefully to make experiments,
that, having carefully observed the structure and properties of each
body they might the more safely judge of its nature” (Jackson 13:483;
emphasis added). “All we can attain to,” Wesley concludes, “is an
imperfect knowledge of what is obvious . . . enough to satisfy our need,
but not our curiosity” (Jackson 13:496). However, Wesley’s salutes
to telescopes, microscopes, burning glasses, barometers, thermome-
ters, air pumps, diving bells, and diving machines disclose his working
assumption that the senses, if extended, yield the base of knowledge
(Jackson 13:487). Dickinson’s tribute to microscopes in

“Faith” is a fine invention

For Gentlemen who see!
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency!
(Fr202)

comes readily to mind in this bottom-line, sense-trusting regard. And

in like manner “reason and experiment” in “Experiment escorts us
last - ” do so.
The foreground of Anglo-American Romanticism, moreover, tilled
the ground for the new-empirical song chanted in “Experiment escorts
us last - ,” the carefully chosen words of which can carry the freight
of fresh belletristic heritage. Late-Romantic Carlyle, for his part par-
alleling Dickinson’s pairing of science and mystery, emphasizes that
“the man who cannot wonder, who does not habitually wonder (and
worship), were he President of innumerable Royal Societies, and car-
ried the whole Mécanique Celeste and Hegel’s Philosophy, and the
epitome of all Laboratories and Observations with their results, in his
single head,—is but a pair of Spectacles behind which there is no Eye”
(Sartor Resartus [1831] qtd. in Shelston 104). “I have the fancy,”
writes Emerson to Carlyle (in a manner resembling Dickinson’s
implied elevation of concrete content over near-decadent form), “that
a realist is a good corrector of formalism, no matter how incapable of
syllogism or continuous linked statement” (qtd. in Slater 122). Since
Emerson encapsulates the point by remarking that “[n]ature does not
like to be observed,” he practices the “wise passiveness” with which
78 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

Wordsworth epitomizes Locke’s wisdom for the high-Romantic,

English-speaking setting, and with which Dickinson in “What mys-
tery pervades a well!” (Fr1433) does, too, for that same setting in
its late-Romantic phase.5 On middle, British and American ground
between form- and sense-drive, Emerson writes, with an attitude
toward mathematics similar to that of Dickinson in “Experiment escorts
us last - ,” “We may climb into the thin and cold realm of pure geom-
etry and lifeless science, or sink into that of sensation. Between these
is the equator of life, of thought, of spirit, of poetry—a narrow belt”
(“Experience” [1844] qtd. in Murphy 1:950). The Anglo-American
duet of Carlyle and Emerson harmonizes so closely with Dickinson’s
empirical voice that, to mix the music metaphor with an image from
painting, a mere brushstroke of the trio can depict the philosophical
and scientific worldview of Anglo-American Romanticism as efficiently
as possible. Dickinson’s empirical voice can chime with Carlyle’s and
Emerson’s, for hers lends obbligato to theirs, though partly by way of
the proximate voice of Charles Wadsworth’s empiricism, which itali-
cizes his tribute, worth repeating here, to “experiment and induction”
as “the first principle” of all mental and material progress whatsoever
(Wadsworth Sermons [1905] 170; Wadsworth’s emphasis).
Carlyle the defender of British empiricism against French ratio-
nalism (see Brantley Coordinates 43–75), not Carlyle the importer
of German idealism (contrast Cazamian), not-so-modestly wins the
competition for chief muse of Dickinson’s “Experiment escorts us
last - .” To evoke the intuition-idiom of neo-Euclidean Descartes,
and to paraphrase the assumption underlying “Experiment escorts
us last - ,” French rationalism relies too heavily, and too compla-
cently, for Carlyle’s and Dickinson’s developing tastes, on the glibly
advocated, downright spurious doctrine of self-evident truth.6 One
hears overtones here of Thomas Jefferson’s unpragmatic, if not
oddly un-American, mood of Francophiliac rationalism. Carlyle the
empiricist aspires “toward those dim infinitely-expanded regions,
close-bordering on the impalpable Inane” (Sartor Resartus qtd.
in Shelston 108), and thereby adds to Locke’s “incomprehensible
Inane” and Shelley’s “intense inane” an enthusiasm for the ultraob-
jects of the universe that rivals Dickinson’s for edge-of-natural-reality
“Circumference”—that is, for “far off” but less retro-Transcenden-
tal than neo-immanent being (compare, respectively, Fr633, line 7,
and Fr740, line 11). According to Carlyle’s alter ego Teufelsdröckh,
“Science” never proceeds “in the small chink-lighted, or even oil-
lighted, underground workshop of Logic alone,” for the rational-
ism of such French mathematicians as Lagrange and Laplace is “the
 Guiding Experiment 79

head screwed off, and set in a basin to keep it alive” (Sartor Resartus
qtd. in Shelston 103). Despite Dickinson’s adeptness at mathemat-
ics (Sewall Life 2:336–64; compare Fr78, Fr99, Fr670, Fr980, and
Fr1725), the reliable, steadfast prop called sensationalist epistemol-
ogy comes to her aid—in part through Carlyle’s mediations—for the
acute, keen companionship of the scientific method helps this poet
to spurn the advances, and to counteract the blandishments, of pure
logic alone. “Experiment escorts us last - ” should serve, henceforth,
as the caption for Emily Dickinson’s picture of Carlyle, in its place of
honor on her bedroom wall.
To “speak in philosophy,” for the moment, rather than in the reli-
gious dialect or in the literary-critical vernacular that an emphasis
on empiricism must also respect, Dickinson’s empirical values pre-
clude, on the one hand, the “coherent, independent, subordinate,
and deductive” principles of rationalism or idealism and, on the
other, the agendas of materialism. Thus Jonathan Culler’s descrip-
tion of Frederick Harrison’s rationalism, if not of Harrison’s idealism,
contrasts with Jeremy Bentham’s materialistic utilitarianism (Culler
158–90, esp. 161), and provides the means of placing Dickinson the
empiricist somewhere between these philosophical extremes. Though
on what Coleridge calls the “dread watchtower” of the “absolute self”
(“To William Wordsworth” [1807], line 4; compare Hab. 2:1), the not-
so-solipsistic Dickinson associates matter with mind, and vice versa. At
the same time, however, she (a) forswears subject-on-object coercion
and (b) parries object-on-subject violence. Without either descend-
ing into mere confusion or diffuseness, and without overreaching to
either facile reconciliation or coalescence, her empiricist’s to-do list
ranges from (1) balancing to (2) interacting with to (3) interchanging
to (4) interpenetrating thoughts and things. Dickinson’s procedure
proves unsystematic, yet by no means unmethodical.

* * *

The following 52 words of palpable obscurity can sound as tonally

superior to sense impressions as any rationalist/idealist Romantic
work, English-language or other, and so these lines can put to the test
any claim that Dickinson’s primary voice is empirical:

On a Columnar Self -
How ample to rely
In Tumult - or Extremity -
How good the Certainty
80 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

That Lever cannot pry -

And Wedge cannot divide
Conviction - That Granitic Base -
Though none be on our side -
Suffice Us - for a Crowd -
Ourself - and Rectitude -
And that Assembly - not far off
From furthest Spirit - God
(Fr740)

As Dickinson writes to Higginson, “There is always one thing to be

grateful for—that one is one’s self & not somebody else” (L405n).7
The poem counts as her “culminating expression of self-confidence
and self-reliance as an intellectual female” (Leder and Abbott 50–51).
Is the speaker so far from professing humble, tough faith in experi-
ence that she veers all the way toward the other pole of transatlantic
Romanticism, the tender headiness of faith in intuition, conscience,
spirit, “soul-competence,” or egotistical sublimity?8 No, it is a subject/
object balance.9 Whether or not the speaker can still sing the old sweet
song of empiricism, Dickinson’s spirit of experiment prevails on her
plane of existence in this poem. Despite the apparent autonomy of
self-projection here, the diction of tumult, extremity, lever, wedge, and
base features sense-relation, as though these three stanzas, after all, stay
grounded in externality.
To be sure, the thesis statement of the poem—namely, “On a
Columnar Self - / How ample to rely / In Tumult - or Extremity - ”
—constitutes Dickinson’s incandescent version of Kant’s categorical
imperative. These three lines might well qualify as her “German” per-
spective on the larger Romantic movement for which Kant deserves
considerable credit as forerunner. Although philosophical approaches
to Dickinson’s poetry have hitherto remained rare, Frederick L.
Morey argues from Zeitgeist that she echoes Kant from time to
time.10 Dickinson’s language in “On a Columnar Self - ” can certainly
seem as self-contained, and perhaps even as self-satisfied, as Kant’s
can sound. Nevertheless, to add the concept of influence to that of
Zeitgeist, the British as well as American accent of Dickinson’s empiri-
cal voice invites homegrown philosophical interpretation of her texts,
this lyric included. If the “Columnar Self - ” seems psychologically
withdrawn, philosophically subjective, or morally upright, then this
self also becomes independent, unselfconscious, modest, and engaged
(one may refer to this self, and to the speaker of the poem, as “she,”
though each is as human, in every respect, as the poet is androgynous).
 Guiding Experiment 81

The persona of the poem holds within her English-speaking precincts

not Kant’s communion with pure reason alone so much as Shelley’s
“unremitting interchange / With the clear universe of things around”
(“Mont Blanc” [1817], line 141–42). Indeed, to conflate the concepts
of Emerson, Coleridge, Locke, and perhaps even Darwin, “the oppos-
ing strengths of me and not-me” in “On a Columnar Self - ” express
Dickinson’s undertone of thought/thing dynamic, and hence her inti-
mation of the sense-based means of epistemology and of the sense-
driven method of science (see the discussion in Juhasz “Tea” 149).
For Sewall, the reality principle of “On a Columnar Self - ” concerns
the transcendent otherness of God. The poem, Sewall argues, “comes
close to reconciling these two disparate phases of [Dickinson’s] being:
her love of the God of her fathers and her belief in herself” (Sewall
Life 2:390). The strangely Puritan-polytheistic God of the poem
proves welcome as one of its palpable obscurities. Its concluding qua-
train melds monotheism and a multitudinous divine selfhood equally
real and mysterious. On the other hand, as Suzanne Juhasz observes,
“The point of the poem is the self relies upon itself, not God,” who,
whether Puritan or polytheistic, or somehow both, “becomes second-
ary to where power resides” (Juhasz “Reading” 220–21). This psy-
chological point does not necessarily come at the expense of the poet’s
attractive paradox of Puritan polytheism, for such religious oxymoron
can represent healthy cultural development,11 but, given her subjec-
tivity-turned-objectivity here, there are more things in the heaven and
earth of the lyric than theology. Equal to the “solitary beliefs” of the
“Columnar Self - ” are “forces external to it” (Juhasz “Tea” 148), and
these appear more philosophical than religious. Dickinson’s balance of
me and not-me lies between this speaker’s psychological and religious
combination of internal with external, anchoring the dynamic of these
lines in outright empiricism.
Surprisingly, in light of his heritage of intuition-emphasizing German
idealism, Sǿren Kierkegaard’s Danish philosophy of Christian existen-
tialism provides an instructive analogy to Dickinson’s experience-based,
other-directed self-reliance, so notably expressed in “On a Columnar
Self - .” Kierkegaard’s dialogue with the dialectics of Hegel takes a
step away from adherence-to-idealism, as though moving toward the
grounded intuition of Dickinson’s poem. In vibration with its empiri-
cal voice and against Hegel, Kierkegaard writes that “a life-view born
of experience is more than a totality or sum of principle maintained in
its abstract indeterminacy. It is more than experience, which as such is
always atomistic. It is in fact the transubstantiation of experience; it is
an unshakable security in oneself won from all experience.”12 These last
82 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

11 words appear to distill Dickinson’s 52, in which “Conviction”—

“Wedge cannot divide it”—deepens over time, almost because time
passes. The solipsism of Hegel’s synthesis, as Kierkegaard would have
understood it, exceeds even the degree of self-consciousness in “On a
Columnar Self - .” With thoroughgoing idealism, and with no simple
idea, no idea of sensation, anywhere in sight, Hegel’s “spirit know-
ing itself as spirit,” his “Speculative Idea of Absolute Knowledge,”
devalues the role of the world in human development (Hegel qtd. in
Leib 38). As Kierkegaard might have recognized, the world acquires
an active role during the course of this initially hermetic lyric. As her
“Columnar Self - ” sings from stanza to stanza, Dickinson progresses
from certainty and undividable conviction to open assimilation of, and
entire absorption by, “far off” but not vertical being.
Dickinson’s subject/object oscillation here, like Kierkegaard’s
spiritual/natural quest, negotiates the Scylla of Hegel-like “spirit
knowing itself as spirit” and the Charybdis of materialism. Close to
her thinking, though, is Emerson’s, according to which, “[l]ife is not
dialectics” (“Experience” qtd. in Murphy 1:948). “In these times,”
Emerson adds, “we have had enough of the futility of criticism and
thought. Our young people have thought and written much on labor
and reform, and for all that they have written, neither the world nor
themselves have got on a step” (“Experience” qtd. in Murphy 1:948).
The impersonality and predictability of Marx’s dialectical material-
ism, as Kierkegaard would have known, appears too pat to explain (an
overly systemic Marxist approach would tend only to explain away)
Dickinson’s intimate wildness.13 Dialectics emerges from Kierkegaard’s
quarrel with Hegel as too technical a term to apply to Dickinson (or,
for that matter, to any other literary talent worth his or her salt). She,
for her aesthetic part, scarcely signs on to read even Kierkegaard, as
though she were some sort of philosophy major, for, like Kierkegaard
and like Emerson, she would have rejected the synthesis-driving relent-
lessness and the antiliterary rigidity of inflexible terminology. That
said—thanks in part to the near influence of Wesley and Wadsworth
and their combination of orthodoxy with empiricism—the speaker
of such an otherwise fully self-conscious poem as “On a Columnar
Self - ” carries on a rich conversation between “spirit knowing itself
as spirit” and “far off”—read: natural/horizontal—being. This partly
religious and poetically subtle, yet by no means entirely unphilosophi-
cal lyric, awards a leading role to the world in Dickinson’s drama of
human development, or, rather, in her paradoxical self-dramatization
of that development, with her speaker as everyman and as every-
woman alike.
 Guiding Experiment 83

Finally, just as “On a Columnar Self - ” progresses from the

personally perpendicular to the decidedly objective, so the poem
begins to function as Dickinson’s signature lyric of reader libera-
tion. On a sociological level, the speaker telescopes women’s history
from Wollstonecraft to the present. This persona travels at light-
speed from “feminist” to “female” to “free” (no “feminine” here;
compare Showalter). “On a Columnar Self - ” realizes the possibil-
ity that Locke, perhaps even more than Wesley, calls for.14 Locke
advocates political equality for women, whereas Wesley merely lets
them preach.15 On the philosophical and scientific note sounded
throughout this book, though, the “Columnar Self - ” goes beyond
sociological self-esteem and psychological self-reliance to “make
excursions into the incomprehensible Inane” as quite the rational
empiricist. Thus her more dual than dueling purpose of suspending
subject and object releases both into freedom. Dickinson’s career-
spanning alternation from one perspective to the other jibes with the
play of the mind and sanctions the both/and logic of the very best
art of knowledge and of paradox alike.

* * *

The age of Darwin could scarcely reconcile the fact of suffering with
belief in God as just and powerful, if not loving. For example, since
natural selection fragmented the theological world-picture of Emily
Dickinson, she wrote theodicy (from theo-dice, God plus justice)
only in fragments or as fragmentary, such truncation sufficing for
her spiritual pilgrimage in the latter day. If she did not exactly pur-
sue the questioning/answering dialectic of this most skeptical sub-
category of traditional religious thought, she at least master-minded
the interrogative mood of her quarrel with God. She gravitated
toward “obstinate questionings” not only of “sense and outward
things” but also of God Himself (compare Wordsworth, “Ode:
Intimations of Immortality” [1802–1804], lines 141–42). Just as
Blake’s miniature poetic version of theodicy consists entirely of
such prying questions as “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”
(“The Tyger” [1794], line 20), so Dickinson’s in-process poems of
unfrozen-in-amber theodicy denote for the ongoing age of Darwin
the inquisitive gambit of this well-tempered but go-ahead kind of
interdisciplined imagination.16
To be sure, such a fellow-poet of Dickinson’s as her contempo-
rary Tennyson also grappled with the faith-challenge posed by the
convergence of geology and evolutionary biology. Nevertheless,
84 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

notwithstanding her high regard for the laureate’s musical ear (Gravil
“Emily”), Dickinson would undoubtedly have found complacent
the all too systematically religious accounting for physical and moral
evil in certain passages of In Memoriam (1850). For instance, where
the opening lines address “Strong Son of God, immortal Love” and
declare that somehow not for worse but for better “Thou madest
Life in man and brute” (lines 1, 6), Tennyson responds, in effect, to
Blake’s cheeky query, doing so from the outset on willful grounds of
willed orthodoxy. It is almost as though theodicy-after-Darwin would
appear necessarily formulaic, pious, and closed-off, and perhaps even
tossed-off, intellectually dishonest, and artistically unsubtle. Of course,
authors long before Darwin and as otherwise various as the writer
of the Book of Job (450 BCE?) and Milton in Paradise Lost (1674)
wrought well their theologically well-worked-out but satisfyingly
complex and imaginatively cogent explanations of suffering. Still, as
her poetic strategy in the face of natural selection suggests, Dickinson
left her theodicean’s task deliberately uncompleted, making a virtue
out of the necessity of excelling at the questioning form, as opposed to
the answering content, of this literary as well as theological subgenre.
Dickinson defined the problem of suffering not by seeking religious
solutions in glib systems but, shades of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, by
hurling open-ended and near-blasphemous interrogatives at the God
not so much of orthodoxy, whether Calvinist or other, as of nature
in the rawness of its violence. Thus leaning away from closure, she
became the poetic experimenter par excellence, some of whose most
tough-minded lyrics alternately embodied the only remaining possi-
bility of, and toyed with the oddly liberating impossibility of, justify-
ing the ways of God to humankind.
According to Patrick J. Keane, on whose recent study of Dickinson’s
reimagined theodicy this discussion aims to build, the signature poem
of her perspective on “divine design and the problem of suffering”
appears “less hopeful than many readers . . . would seem to prefer”
(Keane Emily 30):
Apparently with no surprise -
To any happy Flower
The Frost beheads it at it’s play -
In accidental power -
The blonde Assassin passes on -
The Sun proceeds unmoved
To measure off another Day
For an Approving God -
(Fr1668)
 Guiding Experiment 85

The poem resists “any facile conception of either a painless natural the-
ology or a providential Design” (Keane Emily 130). “By the breath of
God,” Job declares, “frost is given” (37:10); thus, if Dickinson thinks
of the luminously beautiful “blonde Assassin” as divine in origin, she
nonetheless takes a dim view of the frost-God as pale rider, ash blonde,
“an agent of the destruction of beauty” (Keane Emily 129, 140). The
speaker of the poem remains appalled that God would wish, or will,
such waste.17 Whereas Jesus’s theodicy interprets a grain of wheat in
the ground as a metaphor for earthly death that leads to heavenly fruit
(John 12:24), Dickinson’s bid can find no such divine purpose in the
literal, natural death of “any happy Flower.” “By making the symbolic
‘victim’ of violence floral rather than human” (Keane Emily 28), she
takes a cosmic view. She rejected such human-centered theodicy as
that people can suffer (a) when they abuse the divine gift of free will or
(b) as part of God’s omelet-creating but egg-breaking plan of ultimate
redemption. The 53 pages given over to this 36-word lyric constitute
Keane’s thick description of how Dickinson attempts in good faith,
yet fails at, and then disdains, theodicy full blown.
“Apparently with no surprise - ” sarcastically gives up on God and tri-
umphantly spurns Him without either denying that He existed, at least
in the past, or waiving the right to speak with Him again. Keane’s close
reading brings Dickinson’s word accidental from the root-theological
connotation of fortunate fall, ad-cadere, to fall, to the fast-developing
nineteenth-century meaning of randomness, chance (Keane Emily
121). One thinks of Emerson’s near-dismissal of his son Waldo’s death
as “caducous” (“Experience” [1844]) and of the “Crass Casualty” in
Hardy’s “Hap” (1866; line 11). Dickinson’s poetry would appear to
include more of Blake’s “dull round” or of Stevens’s “malady of the
quotidian” than of any coherent plan, “genuine dialectical change,” or
“Kantian or Darwinian purposiveness without purpose” (Keane Emily
140). One may add Keane’s sharp detail to Richard Gravil’s argument
(Dialogues) that Dickinson’s relation to her high- to late-Romantic
precursors and contemporaries remains more dialogical than subver-
sive (for Dickinson’s relation to these Romantics as more subversive
than dialogical, see Diehl Dickinson; Homans).
With further regard to how Dickinson’s unrealized desire to
reach the elusive goal of theodicy relates to her position on the
arc from Romantic to Modern, she keens a Romantic-era song of
suffering perhaps not as secularized as, but even grimmer than,
Wordsworth’s theodicy. Of course, Dickinson twice alluded (L315,
L394) to Wordsworth’s “Elegiac Stanzas” (1807), and she acquired
her own Wordsworth-like “poetic realization of the inevitability
86 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

and universality of loss and suffering mingled with hope” (Keane

Emily 190). Still, the stubbornness of her questioning, as distinct
from any pre-Darwin theodicean’s insouciant solution, marks her late
Romanticism as less hopeful, more tragic, than Wordsworth’s dark-
est songs of suffering.18 Darwin, for his part, could not share the
benign theism of Wordsworth’s Excursion (1814), in which “darts of
anguish” “fix not” in the Wanderer’s flesh (The Excursion 4:12–22;
Wordsworth’s emphasis; see Keane Emily 183–90).19 Neither could
Dickinson, for, in “There’s a certain Slant of light - ,” “Heavenly
Hurt” wounds her persona deeply, permanently:

We can find no scar,

But internal difference -
Where the Meanings, are -
(Fr320, lines 5–8)

Dickinson parted company, in effect, with the Wanderer’s bland sto-

icism, doing so, paradoxically, on somewhat Calvinist grounds.
Although the “Romantic crisis” is “the dichotomy between the
world of scientific laws—cold, indifferent to human values—and
man’s inner world” (Milosz 94), Dickinson’s perspective on suf-
fering as a variety of religious experience craves at least a rearguard
“defense of divine holiness and justice in respect to the existence of
evil” (see the definition of theodicy in the OED). At the same time that
Dickinson sings “the dark under-song of Romanticism,” laments “the
cleavage between the human and the natural” (Keane Emily 125),
the sundering of the human and the divine makes her Romanticism
three-dimensional. Her poetic effort to complete theodicy for her
time corresponds to various works by Wordsworth, Emerson et al.,
but can contain more theological rigor than their only theodicy-like
substitution of hope-without-an-object for God (compare Coleridge,
“Work without Hope” [1825], line 14). Whereas Wordsworth huffs
and puffs, “I must think, do all I can,” that “there was pleasure”
in the flower (“Lines Written in Early Spring” [1798], lines 11–12),
Dickinson grows sure, witness her “Apparently with no surprise - ,”
that, pace Wordsworth, not “every flower / Enjoys the air it breathes”
(“Early Spring,” lines 19–20). Unlike Wordsworth’s “poetic faith”
(Coleridge’s phrase), which for all Wordsworth’s pre-Excursion genius
could be complacent in its less theistic than pantheistic moorings,
Dickinson’s could wonder in a traditional vein of theological ques-
tioning whether this was the best of all possible created worlds, the
worst of all possible godless universes, or, somehow, both.
 Guiding Experiment 87

In one sense, Dickinson agreed with Thomas Jefferson’s charac-

terization of the early-nineteenth-century God of Calvinism as noth-
ing more than “a daemon of malignant spirit” (qtd. in Charles Taylor
804n59). In this sense, she joined Shelley’s attack on this God (see
Queen Mab [1813]). As she confronted her tormentor God, she became
less thankful or inspired, and more “dismayed or denunciatory” (Keane
Emily 40). On the other hand, she scarcely embraced Jefferson’s con-
clusion that “it would be more pardonable to believe in no God at all”
than to acknowledge the existence of the malignant daemon (qtd. in
Charles Taylor 804n59). The discarded, dead, or even deadening God
who haunts Dickinson’s art is the inscrutable Calvinist Deity whom she
“alternately believed in, questioned, quarreled with, rebelled against,
caricatured, even condemned, but never ceased to engage” (Keane
Emily 36). If Dickinson could not quite credit this God, she nonethe-
less brought her case before Him, and appealed to His nobler nature.
Equally like Job, she also brought her case against Him:

“Heavenly Father” - take to thee

The supreme iniquity
Fashioned by thy candid Hand
In a moment contraband -
Though to trust us - seem to us
More respectful - “We are Dust” -
We apologize to thee
For thine own Duplicity -
(Fr1500)

Such bold, if not wickedly irreverent, poems as “‘Heavenly Father’ -

take to thee” (the deflating quotation marks here are heavily ironic)
turn back on God His prejudgment of human beings as guilt-ridden
dust (Gen. 3:19), worms (Job 25:2–6), and embodiments of sin, of
depravity (Exod. 20:5).20
Dickinson’s reply to Paul’s rhetorical question “If God be for
us, who can be against us?” (Rom. 8:31) is saucy, bitter: “but when
he is against us, other allies are useless—” (L746).21 According to
Paul’s theodicy, “the whole creation” has been groaning “until now”
(Rom. 8:22); such divine delivery from suffering, however, failed to
assuage Dickinson. Keane sums up flatly: “Dickinson’s omnipresent
deity is personal, though more likely to be an antagonist than a friend,
exercising his power unpredictably and often cruelly” (Emily 74).
Dickinson’s Calvinist God was more inscrutable than personal. As far
as Dickinson was concerned, except perhaps in some poems, where
her deity appears more Arminian, more free will-granting, loving, and
88 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

joy-inspiring, than Calvinist—that is, predestinarian, forbidding, and

dour—and hence more friendly than antagonistic, God stays so far
from solving suffering as to constitute the problem (compare Brantley
Experience 19–20, 162–63, 197–98).
Dickinson’s sympathetic portrait of Jesus as fellow-sufferer came as
close to finished theodicy as she ever got, but, from her late-Romantic
vantage point, she could depict no smug extreme of theological clo-
sure, perhaps even in her Christological reflection. “To be human,”
she writes, “is more than to be divine, for when Christ was divine, he
was uncontented till he had been human” (L519). Thus she admits
that Jesus existed “before Abraham was” (John 5:58), but she honors
his flesh and blood, and, since her Jesus is no longer God, his suffer-
ing complicates, renders futile, the religious approach to the problem.
Dickinson’s Jesus echoes Schopenhauer’s, also the emblem of suffer-
ing humanity, and parallels Nietzsche’s crucified Christ (this Christ,
Nietzsche says, is the only true Christian [compare Keane Emily 93]).
Dickinson reasons that the exclusively human Jesus’s agony speaks
well for him, for, as the spiritual song has it,

Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen,

Nobody knows but Jesus,

and his passion, from pateo, patēre, to endure, has appealed to the suf-
fering ages. In Dickinson’s view, however, Jesus’s sorrow yielded no
satisfying solution to the theodicean’s dilemma, for “the resurrection
was to Dickinson testimony of the humanity of Jesus,” and “Christ’s
suffering and death registered,” with her, “more powerfully than the
resurrection” (Keane Emily 93).22 As the poet proclaims, in just 11 of
her breakthrough words,

‘Twas Christ’s own personal Expanse

That bore him from the Tomb -
(Fr1573, lines 3–4; emphasis added)

—that is, Jesus is remembered not for his agency of God’s salvation
but because so courageously did he live in danger that he came out
on the other side of it, as in ex-perior, to go through danger. Thus,
the extravagant claim of Jesus as God, and the modest concept of
him as God’s surrogate, alike flunk the scientific test of Dickinson
the empirical poet, for she “raises a possibility never dreamed of”
before (Keane Emily 36–37) even by liberal theologian Henry Ward
 Guiding Experiment 89

Beecher—namely, that “Darwin had thrown ‘the Redeemer’ away”

(Dickinson’s words that bear repeating in this chapter [L750]).
For Darwin and Dickinson alike, the game of cat and mouse imaged
truth, however bald and cold and with whatever character, whether
natural or divine. Consider Darwin’s 1860 letter to his friend and
fellow-scientist Asa Gray, for whom evolutionary biology and intel-
ligent design stayed somehow commensurate:

I had no intention [Darwin discloses] of writing atheistically. But I

own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to
do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems
to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that
a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the
Ichneumonidae [assassination wasps] with the express intention of their
[larva] feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat
should play with mice. (Darwin 2:105)23

For her part in this mid-nineteenth-century dialogue between science

and religion, the Huxley/Wilberforce shades of which have come
down to cloud this very day, Dickinson also signaled her acknowl-
edgment of, and horror at, cat-and-mouse cruelty, what Tennyson
called “Nature, red in tooth and claw / With ravine” (In Memoriam
15:15–16).

The cat [Dickinson writes] reprieves the mouse

She eases from her teeth
Just long enough for Hope to teaze -
Then mashes it to death -
(Fr485, lines 5–8)

Like scientist, like poet, the cat-and-mouse, state-of-the-art-biological,

God-of-Calvin-dominated model of existence demanded the theod-
icean’s inquiry.24 As Keane observes of Dickinson’s stance, she, like
Ivan Karamazov, “was no atheist but a challenger who, in her own
oblique way, never ceased asking the same questions: Why does evil
strike so meaninglessly? Why do the innocent suffer? How can a pur-
portedly omnipotent and loving God approve of such an apparently
random, brutally violent process?” (Emily 72). Just as no “divine reso-
lution,” in the otherwise devout Dostoyevsky’s judgment, can justify
“the tears of a single tortured child” (Keane Emily 72), so answers can,
and should, elude the faith-attracted, yet always thinking, Dickinson’s
persistent interrogations.
90 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

Suffering is well and simply clarified as the fallout of natural selec-

tion, and therefore need not represent a mystery to be explored in
relation to God’s ways with, or tender mercies toward, humankind.
The empirical voice within Dickinson’s protean range of personae,
however, plumbs a residual form of theodicy, a term coined by
Leibniz, in 1710, to label the time-honored, difficult fascination of
suffering/faith settlement. Just as Darwin yearned for such under-
standing, so Dickinson struggled toward it, staying as far as pos-
sible from any slick-but-superficial outcome of a Dr. Pangloss, and
abjuring the unearned result of any easy victory.25 Far from throw-
ing up her hands and taking refuge in agnosticism as Darwin did,
Dickinson neither let God off the hook nor let Him up off the mat,
for with “Wrestling Jacob,” to evoke here one of Charles Wesley’s
most highly regarded hymns (see Brantley “Charles”), she vowed,
“I will not let thee go except thou bless me” (Gen. 32:26).26 Her
quarrel with God was based on her acceptance of Darwin’s science
but also paralleled Melville’s quarrel (see Thompson; T. Walter
Herbert, Jr.) and harked back to Job’s in Job 14, 19. Of course, her
impassioned as well as intelligent stab at the all but God-denying
problem of physical and moral evil arose from the “upheaval” of
her near-philosophical as well as scientifically grounded “thought”
(compare Nussbaum). Still, her theodicean’s initiative dwelled more
in the theological realm than on the cusp of evolutionary biology.
Even her scientific investigation found more faith in honest doubt
than in half the creeds.
Dickinson’s challenge of God never received an answer, either
directly, in the form of theophany (as in Job 29–31), or indirectly
through the vatic, self-apotheosizing voice of Romanticism: contrast
the alternating of divine authority in Paradise Lost to Milton’s own
godlike utterance throughout his sometimes proto-Romantic epic.
Thus, although Dickinson’s inability to finish theodicy, her Bartleby-
like preference not to do so, bears religious overtones, even her con-
text of the Book of Job can appear scarcely comedic, however large a
role the Bible plays in the origin of comedy. Even the religious quality
of her theodicean’s impulse is tragic enough to imply a godless uni-
verse. Although her pessimism can anticipate Yeats’s “Gaiety” that
“transfigures all that dread,” all that gloom (compare “Lapis Lazuli”
[1936], line 7), she resisted any view that “poetic faith” can be advan-
tageously untroubled. By analogy, by what Keane calls “mutual illu-
mination” (3) as well as through direct influence from the works of
others to hers, and vice versa, the theodicy-like aspect of her poetry
describes a near-tragic arc of Anglo-American Romanticism.
 Guiding Experiment 91

Because Darwin’s science called Dickinson’s religious frame of ref-

erence into doubt, her theodicean’s imperative can feel rather less
full-throated than that of the equally brainy, yet less Darwin-haunted,
Hopkins (see the latter’s Wreck of the Deutschland [1875] and his
“terrible sonnets”—that is, his divine-terror-filled, divine-terror-
inducing poetic sequence [1885–1889]). Dickinson’s suffering-
themed poetry of emotionally cerebral God-talk, however, looks
forward. It yet grabs those for whom shoring fragments against their
ruin remains their first-aid means of survival. “Better an ignis fatuus,”
she tells them, “Than no illume at all - ” (Fr1581, lines 8–9), but,
she would also say, better still to brave the bald, cold truth that holds
(compare Fr341, line 9; for the immediate nineteenth-century recog-
nition of the materialism and atheism inherent in evolutionary biol-
ogy, see Kirkby “‘[W]e thought’” 13–17).
It is not necessarily that Dickinson’s philosophical and scientific
perspective on theodicy, and hence her reservations about this ven-
erable form of theological disquisition, to the point of abandoning
it, means that she is not, after all, in any central sense a religious
poet. For her, on the contrary, “Faith is Doubt” (L912; Dickinson’s
emphasis), and, in an accordingly counterintuitive manner, the con-
structive skepticism of her controversy with God kept Him as hearer
of something like her prayer.27 Would she have agreed with Harold
Bloom’s harsh stricture against anyone who indulges in theodicy
(Bloom regards theodicy here as excessively, hubristically, intellectu-
alized luxury)?

Theodicy [Bloom writes] is a mug’s [a seemingly sophisticated but

actually naïve or easily deceived person’s] game: no humane individual
could bear to justify God’s ways to man. Nazi death camps, schizo-
phrenia, cancer do not yield to ideologues who assert they speak for
God. In old age, I rebel against moral idiocy. Job, rejecting his horrible
comforters, speaks to and for me until the Voice out of the Whirlwind
(“storm” in the Hebrew) silences him in shocked awe at the audacity of
the Creation; after that I go back to his superbly laconic wife: “Curse
God and die.” (Shadow 199–200)

That is to place anyone immersed in the theodicean’s pursuit, fas-

cinated by the theodicean’s heritage, from Habakkuk, Jeremiah,
and Job, through Jesus and Paul, to Milton, Blake, Coleridge, and
Tennyson, under a rather dark cloud of suspicion.28 Dickinson, how-
ever, would have agreed with Bloom to some extent. She, too, would
have denounced self-satisfied justification of God’s ways. No more
than Bloom, however, would she ever, even for a moment, have found
92 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

such complacency in this Job- and Milton-proud tradition at its skill-

fully aesthetic best.
Perhaps Dickinson’s prayer, as unanswered, entailed her hope for the
unforced force of a better dialogue in heaven, where never is heard the
command to stop in the name of the law. Perhaps her “Flood subject”
of “Immortality” (L319) was not so much about pie in the sky as about
her coming day in God’s court of justice, where she would be less a
criminal in the dock than a plaintiff expecting an award of heavy dam-
ages. “Then call, and I will answer; or let me speak, and do thou reply
to me,” Job pleads, as he imagines talking to God in an afterlife (Job
13:22). The result of such an exchange, for Dickinson, would be “Some
new Equation, given - ” by God (Fr403, line 11) to satisfy “Man that is
born of a woman” (Job 14:1)—that is, everyone—with why the unjust
and the just alike must endure affliction on this earth. Who knows, for
no traveler has ever returned from that bourn, but her hope of explana-
tion and of judgment in favor of her and of her select society of fellow-
petitioners might, just might, have proved adequate to keep this failed
theodicean at her present time a vindicated one in prospect.
Did Dickinson’s desire for conversation with God grow from Royal
Society as well as from Methodist Society roots? Did the “double
consciousness” that led Darwin to make an “ideal argument held in
his own mind” (Barrett 90) parallel Dickinson’s model of produc-
tive, philosophical, and scientific as well as religious, dialogue? As
Gillian Beer writes, “Darwin’s reading is always a process of conver-
sation, marked by ripostes scribbled on the page as well as rumina-
tive notes recorded alongside. And beyond that, he engages in active
silent dialogue in which the reader slides into the place of the writer
and yet presses back into his or her own person too” (180; emphasis
added). Thus, especially for Dickinson the theodicean, the sight of
the face is sufficient, yet not necessary, for communion. Her verbal,
inscribed masks do not belie, deny, or militate against, but, rather,
enact engagement with, verbal, printed personae, of which the one in
On the Origin of Species (1859) is prominent indeed. The combination
of her speakers with such others represents a transcultural moment of
her select society of partners in philosophical and scientific (as well as
religious) dialogue about the problem of suffering (as about almost
any other topic of conversation one can conceive of).

* * *

To recapitulate part I, at some length, although Dickinson’s personae

can range from Jesus-loving hopers through no-hopers to near-nihilists,
 Guiding Experiment 93

many breathe philosophy and project science. These can sound watch-
ful rather than self-contained, reflective instead of self-satisfied, reli-
able different from predictable, inductive athwart deductive, and
open-minded not abstract. They may search for the historical Jesus as
“the light,” but they “see the light” shed by sense perception on what
to think and on how to live. To borrow a phrase from Wordsworth,
in a not-so-different context, and to apply it to Dickinson’s personae
in this framework, their “master light” of all their seeing is rational
empiricism (compare “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” line 154).
Imagination, reason in conjunction with the senses, underlies her art
of knowledge.
To be sure, as Patrick J. Keane argues in another book of his (com-
paring Wordsworth and Emerson), Wordsworth’s “master light of
all our seeing” can equate to the “intuitive reason” that Kant con-
strued as the distinguishing faculty of mind. Kant, after all, buzzed
in English-speaking circles of art, from the dawn of the nineteenth
century to the fin de siècle and after. Wordsworth’s boon companion
Coleridge and University of Vermont president James Marsh imported
German idealism into their respective countries as though with a long-
run view to the idealistic pragmatism of John Dewey.29 Nevertheless,
the signature metaphor of Wordsworth’s epistemology, “the master
light,” can move away from “intuitive reason,” and back onto the
experiential common ground of the British Enlightenment, in the first
instance, and Anglo-American “sense,” English-language seeing, in
the next. His “master light” derives not as much from his “shadowy
recollections” as from his “first affections” (“Ode,” lines 150–51).
Does his “master light,” as sense-based reason, even signal continuity
between Locke the progenitor of the British Enlightenment and such
late-Romantic duumvirates of Anglo-American literature as Carlyle
and Emerson (compare Brantley Coordinates) and as Tennyson and
Emerson (compare Brantley Anglo-American)?30 If so, then, for rea-
sons of British more than German philosophy, Dickinson absorbs into
her American identity Emerson’s “tide of being, which floats us into
the secret of nature,” until “the advancing soul has built and forged
for itself a new condition, and the question and the answer are one”
(“The Over-soul” [1841] qtd. in Murphy 1:918). The enlightened
Romanticism of England and the United States arced to her latter-
day but not belated version of faith in experience and sufficed for her
knowing much.
Dickinson enters into, possesses, reinvigorates, and imparts her
naturalized, naturalizing British heritage of philosophy. Whenever she
gives priority to this homegrown as well as cross-pond empiricism,
94 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

she seeks equilibrium between thick substance and broad appeal. By

teaching Americans, in particular, not to sell their birthright of tough
mind, she makes pilgrims of experiment. Apart from her “Flood sub-
ject” of “Immortality” (does she paradoxically find even immortality
at hand, on earth, where “Paradise is of the option” [L319]?), she
sojourns in Wordsworth’s

world
Of all of us,—the place where in the end
We find our happiness, or not at all!
(The Prelude [1850] 11:140–42)

When she acknowledges that “Philosophy, dont know,” whether or

not “[a] Species stands beyond - ,” she not-so-simply means that phi-
losophy is not yet, but someday might be, certain that heaven is as real
as, say, evolutionary biology (Fr373, lines 2, 6). Above all, though,
these lines signify that philosophy should avoid the besetting sin of
knowingness. Empirical epistemology can do no better than “see
through a glass, darkly,” an afterlife like the life Dickinson knows she
loves in the here and now, whatever glibness she hears may be true or
untrue of some putative world elsewhere (compare I Cor. 13:12).
Dickinson the empiricist remains sure of only one aspect of her
flood subject. “Earth is Heaven - / Whether Heaven is Heaven or not”
(Fr1435, lines 1–2). Although her personae hunger for that world
elsewhere, they sustain wonder at this world. They sharpen and add
to what they know by interrogating how they know it, as Wordsworth
does, through constructively skeptical, “obstinate questionings / Of
sense and outward things.” To the extent that the poet calls even sense
into question, she allows for an afterlife, though unseen. Because she
mainly questions by means of sense, however, she doubts that she ever
will “stand beyond” this life. Dickinson the empiricist does not cling
to the self-centered goal of eternal life (one thinks here of those colos-
sally egomaniacal pyramids of the pharaohs) but progresses on earth,
without dubious “intimations of immortality.”
In the spirit of Matthew Arnold’s willingness to change his mind on
occasion, the Dickinson phase of this series on Romantic Anglo-America
has, in this second installment of it (compare Brantley Experience),
devoted separate analysis to her search for knowledge through sense
perception. From the series’ usual combination of empirical philoso-
phy and evangelical faith, part I of this volume has stepped back, to
focus on her empirical milieu, temperament, and expression. Her faith
in experience so religiously follows the rational highroad of her senses
 Guiding Experiment 95

into a clearing of secular epiphanies that her empirical voice deserves

as reverent a hearing as her new-evangelical song. She leans away from
the Calvinist, Puritan, predestinarian, and antiexperience thesis of
Anglo-American evangelism, and toward its Arminian, Wesleyan, free
will, and pro-experience antithesis, for even Presbyterian Wadsworth
tilts like this. Her experience of faith as indicated by her hermeneu-
tic circle—“understand in order to believe; believe in order to under-
stand” (Ricoeur 27)—is a disciplined, muted assessment of Jesus, and
a sense-tested, clear-eyed measurement of God. Insofar as her rational
empiricism overrules the nonrational witness that she intermittently but
memorably registers, Locke’s reasonable Christianity wins out during
the long years of her thought.31 The philosophical and scientific mani-
festation of her poetic genius harks back, across time and the Atlantic,
to renew Locke’s temporal kind of externalized seeing as a more than
adequate substitute for the inward light of intuition and of the soul.
If the sense-based means of epistemology, the sense-driven method of
science, can serve the spiritual sense on the common ground of expe-
rience, and if Dickinson’s empirical voice can lend credibility to the
sometime summons of her faith, then that voice can also terminate that
call, replace that art of belief.
Dickinson generates mystery from, finds joy in, her evangelical
empiricism (compare the history of joy [Potkay]). She recommends
observation and reflection as the bifold means to “all / Ye know on
earth” and, even more forcefully, “all ye need to know” (compare
Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” [1819], lines 49–50). Besides adding
a religious dimension to empiricism, as though suggesting that faith
in “the world / Of all of us” analogizes to, overlaps with, strength-
ens, and blends with faith in a world to come, her poems can feel
evangelical about empiricism. For instance, her unattenuated awe of
Locke-inspired scientific method entails her bipartite, near-explicit
imperative, Trust in Experiment! Test Religion! Thus, if her spiritual
sense aspires to otherworldly faith, it does so guardedly. If her sense-
based reason qualifies as empirical procedure or even as scientific
method, it does so rigorously, with expectation of result. Finally, if this
dynamic of her creativity coexists with the hymn-form and -content
of her nostalgia for, and reenactment of, evangelical life, her empirical
voice sings solo. The dominant sound of her art proves worthy of an
audition by itself, and not necessarily in two-part harmony with her
new-evangelical song.
Since Dickinson’s evangelical empiricism can yield imagination, per-
haps more than the other way round, her poetic incarnation of truth
reconstitutes simple ideas and ideas of sensation, and also not unlike
96 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

Locke’s philosophy, her art can make way for ideals. Precisely because
of her touching capacity for childlike belief, guileless enchantment,
she can trace her pedigree of cerebral engagement to a no-nonsense,
flexible tradition that her words can incarnate, can give back. Her
empirical voice thus becomes as important to historical, interdisciplin-
ary criticism of her works as her religious concerns have been hitherto.
This poet regards grounding in the senses as the most indigenous,
appropriate, and authoritative corrective of any of the most subjective,
intuitive, or fanatical extremes to be found among even her otherwise
most cherished traditions of faith. To add literary history to the his-
tory of ideas, her late-Romantic hope boards the ark back and forth
across the Atlantic to the British Enlightenment and its liberating
standard of imagining as well as of knowing all things. Accordingly,
although she can espouse tender-mindedness, her rational empiricists
proceed from their wise and well-earned optimism to their anything
but foolish disinclination to believe any longer in six impossible things
before breakfast. Through the Locke-like aspect of Wesley’s and of
Wadsworth’s experiences of faith, Dickinson’s works describe the arc
from An Essay Concerning Human Understanding to the almost sci-
entific tough-mindedness of Anglo-American Romanticism, as dis-
tinct from its voice of idealism.
The late-Romantic imagination of Emily Dickinson draws on
Locke’s Essay as much by way of the “natural methodism” in Romantic
Anglo-America as by means of the more empirically methodical than
hard-shell Methodist ingredient of the transatlantic revival. No lon-
ger thinking of methodism as capitalized, one can redefine natural
methodism not as a religious concept but as empiricism practiced with
religious fervor. Dickinson derives from les bonnes lettres and from les
belles lettres of England and the United States an empirical voice all the
more distinctive for its evangelical inflection, even as that voice is also
all the more satisfying for its Romantic-era modulation.
Sense-based reason and scientific method of a neoclassic as well as
Romantic stripe kept the head of the Myth of Amherst on straight. Her
avoidance of abstracted, self-administering excess meant that her ratio-
nal empiricism shaded into passion and attachment. Like Wordsworth
and company, and like Locke, Wesley, Wadsworth, Darwin et al., she
schooled her mind in ideas of sensation and developed knowledge
and definitions based on keen, sophisticated observation. Far from
positioning the mind elsewhere, her empirical imaginings thus real-
ized scientific findings.
Through the fundamentals of the Industrial Revolution, the saga of
geology, the arcana of astronomy, the basics of physic, and the shock
 Guiding Experiment 97

of Darwin’s science, in particular, Dickinson nurtured joyful wisdom.

She understood that vitality can be economic, that change must be
as temporal and spatial as moral and spiritual, that cosmic sublimity
whispers oblivion (but what a way to go), that hope for well-being
can survive well-founded, that struggle of species reinforces “the one
Life within us and abroad” (compare Coleridge, “The Aeolian Harp”
[1796], line 26). Whether at a reach “farther than the Stars” or on the
“dull round” of the celestial mill, or whether paradoxically embracing
both stances toward astronomy at once, the living, breathing truths of
empiricism, on the one hand, and its bald, cold truth, on the other, all
carried over to the poet.32 From the philosophical and scientific as well
as religious and literary perspective of Anglo-America, and hence with
the exalted humility and imaginative verve of empiricism and of evo-
lutionary biology alike, Emily Dickinson beheld the world steady and
whole, and what mystery yet pervades the deep well of her truth!
Dickinson might well have distilled the argument of this book
something like this (her words): “Common Sense is almost as omni-
scient as God” (L922). This prose fragment, number 68 of 124, plays
on the Scottish Common Sense School on father Edward’s shelves
but alludes, by way of Anglo-American lettres bonnes and belles, to
Locke’s primal senses. On the one hand, this signature aphorism of
her proverbial mode boasts superhuman depth and breadth of ref-
erence. As Keats writes, in something of a cocky Cockney manner:
“Knowledge enormous makes a God of me” (Hyperion: A Fragment
[1817] 3:117). On the other hand, Dickinson’s miniature prose
manifesto of her poet’s empirical voice implies that recognition and
understanding emerge slowly but surely from the procedure of the
laboratory. As Dickinson also writes, and also in prose (albeit poeti-
cally, metaphorically), “truth like Ancestors’ Brocades can stand
alone—” (L368), which says, inter alia, that whether or not love can
match death, wisdom can grow sturdy on experience.
Like Wordsworth, Dickinson visualizes the “light that never was,
on sea or land” (she twice alludes to these words of his) but “see[s]
into the life of things” (she makes this predicate of his her own).33
Her outward experience does not just balance but checks her inner
life. The empirical tone of her letters and poems overrides their reli-
gious overtone. Dickinson the empiricist, as distinct from the lega-
tee of her evangelical heritage, oscillates between exaltation of mind
over matter, and the humility of matter over mind.34 Thus her Anglo-
American grounding explains the rich strangeness of her sense percep-
tion. Dickinson’s philosophical and scientific underpinnings make her
art broad and nuanced alike.
98 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

If the ideal, tender character of British and American Methodism

and of America’s First and Second Great Awakenings could cushion
the soul and heart of the Myth of Amherst, then the tough, sensate
element of this binational religious movement could also stiffen her
mind. The thick substance of her imagination can traffic with a spiri-
tual sense not merely analogous to the physical senses but conspic-
uously arrayed with them on the natural to spiritual continuum of
experience. Dickinson’s writings can vibrate with Locke’s Essay, as
this influential masterpiece of British empiricism remains undistorted,
though retrospectively colored, by the sense-oriented component and
the spiritual-witness emphasis of the transatlantic revival.
Dickinson’s words can compare to “the subtler language” of
the Romantics, as well as to the perhaps less subtle, yet no less tell-
ing, words of Locke, Wesley, Wadsworth, and Darwin (compare
Wasserman Subtler). That is, belles lettres, too, upholds the integrity,
and underwrites the efficacy, of sense-based reason and the scientific
method alike. The “natural methodism” of Romantic Anglo-America,
Wordsworth’s “language of the sense,” contributes the secular
authority of the creative imagination to Wesley’s sanction of empirical
tradition, thereby clearing a field for Dickinson’s “naturalized imagi-
nation,” her confidence in experience as test of fidelity, to take root
(compare “Tintern Abbey,” line 108; recall Stillinger’s phrase).
Of course, the need to distinguish between empiricism as an epis-
temological philosophy and simple keen observation as a poetic meth-
odology can scarcely be greater than in the case of Emily Dickinson’s
modus operandi/vivendi. Still, since the words of Locke can bond
with Anglo-American Romanticism, as well as bind to transatlantic
revivalism, she can sing the senses electric without ever losing (say
rather, scarcely ever losing) her status as a proper aesthete. Dickinson’s
empirical voice can call on “the better angels of our nature” to pre-
serve our birthright of salutary realism.
To emphasize the words “Philosophy” and “Science” in the subti-
tle of this book—“Poetry” will occupy front and center in part II—here,
conclusively, is how a more empirical than evangelical strain can run
the gamut from Locke to Dickinson. Since Wesley’s Essay-inspired
expression of spiritual experience can leave room for natural experi-
ence to ascend in Wadsworth’s British background, the experiential
ground of philosophy and faith underlies Dickinson’s transatlantic
givens, too. Whether or not her poems, regularly included in her
correspondence, influenced Wadsworth’s sermons, which she read,
his sermons can figure as the most immediate “preceptors” of her
“independent study” in empiricism. Consistent with the twofold fact
 Guiding Experiment 99

that Locke, like Wesley and Wadsworth, was widely known, and that
Wesley and Wadsworth, like Locke, were philosophical, this intel-
lectual and social as well as literary history casts empirical rational-
ism in the starring role of her philosophical drama, shedding its light
on her experiential aesthetic. Thus, regardless of where England and
the United States can stand philosophically now, late-seventeenth- to
mid-nineteenth-century empiricism can register in her art in Amherst.
Dickinson’s practical philosophy, in turn, logically comes down to
her sense of laboratory discovery, no less binationally sanctioned and,
above all, Darwin-informed, or, to put it more generally and less his-
torically, her outlook does not shade, but shades into, the truth of
nurture over nature.
At the risk of too many intellectual and mid- to high-cultural
contexts, then, yet in the hope of just enough, the first half of this
book has sought to broaden out fully from Dickinson’s Homestead.
Although criticism has often favored local and biographical atmo-
sphere (Wadsworth, too, breathes there), she radiates from her vil-
lage to the globe, and from her present to the past and future. Thus,
cultural poetics have sought to illuminate how her empirical leanings
turned her inner philosopher into her inner scientist. An aestheti-
cally alert as well as sociologically ramifying combination of empirical
method with Methodist discipline (a pun on the binary opposition is
earnestly hereby intended) affects her writing. A philosophically and
scientifically up-to-date strain of belles lettres exerts an equal impact
on her web-like connections with transatlantic authors. The arc from
Locke’s Essay to Wesley’s and Wadsworth’s prose to Anglo-American
Romanticism to her empirical values hums with science and, serving
to differentiate between her art of knowledge and her art of belief,
promises to reintegrate these antipodes of her late-Romantic imagina-
tion. Perhaps Emily Dickinson’s rich conversation can even pivot “the
world” to which she sent her “letter” (Fr519, line 1).
The fox and the hedgehog, finally, can join forces. Foxlike, Experience
and Faith: The Late-Romantic Imagination of Emily Dickinson ranged
over British and American terrain; like a hedgehog, moreover, the
book tried to home in, as well, on dialectics. Now, Emily Dickinson’s
Rich Conversation: Poetry, Philosophy, Science can skim the surface of
the subject, yet can also burrow, perhaps deeper than its companion
volume did before, into the empirical thesis. The sweep can remain,
insofar as this book has to this point, at least, succeeded in locating the
poet’s concerns on the philosophical and literary as well as scientific
curve from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century.35 As though “the
empirical/evangelical dialectic of Romantic Anglo-America” were too
100 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

big an idea, were too totalizing, for critical specificity, however, this
book has sought, above all, to modify the phrase by changing dialectic
to dialogue, to conversation, or to oscillation. It has concentrated on
empirical glosses that border on, yet do not strain to reconcile, evan-
gelical contexts. It has not intended to reach irritably after system,
program, project, or closure, yet has attempted to suggest that empiri-
cism “wins out,” however provisionally, in the exchange. Combining
equal measures of dynamic and salutary realism with her fine mental
chaos of contingent truths, Dickinson’s breadth and depth of thought
make her aesthetic minimalism into a major force to reckon with, a
great name to conjure with, in this and for all seasons.
In sum, “Retrospection is Prospect’s half - / Sometimes, almost
more - ” (Fr1014B, lines 7–8) can capture Dickinson’s counterin-
tuitive message of reminiscence that brings rebirth. Through a some-
times direct, yet more often indirect and rather complex, process of
cultural osmosis, her “retrospective” imagination can renew her liter-
ary, philosophical, and scientific heritage. Thus, just as her oeuvre can
reverberate from Amherst to London to Grasmere and back, so she
can turn milieu into timelessness. Dickinson’s empirical voice proves
richer for the bitter-sweetness of its would-be-evangelical inflection
and of its Romantic-era modulation alike. It remains for part II to
overhear whether or not, and if so, how, that voice can still resound in
her pre-Modern mode, her post-Modern intimations.
 Part II

E x te nd ing Ex pe rien c e
 Chapter 3

G aining L os s

“
E ven to write against something,” including whenever “some-
thing” turns out to be one’s very own position, “is to take one’s bear-
ings from it.” As an example of this variation on Denis Donoghue’s
useful insight into creativity (see his Third Voice 18), the difference
between Emily Dickinson’s poetry of experience (recall part I) and
the “post-experiential perspective” of her poems of “aftermath”
(for thorough discussion of this canon-within-the-canon, see Pollak
Anxiety 202ff.) is one of degree. Yes, “After great pain, a formal feel-
ing comes” (Fr372, line 1) goes from trauma to feigned emotion, but
does this line as well as the poem of which it serves as title also suggest
the re-form-ation, the salutary disciplining, of the however-much-
traumatized senses? Does the line hint of something positive not
so much in hardwired as in deep-structured-by-life emotion, hence
“a formal feeling,” as distinct from merely going through the motions
of emotion, hence a “formal feeling”? Some cockeyed optimist might,
just might, catch here the whisper of pretraumatic feeling now refined
or revised and extended as though happy days were here again, as
though Post-Experience, personified, could somehow, as in paradoxi-
cally, renew The Promise of Experience Past.
To be sure, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes” can mean
that the speaker grows numb. Nevertheless, these signature words of
Dickinson’s subcategory of postexperience can signify, too, that her
suffering does not preclude, does inspire and empower, her taut but
impassioned and explosive idiom of death-in-life come back to life, as
in “A wounded deer leaps highest” (Fr181, line 1). The Dickinson of
postexperience remains the poet of experience in that her language
of aftermath is act outperforming deeds, as in whenever Thomas
104 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

Jefferson’s words about equality outlive his slaveholding days. In

Dickinson’s outcries of seeming paralysis, yet real movement, little
or nothing is ever quite all said or done, if only because her saying
still lives, still breathes, as in “The smitten rock . . . gushes” or “The
trampled steel . . . springs” (Fr181, lines 5–6). It is as though, as far
as the Myth of Amherst is concerned, not anything is ever quite over
and done with, and certainly not her life that defeats quietus, as when
enlargement attends agony: “Power is only pain” (Fr312, line 10).
As counterintuitive as it all may sound, Dickinson’s “post-experiential
perspective” does not so much lull and suppress as preserve and spread
out experience. For one thing, her “great pain” lasts. For another,
though without fully reimagining her empirical voice of rich conversa-
tion about poetry, philosophy, and science, the Dickinson of aftermath
cleanses the doors of her perception, and so equals Blake in refresh-
ing the senses.1 Unfreezing effort, restoring expectation, replenish-
ing desire, and reopening dialogue with her selfhood, as well as with
her others living or dead, this Dickinson, too, honors the ranks of the
Romantics, who were distinguished for their “poetry of experience”
(see Langbaum Poetry). Although Dickinson’s “post-experiential per-
spective” scarcely anticipates the ebullience of a Theodore Roosevelt
or of a Rotary Club president or of any other kind of a cheerleader, her
poems of aftermath nonetheless struggle to salvage the troubled but
resilient faith-in-experience that Anglo-American Romanticism and
her art of knowledge alike so well profess. The Dickinson of postexpe-
rience especially rivals Keats—that is, she values process as “[her] own
and man’s chief good,” and, short of foreclosing actual/ideal oscil-
lation, regards any transcendental element of dialogical or dialectical
explanation as a false lure (recall Stillinger on Keats).
The pessimism of Dickinson’s aftermath not only prefigures poste-
verything post-Modernism but also balances with, and yields to, the
perennial remnant of traditional optimism. Of course, this pessimism
is prescient, for it forebodes the fin de siècle lassitude of Hardy’s
belated “gloom,” foreknowing that “Modernism’s . . . true name’s
Despair.”2 Still, this pessimism is also traditional, for it sharpens the
Romantics’ already-heightened foretaste of posttraumatic stress
disorder.3 The Dickinson of postexperience, without necessarily reliv-
ing the Romantics’ heart leaps of immediate joy, harks back to, and
intimates, Wordsworth’s own postexperience-sounding “hope that
can never die.”4 This Dickinson recounts the twofold experience of
holding despair at bay and of keeping hope-against-hope, though not
quite hope full blown, alive. Thus, to repeat her lines perhaps most
worth repeating of all her lines, just as “Retrospection is Prospect’s
 Gaining Loss 105

half - / Sometimes, almost more - ” (Fr1014B, lines 7–8), so her

late-Romantic imagination survives in, and survives, her pre-Modern
mode, for especially her poems of aftermath can look backward on
the arc from Romantic to Modern.5 Two prose fragments and two
letters can serve at the outset of this chapter to elaborate the thesis
of part II—namely, that however contradictory it might seem, even
Dickinson’s “post-experiential perspective” does not so much spurn as
detach itself from, and then test/(recapture?), the experiential vision
of Romantic Anglo-America.
“Did we not find (gain) as we lost,” Dickinson writes, “we should
make but a threadbare exhibition after a few years.”6 This drollery sug-
gests (a) that experience leaves us naked and delivers us to death and
(b) that gain and loss nonetheless work together for good to those who
still love life. “I ‘have gained a loss,’ or by the loss,” writes Byron in a
similar vein (Byron’s emphasis).7 Losing gain but gaining through loss,
Dickinson’s speakers of aftermath harbor scant illusion about, yet yearn
for, return of gain, and their latter-day-Blake version of “More! More!”
is the cry of “Man” and “Less than All cannot satisfy” ranks as experi-
ence more intense for being felt and uttered in postexperience (com-
pare Blake, There Is No Natural Religion [b] [1788], Principle V).
A second prose gloss also interprets Dickinson’s poems of after-
math as the coincidence, the serendipity, of loss and gain: “Tis a dan-
gerous moment for anyone [Dickinson writes] when the meaning
goes out of things and Life Stands straight—and punctual—and yet
no content(s) (signal) come(s). Yet such moments are. If we survive
them they expand us. If we do not, but that is Death, whose if is
everlasting.”8 The first two sentences acknowledge the devastation of
emptiness, and the second part of the fourth sentence suggests that
each loss scares us to death. Thus experience is ineffectual, violent.
The third sentence, however, speaks of hope-against-hope, and per-
haps even of hope-after-hope, though not quite of hope itself (her “if”
is big): “If we survive [dangerous moments] they expand us” parallels
Nietzsche’s “What does not kill us makes us stronger.”9 If survival
“expand[s] us,” if “the meaning of things” never entirely “goes out
of things,” then “post-experiential perspective” (is this phrase some-
thing of a misnomer, after all?) neither bids adieu to, nor curtails,
but entails and heralds, experience. Although aftermath might seem
closer to T. S. Eliot’s “hollow men” than to Wordsworth’s “Happy
Warrior,” “mighty Poets,” the Dickinson of postexperience nonethe-
less renews her lease on life and on imagination alike.10 Tipping the
balance between gain and loss in favor of regression from the former
to the latter, and of progression from the latter to the former, this
106 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

Dickinson takes a two-way street back to near-cancellation and forth

to reconfirmation of experience.
“Emerging from an Abyss, and reentering it—that is Life, is it not,
Dear?” asks Emily Dickinson of her “Sister Sue” (L1024). The pessi-
mistic aspect of this rhetorical question compares closely with Shelley’s
version of aftermath, his tragic vision of modern love:

When the lips have spoken,

Loved accents are soon forgot.
...
From thy nest every rafter
Will rot, and thine eagle home
Leave thee naked to laughter,
When leaves fall and cold winds come.11

Relentless in their harsh detail, these lines match Emerson’s for postex-
periential determinism. “Every roof,” Emerson writes, “is agreeable
to the eye, until it is lifted; then we find tragedy and moaning women,
and hard-eyed husbands, and deluges of lethe, and the men ask,
‘What’s the news?’ as if the old were so bad” (“Experience” [1844],
in Murphy, ed., 1:947). Emerson adds, “Our relations to each other
are oblique and casual” (Murphy, ed., 1:947). Emerson concludes
that “the plaint of tragedy which murmurs” from the failed search
“in regard to persons, to friendship and love” derives from the aban-
doned quest for a “lasting relation” between “intellect” and “thing”
(Murphy, ed., 1:947). Thus the pointed quality of Dickinson’s rhe-
torical question, her bitterness, suggests the troubled past of her rela-
tionship with Susan, as well as indicating her premonition of death,
for the poet’s final illness had begun.
On the other hand, if Dickinson’s question scarcely balances pes-
simism with optimism, if her interrogative hardly chooses the latter
over the former, it does more than merely negate her experience, for
she emerges from, as well as reenters, “an Abyss.” The next sentence
sets up her complimentary close, “Lovingly—”: “The tie between us
is very fine, but a Hair never dissolves” (L1024). Like the just-cited
verse of Shelley and like the just-quoted prose of Emerson, her poems
of aftermath neither negotiate the strait between experience and faith
nor synthesize experience and faith but, rather, affirm the former
as tough epistemology. To epitomize the Romanticism from which
Dickinson conjures her world-grounded ability to generate hope from
despair: “It is only by touching the abyss that the soul [of the British
Romantic poet] comes to recognize its power” (Swingle 77).
 Gaining Loss 107

“The things of which we want the proof are those we knew

before—” (L334). On the one hand, this letter to Susan speaks of
absence, of postexperience, pessimistically, for, insofar as want means
lack, whatever we used to possess has disappeared without a trace.
Such loss looms so inevitable that even what we have seems gone. On
the other hand, since want can mean desire, we scarcely forfeit that
for which we yet seek evidence, and we rarely give up on anyone for
whom we yearn. We rejoice

that in our embers

Is something that doth live,
That nature yet remembers what was so fugitive!
(Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”
[1802–04], lines 129–31)

The actor Timothy West read these lines at the wedding (2005) of
Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles, giving heart to those of a
certain age whose experience-in-postexperience, aftermath, has made
them sadder-but-wiser folks whose hope does not so much triumph
over past experience as subsist on/rekindle because of afterglow. No
sooner does Dickinson appear to second Keats’s “Fled is that music”
(“Ode to a Nightingale” [1819], line 80) than she would embrace for
the very reason of her loss Wordsworth’s posttraumatic but far from
paralyzed or ascetic quadrilateral of values: “Effort, and expectation,
and desire, / And something evermore about to be” (The Prelude
[1850] 6:68–69).
To be sure, death in Dickinson’s postexperience can dominate her
perceptions there. Tennyson’s great poem of aftermath, In Memoriam
(1850), feels the same “awful sense / Of one mute Shadow watch-
ing all” (30:7–8). Emerson’s postexperience, in equal prefiguring of
Dickinson’s, offers an antiexperiential reason for not writing autobi-
ography, the genre most compatible with experience. “Our life looks
trivial,” Emerson writes, “and we shun to record it” (“Experience,”
in Murphy, ed., 1:943). “Nothing is left us now,” he adds, “but
death” (Murphy, ed., 1:945). Emerson concludes, “We look to that
with grim satisfaction, saying, there at least, is reality that will not
dodge us” (Murphy, ed., 1:945). Nevertheless, in keeping with the
lighter mood of Tennyson or of Emerson—namely, the optimism or
the “soul-competency” of their Anglo-American Romanticism—even
the Dickinson of aftermath can move “downward to darkness” with
lyrical lilt.12 Thus the Myth of Amherst reconstitutes experience as
hope-against-hope in, as hope-after-hope for, the here and now.
108 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

The precedent for Dickinson’s symbiosis of postexperience/

experience is Romanticism. Of course, her withdrawal from social
life has something to do with the “alternate joy and woe” of her
love for “Sister Sue” and for Wadsworth, and her posttrauma attends
her implicit interpretation of Darwin’s science and the Civil War as
twin omens of Modern-era diminishment and shell shock.13 Still, her
“post-experiential perspective” derives not only from these emotional
and these intellectual reasons for her reclusive tendency but, more
optimistically, from the spiritual dedication from which she makes
a not-so-cloistered virtue of her Tiresias-/Homer-/Milton-like eye-
trouble, thereby preserving herself as “daughter of prophecy” who
well and truly sees.14 Wordsworth’s “abundant recompense” for
“such loss” as the “aching joys” and “dizzy raptures” of his “boyish
days . . . all gone by”—namely, “the still, sad music of humanity,” the
“years that bring the philosophic mind”—offers Dickinson’s speakers
of aftermath a not-so-muted mitigation of it.15 Insofar as the natu-
ral grace of Dickinson’s poetry of experience, her art of knowledge,
becomes the unvarnished, astringent truth that her “post-experiential
perspective” curiously welcomes and strongly recommends, her pre-
Modern mode develops residually Romantic-era consolation for
faded “splendor in the grass” and for lost “glory in the flower” (com-
pare Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” [1802–04],
line 180).

* * *

To confront, first, the pessimism of Dickinson’s aftermath, and to give

it its due, here is a signature poem in point, lines resistant to any ame-
liorating exegesis:

The difference between Despair

And Fear - is like the One
Between the instant of a Wreck -
And when the Wreck has been -
The Mind is smooth - no Motion -
Contented as the eye
Opon the Forehead of a Bust -
That knows - it cannot see -
(Fr576)

Of course, this fear-turned-despair finds alert style, “the complex-

ity that analogy and parallelism often achieve” (Juhasz “‘To Make a
 Gaining Loss 109

Prairie’” 16–17). Still, the poem says that aftermath and numbness/
paralysis are the same and permanent. The poet sent the poem to
Susan. Thus, in the physical absence of the beloved, the speaker waits
on Godot. To repeat what bears repeating as one reads this poem,
“Tis a dangerous moment for anyone when the meaning goes out of
things and Life stands straight—and punctual—and yet no content(s)
(signal) come(s).”
A poem of two lines is so pessimistic as to constitute an antiaubade,
a perverse subversion of the hopeful dawn-poem genre:

To Whom the Mornings stand for Night,

What must the Midnights - be!
(Fr1055)

Instead of substituting for, or replacing, nights, and rather than com-

pensating for loveless nights by eliminating, reducing to just propor-
tions, intense darkness indeed, the speaker’s mornings symbolize
loveless nights. These mornings, in fact, become these nights, for, by
Dickinson’s implication, aubade that follows nonepithalamium proves
scarcely worth distinguishing from the dead of night, from night’s
barely alive, merely undead companions.
Dickinson’s longest statement of postexperiential pessimism merits
full quotation here, and also calls for an assessment of, a contribution
to, the most pertinent critical conversation about the poem:

It would never be Common - more - I said -

Difference had begun -
Many a bitterness had been -
But that old sort - was done -
Or - if it sometime showed - as ‘twill -
Opon the Downiest morn -
Such bliss - had I - for all the years -
‘Twould give an easier - pain -
I’d so much joy I told it - Red -
Opon my simple Cheek -
I felt it publish - in my eye -
‘Twas needless - any speak -
I walked - as wings - my body bore -
The feet - I former used -
Unnecessary - now to me -
As boots - would be - to Birds -
110 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

I put my pleasure all abroad -

I dealt a word of Gold
To every Creature - that I met -
And Dowered - all the World -
When - suddenly - my Riches shrank -
A Goblin - drank my Dew -
My Palaces - dropped tenantless -
Myself - was beggared - too -
I clutched at sounds -
I groped at shapes -
I touched the tops of Films -
I felt the Wilderness roll back
Along my Golden lines -
The Sackcloth - hangs opon the nail -
The Frock I used to wear -
But where my moment of Brocade -
My - drop - of India?
(Fr388)

Joanne Feit Diehl’s idea that the poem qualifies as “paradigmatic

expression” (Diehl “‘Ransom’” 170–72) finds a counterpart in
Maryanne Garbowsky’s placement of these lines at the center of
Dickinson’s “poems of aftermath” (Garbowsky 128–29). Cristanne
Miller, too, addresses the meta-poetical dimension of a lyric that “tells
a Cinderella story in which the speaker is her own fairy godmother.
She turns herself from a ‘Common’ woman into a poet, and her magic
gift and husband Prince are all words” (147–49, 151). Shira Wolosky
and Alice Fulton acknowledge that the poem is about poetry, but they
highlight the poet’s fall from, rather than her access to, verbal power.
“The poem,” Wolosky contends, “perhaps merely describes the pass-
ing of poetic inspiration” (Emily 155–57).16 Fulton concludes that
here “a woman confronts literary effacement” (43).
Cynthia Griffin Wolff emphasizes the ebb of the speaker’s ebb-and-
flow of verbal prowess. “The ever-shifting balance of power between
the creative forces and the forces of destruction swings against the
poet, and the effort to impose order must begin again” (217–19, 383,
529). Thus, although the poet-speaker ranks high as an artist, she
ends on a note of aesthetic timidity. The final line laments the loss
of her “drop - of India,” her thick, black ink for the lettering of her
works. Dickinson’s pen has run dry.
To be sure, Ben Kimpel holds that Dickinson’s poems of after-
math, including “It would never be Common - more - I said - ,”
 Gaining Loss 111

describe “occasions in her life out of which her religious response

occurred” (245). Emily Miller Budick, too, sees this poem as reli-
gious. Nevertheless, as Budick makes clear, this speaker’s experiential
temper limits the success of her religious aspirations. “The attempt
to characterize heaven in ordinary symbolic language can only result
in a disappointment and loss that are both proximate and ultimate”
(71–73). The third, fourth, and fifth stanzas entertain such miracu-
lous transcendence that they have nowhere else to go but toward a
correspondingly intense, postlapsarian tone, in the sixth, seventh, and
eighth stanzas. Dickinson comes across here as more pessimistic than
optimistic, more naturally than spiritually oriented.
One of the most skillful effects of “It would never be Common -
more - I said - ” concerns the poet’s use of dashes in the sixth stanza
to mark the transition from first love to forlorn devastation. In the
seventh stanza, where the speaker reports that she “felt the Wilderness
roll back / Along my Golden lines - ,” Dickinson psychologizes the
New England/Puritan “Errand into the Wilderness.”17 The myth of
the golden age, as Shelley dilutes it in “The World’s Great Age Begins
Anew” (1822) and as Joni Mitchell further attenuates it in “We’ve
Got to Get Ourselves Back to the Garden” (1971), proves equally
apropos. Although Dickinson’s persona, in the final stanza, puts
behind her the “Sackcloth” of bitterness, her “Frock” of young love’s
hope and promise recedes, too. She stands alone, in a daze, looking
backward, wondering what hit her.18
“After great pain, a formal feeling comes - ” explores how the “for-
mal feeling” stays so far from functioning as a palliative that it can, and
probably will, kill the sufferer:

The Feet, mechanical, go round -

A Wooden way
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought -
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone -
This is the Hour of Lead -
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow -
First - Chill - then Stupor - then the letting go -
(Fr372, lines 5–13)

As Jane Marston observes, “The event that has caused pain is not
named; thus, pain may be understood as either loss or physical pain,
the one prefiguring grief, the other, death . . . The speaker cares about
112 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

effect, not cause—about what it is like to live out the aftermath of

pain” (114). “The poem,” Garbowsky writes, “suggests the panic
attack where the individual is numbed with anxiety and fear, feeling as
if death has come” (134–35). Vivian Pollak’s insight that Dickinson’s
“pain signifies a loyalty to frustrated aspirations, which is both heroic
and dysfunctional,” qualifies as an equally psychological, no less
tough-minded approach to the poem (199, 206–11).
Formalistic understanding of the poem and of its post-Modern inti-
mation of formalistic disconnection emerges from John Robinson’s
conclusion that the “orderly and analytic” message here “is dramati-
cally enacted in terms which challenge that control and even threaten
the message” (126). In a historically aware as well as formalistically
sophisticated observation, A. R. C. Finch writes that “as the meter of
the past poets overtakes the poem, the poet uses iambic pentameter
to present an image of helpless, frozen stupor” (167). Wolff drops
a formalistically radical, almost post-Modern bombshell: “themes of
violation and disorder” in the poem mean that Dickinson’s poetry as
a whole “has been fatally wounded by the pain of its creator” (154).
Thus Dickinson foreshadows such Moderns as Yeats, Eliot, Frost, and
Stevens.19 As Linda J. Taylor puts it, “After great pain, a formal feel-
ing comes - ” helps “to establish a place for [Dickinson] in the main-
stream of . . . post-romantic poetry in England” (253).
The poem also helps to align Dickinson’s postexperiential pessi-
mism with the high- to late-Romantic version of pessimism, for the
tough-minded side of Anglo-American Romanticism provides a solid
model for both the “great pain” and the “formal feeling” of her after-
math. “In the death of my son [Waldo], now more than two years
ago,” Emerson writes,

I seem to have lost a beautiful estate,—no more . . . [I]t does not touch
me: some thing which I fancied was a part of me, which could not
be torn away without tearing me, nor enlarged without enriching me,
falls off from me, and leaves no scar. It was caducous. I grieve that
grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature.
(“Experience” in Murphy, ed., 1:944)

This attitude, as Barbara Packer recognizes, appears both “self-

lacerating” and filled with “casual brutality” (117). “We can imagine
a voice that says all these things with bitter irony,” she adds, but we
can also imagine “a voice as toneless and detached as that of a witness
giving evidence in a war crimes trial” (117). Another analogy to the
latter voice, in Packer’s view, inheres in the “wasted and suffering”
 Gaining Loss 113

discharged soldier whom Wordsworth questions in Book 4 of The

Prelude (1850):

In all he said
There was a strange half-absence, as of one
Knowing too well the importance of his theme
But feeling it no longer.
(Lines 442–45; qtd. in Packer 120)

Packer thinks that “the casual brutality of the sentence in which

Emerson introduces the death of his son as an illustration is unmatched
by anything I know of in literature, unless it is the parenthetical
remark in which Virginia Woolf reports the death of Mrs. Ramsey in
the ‘Time passes’ section of To the Lighthouse [1927]” (120; Packer’s
emphasis). Packer thinks, as well, in this regard, though far back in
time, of Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydrotaphia (1681): “There is no anti-
dote,” Browne laments, “against the Opium of time” (qtd. in Packer
129–30). Most significantly for present purposes, though, Packer
mentions Dickinson’s “After great pain, a formal feeling comes - ” as
an especially memorable example of postexperiential pessimism from
Wordsworth to Emerson to Woolf (Packer 132).

* * *

On the other hand, Aliki Barnstone offers an optimistic reading of

Dickinson’s poems of aftermath—that is, that such a poem as “After
great pain, a formal feeling comes - ” illustrates “the Nirvana principle
of abandonment to nothingness, which is a release and a liberation,
the necessary state for revelation” (142–43). This observation seems
too religious to suit the poem. The poem, though, is more than a psy-
chological case study. It prescribes a strangely positive procedure for
even the worst experiences of aftermath—namely, survival training for
this “World of Pains and troubles” (compare the letter from Keats to
George and Georgiana Keats, February 14–May 31, 1819).
“After great pain, a formal feeling comes - ,” accordingly, emerges
as a more late-Romantic than pre-Modern poem. Consider, in this
regard, Edward Fitzgerald’s perspective on the lowest moments of
In Memoriam. “I felt that if Tennyson had got on a horse and rid-
den 20 miles, instead of moaning over his pipe, he would have been
cured of his sorrows in half the time. As it is, it is almost 3 years before
the Poetic Soul walks itself out of darkness and Despair and into
Common Sense” (qtd. in Ricks 214). But Fitzgerald undervalues how
114 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

Tennyson’s hope “comes from darkness” (Kincaid 83–84; Kincaid’s

emphasis). Even the empirical voice of In Memoriam, to say nothing
of its voice of faith, moderates the poet’s desolation over the death of
Arthur Henry Hallam (for both voices of In Memoriam, see Brantley
Anglo-American 33–50). Dickinson’s empirical voice, like Tennyson’s,
lends vitality, if not exactly untroubled robustness, to her late-Roman-
tic version of aftermath. Instead of ever having backed off, with an
attitude of “Do I dare to eat a peach?” the persona has welcomed
“frequent sights of what is to be borne,” and so sustains liberating
abandonment to nothingness.20 Recall: “then the letting go - .”
In Dickinson’s poems of aftermath, the premium placed on survival
training reflects her hard-won optimism, and hence her empirical, if
not scientific, values, as distinct from her defense mechanisms identi-
fied by such a psychoanalytic approach to her works as that of pioneer
psychological critic John Cody. Yes, the “Languour” or “Drowsiness”
that equates to “Pain’s Successor - ” “Envelopes [Dickinson’s]
Consciousness - ” (Fr552, lines 1, 3, 5, 7). And yes, her postexperi-
ence turns out to be an even more ominous portent of her death than
her first sharp outcry of pain.

The Surgeon - does not blanch at pain -

His Habit is severe -
But tell him that it ceased to feel -
The Creature lying there -
And he will tell you - Skill is late -
A Mightier than He -
Has ministered before Him -
There’s no Vitality
(Fr552, lines 9–16)

However, as psychologically and linguistically acute as Dickinson’s

most pessimistic understanding of aftermath can be, she concludes in
these poems as a group that even the worst of postexperience fulfills
the late-Romantic function not so much of spiritual discipline as of
stoic endurance.
Dickinson’s hope paradoxically comes from the darkness that some-
times encompasses her.

There is a pain - so utter -

It swallows substance up -
Then covers the Abyss with Trance -
So Memory can step
 Gaining Loss 115

Around - across - opon it -

As One within a Swoon -
Goes safely - where an open eye
Would drop Him - Bone by Bone -
(Fr515)

Pollak is under no illusion about the lingering effects of affliction as it

is presented in these lines. “Extreme pain destroys the memory of its
occasion . . . The soul cannot bear too much reality and commands a vari-
ety of amnesiac responses which blank out pain, all of which prefigure
the ultimate amnesiac, death” (209). Garbowsky’s clinical interpreta-
tion of Dickinson’s poetry, as agoraphobia, goes further than Pollak in
capturing whatever ameliorative properties these lines may display. “This
description of the trance-like effect of depersonalization brought on by
the panic attack accurately describes its release function and the protec-
tive purpose it serves. By cutting the victim’s feelings off, depersonaliza-
tion prevents him or her from a more serious breakdown” (123). Thus
the speaker of the poem does not so much forget his or her suffering
as use trance to remember it gingerly, and, as distinct from sleepwalk-
ing to oblivion, he or she “Goes safely - ,” does not burn with a hard,
gemlike flame but lives in some security. If Dickinson’s poems of after-
math sometimes include the near-suicidal mood of the third chapter of
the Book of Job or of Hopkins’s “No Worst, There Is None” (1885),
poems like this one, and indeed especially “There is a pain - so utter - ,”
nonetheless provide the setting for her reemergence.
What might seem to be Dickinson’s defense mechanism of denial
can turn out to be the natural grace of her recuperative powers (recall
the discussion in chapter 1 of her almost scientific faith that every man
or woman can be his or her own physician):

A Doubt if it be Us
Assists the staggering Mind
In an extremer Anguish
Until it footing find -
An Unreality is lent,
A merciful Mirage
That makes the living possible
While it suspends the lives.
(Fr903)

Barbara Mossberg sums up the poem. “While the voice of the poet
is anguished, it is operative” (29). Pain no longer envelops this
116 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

consciousness. Dickinson’s speaker appears more pragmatic than

solipsistic, more experience-hungry than inwardly tortured.
The most autobiographical among Dickinson’s less pessimistic
than optimistic poems of aftermath merits, like “It would never be
Common - more - I said - ” (perhaps the most pessimistic of these
poems), full quotation and careful moderation, modulation, of the
received critical dialogue:

I tie my Hat - I crease my Shawl -

Life’s little duties do - precisely -
As the very best
Were infinite - to me -
I put new Blossoms in the Glass -
And throw the Old - away -
I push a petal from my Gown
That anchored there - I weigh
The time ‘twill be till six o’clock -
So much I have to do -
And yet - existence - some way back -
Stopped - struck - my ticking - through -
We cannot put Ourself away
As a completed Man
Or Woman - When the errand’s done
We came to Flesh - opon -
There may be - Miles on Miles of Nought -
Of Action - sicker far -
To simulate - is stinging work -
To cover what we are
From Science - and from Surgery -
Too Telescopic eyes
To bear on us unshaded -
For their - sake - Not for Our’s -
Therefore - we do life’s labor -
Though life’s Reward - be done -
With scrupulous exactness -
To hold our Senses - on -
(Fr522)

This aftermath, it is true, seems grim enough, for “life is represented

[here] as fury coming to terms with sexuality, and both are subject to
the efforts of repression” (Cameron “‘A Loaded Gun’” 431). While
Dickinson’s readers might identify with her uncharacteristically pejo-
rative use of an empirical metaphor—“Dickinson’s fear that the inner
 Gaining Loss 117

world would be looked into is surely connected with the develop-

ment of science, particularly the telescope” (Uno 98)—her desire
to keep the subconscious repressed might strike them as unhealthy.
Nonetheless, “the speaker’s admission that the bomb is calm now
reveals that the panic attacks are in remission, and although the bomb
is still intact, she is in a state of relative ease, trying to appear nor-
mal” (Garbowsky 126). Thus “time is meaningless to [Dickinson]”
at a subjective level, but “objectively, it continues to organize her
behavior” (Pollak 204). In other words, “I tie my Hat - I crease
my Shawl - ” concerns “a life in which control is the only meaning
and meaning the only control,” and this conundrum suffices (Dickie
Lyric 131). Since the poem “allows us a sight of Emily Dickinson
presenting herself to the eyes of other people and sustaining herself
by the fact of that observation” (John Robinson 97), the formalism
of her postexperience contributes to, and perhaps even constitutes,
her very survival. Dickinson, to give the last word on this poem to
an especially optimistic conclusion arising from the criticism of it,
does not just speak here of the “trivial duties that must be done” but
even “remains in firm control of her poem” by “choosing figures”
that do not exaggerate but “understate” her “dilemma” (Patterson
Emily 112).
By corollary, finally, these more optimistic poems of Dickinson’s
aftermath can remain in firm control of content as well as of form.
Of course, to understate her dilemma can be to condense, abridge,
shorten, or curtail experience. Still, these sadder but wiser words com-
prise no mere summary, abstract, or selection of essential facts. They
deepen experience, as well. Perhaps these speakers even gain distance
on the present through hindsight, the second self of foresight.
Make no mistake: Dickinson’s poems of aftermath can dwell on the
past. This harking back, however, is an almost desirable, as well as an
inevitable, result of losing what, or whom, she cherishes most.

Pity - the Pard - that left her Asia!

Memories - of Palm -
Cannot be shifted - with Narcotic -
Nor suppressed - with Balm -
(Fr276, lines 10–13)

The leopard remains “somehow involved in the central idea of love as

tropical heat, vitality itself” (Patterson Emily 151). Thus “Pity - the
Pard - that left her Asia!” sympathizes with a zoo-confined animal
deprived of rich experience in her native land, for “the Pard” is a
118 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

surrogate for the postexperiential poet in her unshakable, pointblank

remembrance of exotic, bygone persons, places, or things.
The speaker of “I held a jewel in my fingers - ” looks back with the
bittersweetness of nostalgia, as well as in anger at herself:

I held a jewel in my fingers -

And went to sleep -
The day was warm, and winds were prosy -
I said “’Twill keep” -
I woke - and chid my honest fingers,
The Gem was gone -
And now, an Amethyst remembrance
Is all I own -
(Fr261)

Although blankness here means “Dickinson’s fear of losing her ability

to create,” and although “jewels appear often in Dickinson’s imagery as
emblems for the poet’s self, or more specifically, for her artistic genius,”
her pet name for her “dearest earthly friend,” Charles Wadsworth, is
“Dusk Gem.”21 Dickinson uses the “gem metaphor to heighten the
sense of the preciousness of her friends” (Simpson 38). Just as this
poem defines poetry as “the reclamation or repossession of absence,”
so these lines exemplify the lyric genre as “the owning of loss,” as
“the owning up of loss” (Gelpi “Emily Dickinson’s Word” 44; Gelpi’s
emphasis). In Dickinson’s case here, it is perhaps more the latter.
“Where I have lost, I softer tread - ” provides a blueprint, not only
of the postexperiential Dickinson’s balance between pessimism and
optimism, but also of her tipping the scales from the former to the
latter:

Where I have lost, I softer tread -

I sow sweet flower from garden bed -
I pause above that vanished head
And mourn.
Whom I have lost, I pious guard
From accent harsh, or ruthless word -
Feeling as if their pillow heard,
Though stone!
When I have lost, you’ll know by this -
A Bonnet black - A dusk surplice -
A little tremor in my voice
Like this!
 Gaining Loss 119

Why I have lost, the people know

Who dressed in frocks of purest snow
Went home a century ago
Next Bliss!
(Fr158)

The lyric poses the where, who, when, and why of parting in general
and of bereavement in particular. As the poet would later observe, in
lines worth repeating here if only because of how they have captured
the imagination of the present age (compare Harry Crews’s title),

Parting is all we know of heaven,

And all we need of hell.
(Fr1773, lines 7–8)

To the extent that “When I have lost, I softer tread - ” cannot answer
these journalistic questions, these four stanzas merely own up to loss—
as “I held a jewel in my fingers - ” does primarily—as death-in-life
that defines antiexperience. Thus only those who now see face to face
in heaven could explain why she has lost (compare I Cor. 13:12).
Her funereal sorrow when she loses proves her only certainty. To the
extent that the lyric can answer such questions, however—and here is
where the tone emerges—these lines own loss. Perhaps even within
Dickinson’s “post-experiential perspective,” they represent her ongo-
ing experience.
To illustrate how “Where I have lost, I softer tread - ” owns loss,
consider a parallel between the second stanza, beginning “Whom I
have lost,” and the fourth and fifth stanzas of a more familiar poem,
“My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun - .”

And when at Night - Our good Day done -

I guard My Master’s Head -
‘Tis better than the Eider Duck’s
Deep Pillow - to have shared -
To foe of His - I’m deadly foe -
None stir the second time -
On whom I lay a Yellow Eye -
Or an emphatic Thumb -
(Fr764, lines 13–20)

On the one hand, the speakers of both poems lead “impoverished and
inadequate” lives (Margaret H. Freeman’s language [262] for the per-
sona of Fr764), for the one grieves over the literal or figurative death
120 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

of her beloved, and the other suffers from jealousy. For the poet, on
the other hand, “knowledge of the world is formed by an experience
of the world” (Freeman’s emphasis), for, despite her life of reduced
circumstances, each poem, that is, Fr158 as well as Fr764, embodies
Dickinson’s wisdom.22 “Where I have lost, I softer tread - ,” in par-
ticular, locates wisdom in fidelity, suggesting that Dickinson’s desire
to see Charles Wadsworth again, though certainly not her expectation
of beholding him in heaven, is as strong as death, and perhaps even
keeps him near her.23
Dickinson’s withdrawal from society does more than signal either
her posttraumatic stress disorder or her fugitive, cloistered, unpraise-
worthy virtue. Her reclusive tendency signifies, as well, fullness of
time. Her aftermath, as it appears from the pages of this chapter, can
go from lesson learned, to gist grasped, to concentration intensi-
fied, to watchfulness restored, to imagination unwearied. Can faded
friendship and lost love, for her, open heartfelt access to the divine,
as opposed to exacerbating destructive skepticism, on the one hand,
and paralyzed aporia, on the other?24 Whether or not the answer is yes,
and even if her reputation as a recluse is well founded, the experience
of being one, for the Myth of Amherst, shades into being one with
experience.

* * *

At their lowest moments of distress and hopelessness Dickinson’s aes-

thetic self-projections manage to salvage, against all odds and in their
best and worst of all possible worlds, the constructive skepticism and
the lyrical lilt of her late-Romantic imagination. The “perpetual atten-
tion” that her poems of aftermath pay “to experience, the pole-star
of truth” (to press William Godwin’s crucial language into service
again) glosses the sensationalist epistemology, if not the Experiential
Faith, of Romantic Anglo-America. Her “post-experiential perspec-
tive” has more to do with Wordsworth’s “wise passiveness,” his
deliberate survival training verging on spiritual discipline, than with
defense mechanisms.25 Her poems of aftermath, like the contempla-
tive dimension of Keats’s art, foster “being in uncertainties, Mysteries,
doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” (Keats’s
words can scarcely be too often brought to bear on Anglo-American
Romanticism).26 Dickinson’s version of “Negative Capability” remains
as far from nihilism as his.
To move from Dickinson’s high-Romantic precursors to a late-
Romantic contemporary, the more optimistic than pessimistic poems
 Gaining Loss 121

of her aftermath vibrate more sympathetically with Carlyle’s ver-

sion of postexperiential suspension than, say, with Eliot’s Prufrock.
According to “The Hero as a Man of Letters” (1841), Carlyle’s
“skepticism is not an end”—that is, it is not an acquiescence in static
doubt after strong faith “but a beginning”; it is not “the decay of old
ways of believing” but “the preparation afar off for new and wider
ways” (Shelston, ed., 253). Also pertinent to hearing Romanticism
in Dickinson’s postexperiential combination of pessimism with opti-
mism is Carlyle’s hard-won but nowhere near exhausted definition of
doubt as constructive skepticism. “Doubt,” he writes, represents “the
mystic working of the mind, on the subject it is getting to know and
believe” (Shelston, ed., 253). Though perhaps of the very essence
of aftermath, doubt remains a key to purposive process, and, in this
sense, Carlyle’s portrait on the wall of Dickinson’s room keeps her
spirits up, especially at the very center, at the near-sacred inner sanc-
tum, of her postexperience.
Dickinson’s assimilation of the open quality of Tennyson’s and of
Emerson’s skepticism, furthermore, obtains in the free space of her
aftermath. On the pessimistic side, Tennyson’s implication of doubt
as postexperience can sound like Dickinson’s, though she is rarely as
glib in her God-talk as In Memoriam can be:

And falling with my weight of cares

Upon the great world’s altar-stairs
That slope through darkness up to God,
I stretch lame hands of faith and grope,
And gather dust and chaff, and call
To what I feel is Lord of all,
And faintly trust the larger hope.
(In Memoriam 55:14–20)

On the optimistic side, Emerson’s implication of doubt as postex-

perience can sound even more Dickinson-like, for her language, as
this chapter has everywhere tried to show, is usually as philosophically
acute, and is usually as soft-pedaled in God-talk, as this passage from
his “Experience” (1844): “For, skepticisms are not gratuitous or law-
less, but are limitations of the affirmative statement, and the new phi-
losophy must take them in, and make affirmations outside of them, just
as much as it must include the oldest beliefs” (Murphy, ed., 1:955).
Emerson adds, “Out of unbeliefs a creed shall be formed” (Murphy,
ed., 1:955). Dickinson would say, “Out of aftermath a new begin-
ning shall be willed,” for she absorbs and makes her own the radically
122 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

skeptical but eminently constructive stance of such Romantics, if

only in their mode of postexperience, as Wordsworth, Keats, Carlyle,
Tennyson, and Emerson.
Dickinson goes “White - unto the White Creator - ” (Fr788, line
7), but does her candor (from candidus, white) signify innocence of
experience,27 as though, at the end of her life, she were “blank” (from
blancus, white), like the clean slate or tabula rasa of John Locke? No,
for her personae speak from experience, and those of aftermath, in
particular, not so much sweet and guileless as frank and direct, have
turned their experience into wisdom.28 Dickinson’s wisdom, accord-
ingly, is not only the tougher for following upon, but perhaps even
the more efficacious for reconstituting, her experience. In her book,
especially from its postexperiential perspective, going “White - unto
the White Creator - ” signifies not so much having existed timidly
or palely, seeking refuge in retreat, as having lived life to the fullest,
burning through it not to its ashes but to its calcined form of near-
spiritual purity.
Dickinson’s candor means, finally, her incandescence—that is, the
glow with which her personae of aftermath retain, reimagine, and
rekindle the white-hot heat of experience, albeit in the crucible of a
highly creative postexperience (compare her metapoetic “Dare you
see a Soul at the ‘White Heat’?” [Fr401]).29 To conflate her lan-
guage with that of Wordsworth, himself a poet both of experience
and of postexperience, her aftermath constitutes, if not her “sponta-
neous overflow of powerful feeling,” then her “emotion recollected
in tranquility,” making “internal difference - / Where the Meanings,
are - .”30 The whiteness of her aesthetic self-projections—that is, her
presence-of-all-color, as opposed to either her unstained purity or
her point-blank nihilism (whiteness/blankness can connote, after
all, nothingness)—signals an existential authenticity, a perdurability
that, for better or worse, yet “burn[s],” in her, “with a hard, gem-
like flame” indeed (compare Pater, Conclusion to Leonardo da Vinci
[1873]). Thus she aligns herself with what Shelley means by Mont
Blanc, “a vacancy that nevertheless holds in itself the potentiality of
all that is,” as distinct, say, from Ahab’s apprehension of void in the
whiteness of the whale, or as distinct from Arthur Gordon Pym’s
horror in the snows of Antarctica.31 The whiteness of Dickinson’s
postexperience betokens further, fresh experience, dynamic possibil-
ity (recall “I dwell in Possibility - ”) of near-death experience, of “the
white radiance of Eternity,” and, for that matter, of gloriously, mind-
blowingly aesthetic/cinematic white-out.32
 Gaining Loss 123

Dickinson’s poems of aftermath, then, do more than just illustrate

the “post-experiential perspective” of her pre-Modern mode and the
antiexperiential bias of her post-Modern intimations. This strain of her
genius, if only by fits and starts, reactivates the natural and spiritual
dialogue of Romantic Anglo-America. Her experience of postexperi-
ence features the yet-viable role of friendship and of love in her “inter-
nalized quest romance,” thus turning loss into the gain of gold on
the page.33 Is her “post-experiential perspective” consonant with her
poetry of experience? Yes, for, besides equating to disastrous conse-
quences, Dickinson’s poems of aftermath entail outcome, and perhaps
these personae even augur harvest in this world again.
 Chapter 4

De s pair ing H op e

A s the letters and poems of Emily Dickinson seek to understand it, the
human condition integrates despair and hope. The same woman who
lamented “the hollowness & awfulness of the world” (Leyda 1:213;
Dickinson’s emphasis) testified that “I find ecstasy in living—the mere
sense of living is joy enough” (L342a).1 As though her despair could
regularize her hope and her hope could celebrate her despair, each of
her opposing stances dramatizes the other at any given point of her life
of writing.2 To complicate for Dickinson studies an affirmation lately
appropriated by the US “culture wars,” her despair and her hope alike,
paradoxically at the same time, can let her “choose life” (compare
Deut. 30:19). Thus, the pessimism that recurs throughout her career
can cultivate the very seed of her perennial resilience.
As though simple hope could bestow only chaste satisfaction,
Dickinson’s personae prefer despairing hope, albeit at some risk of their
merely seeming to indulge, thereby, in overclever oxymoron. Whenever
they can avoid that kind of hazard (this chapter will imply that they
often do), then, even if their despair does not exactly yield their hope,
it can nonetheless yield to their hope. Dickinson’s “despondency,” to
borrow Wordsworth’s word, her “dejection,” to redirect Coleridge’s,
can serve here as the catalyst not so much to her rarefied, muted, and
detached hope, as to her uncloistered, articulate, and engaged hope.3
One thinks in this connection, by way of comparison/contrast between
her despondent hope (so to speak) and the even more dejected quality
of Lord Byron’s, of this pertinent lyric (1814) by him:

They say that Hope is happiness—

But genuine Love must prize the past;
126 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

And Mem’ry wakes the thoughts that bless:

They rose the first—they set the last.
And all that mem’ry loves the most
Was once our only hope to be:
And all that hope adored and lost
Hath melted into memory.
Alas! It is delusion all—
The future cheats us from afar:
Nor can we be what we recall,
Nor dare we think on what we are.

The despairing hope of Emily Dickinson rarely, if ever, sinks this low.
Whether or not the inextricable intertwining of her despair with her
hope is a witting antidote to Byron’s legacy of near-hopelessness in the
deceiving guise of, in the mere name of, hope, this chapter will attempt,
at any rate, to make clear, nonetheless, that her despairing hope con-
stitutes her happiness. Thus, while her very despair could outhope her
hope, she can prevail: she can come out on the other end of times when
even her hope would appear to be outdespairing her despair.
To be sure, Dickinson’s love for her “dearest earthly friend”
(L807), Charles Wadsworth, on the one hand, and her love for her
sister-in-law, Susan Dickinson, on the other, would seem to have
equated to hopelessness itself. Vivian R. Pollak suggests that the geo-
graphical distance between Charles and Emily (Wadsworth lived for
a time, 1864–1867, in San Francisco) and the emotional distance
between neighbor Sue and Emily (so near, yet so far) contributed
narrative tension and dramatic conflict to Dickinson’s hundreds of
love poems. “Poems for Master” and “Poems for Sue” (these are
Judith Farr’s labels for this manifold category of Dickinson’s verse)
emerge from Pollak’s psycho-biographical criticism as more tragic
than many readers might expect love poetry to be. Dickinson’s phi-
losophy of friendship and of love alike can turn skeptical enough to
darken her poetic tone. Perhaps the discipline with which the poet
learned to do without Wadsworth (did he know how much she loved
him?) mirrored something of his Presbyterian doctrine of self-denial:
he declared, for instance, that “[t]he grand secret of contentment is
found, not in increasing our supplies—but in diminishing our neces-
sities” (Sermons [1869] 266). Wadsworth’s use of a dash appears here
as a Dickinson-like element of this rather dour homiletic aphorism.
Just as Byron’s dashes can also seem proto-Dickinson, so Wadsworth’s
punctuation parallels her way of indicating the emphatic quality of
 Despairing Hope 127

her habitual minimalism—that is, the sometimes pronounced empti-

ness of her poetic content, as well as the sometimes deliberate paucity
of her poetic form.
Nevertheless, as a not-so-one-sided understanding of Dickinson’s
outlook in general and of her views on friendship and on love in par-
ticular, this chapter will specify that the modest goal of contentment
set forth by Wadsworth’s instruction contrasts with Dickinson’s signa-
ture conundrum—namely, “sumptuous Destitution - ” (Fr1404, line
7; emphasis added). This enigma does not merely fluctuate between
seeming opposites: Byron’s phrase “love’s alternate joy and woe”
comes to mind as not quite apposite here (see “Maid of Athens, Ere
We Part” [1812], line 7). Rather, Dickinson jumbles antitheses. She
might counter Wadsworth’s dictum with Blake’s maxim: “Without
Contraries is no progression” (Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell [1790–1793], Plate 3). As novelist Kathryn Harrison observes in
quite another context, “Desiring to not desire, after all, is itself a new
form of desire” (922). Dickinson’s “less” proves strangely rich, hence
“more,” as though her idea treats despair and hope in the same way,
in tandem. Such both/and logic, in the case of William Wordsworth,
can emphasize the former—as in

We Poets in our youth begin in gladness;

But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.
(Wordsworth, “Resolution and Independence” [1807],
lines 48–49; emphasis added)

—whereas Dickinson’s poetic reasoning, as this chapter maintains, can

reverse the progression, drawing gladness out of despondency.
The signature lyric of Dickinson’s “sumptuous Destitution - ”—that
is, the poem in which this phrase appears—puts sorrow and joy in the
same breath, as though such opposites, such paired stances, were to
coalesce, to interpenetrate, in the speaker’s inspiration:

In many and reportless places

We feel a Joy -
Reportless, also, but sincere as Nature
Or Deity -
It comes, without a consternation -
Dissolves - the same -
But leaves a sumptuous Destitution -
Without a Name -
128 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

Profane it by a search - we cannot -

It has no home -
Nor we who having once waylaid it -
Thereafter roam.
(Fr1404)

The lower case “sumptuous” and the upper case “Destitution - ” that
exemplify Dickinson’s adjective-noun combinations address the mys-
tery of life and recognize “the hollowness & awfulness of the world”
but forgo joy no more willingly than the persona loses either the natural
anchor of, or the divine presence in, her theism. The absence of these
two doctrinal mainstays from her unorthodox thought here could
constitute her joylessness, and any effort, on her part, to rediscover
joy here, whether psychological or spiritual, could oversimplify the
intrigue of the original experience. Dickinson’s having had joy, how-
ever, squares with her still having it, perhaps even before the extraor-
dinary times when she effortlessly receives back what she has had to
resign. To say nothing of her “ecstasy in living,” her “mere sense of
living is joy enough,” because “sense of living” counts as abundant
life of the imagination, only one remove from “living” as ordinar-
ily understood. According to Jean McClure Mudge’s ironic reading
of these lines, “Joy’s sincerity parallels Nature’s and God’s; that is,
it is untrustworthy, for both cosmic forces betrayed [Dickinson]”
(223–24). The happiness of the speaker, however, fades by degrees,
and scarcely dissipates, as though lack of consternation were to ease
transition from joy to “sumptuous Destitution - ,” and as though joy,
alloyed but implicit in “sumptuous,” could stay relatively genuine,
after all.
The previous chapter began to modify mainstream supposition of
Dickinson’s pessimism. Now, further to do so, this chapter empha-
sizes that the “post-experiential perspective” of her “poetry of after-
math” still includes posttraumatic despair but coexists with, and
features, hope as “the thing with feathers- ,” “a strange invention - ,”
or “a subtle Glutton - .”4 Such an inexhaustible lyric as “After great
pain, a formal feeling comes - ” (Fr372), interpreted to some extent
in the last chapter, can sound here even less like sheer outcry over
disastrous consequences, can look here even more like renewed wit-
ness to outcome auguring further harvest. At the risk of smoothing
out Dickinson’s three-steps-forward, two-steps-back kind of progress
(Job’s, too, can scan thus ragged), this chapter samples these poems
out of chronological sequence, the better to highlight her power
to resume optimism. If she forgets that “the thing with feathers” is
 Despairing Hope 129

“perhaps . . . every human’s potential for music and poetry, brave stays
against the brooding dark” (Wolff 248), she remembers in the dark.
The ongoing renewal of hope among her speakers of postexperience,
and not just the persistence of their hope-against-hope, their hope-
after-hope, demonstrates the upholding strength of her “Columnar
Self - ” (Fr740, line 1). The pluck of her speakers of aftermath dis-
closes as much about her as about her artistry.
Although the psycho-biographical perspective on Dickinson’s
poetry of aftermath remains of interest here, the relation between her
postexperiential perspective and the natural as well as spiritual vision
of Romantic Anglo-America is of even more concern here. Her con-
text in philosophy, faith, and science forms the subtext of this literary-
historical emphasis. John Locke, John Wesley, Charles Wadsworth,
and Charles Darwin, despite their contrasting emphases on inference
(Locke/Darwin) and direct knowledge (Wesley/Wadsworth), seek
access to, and assurance of truth, and they imply between the lines
a foil to Dickinson’s crisis of confidence in such empirical/theologi-
cal procedures. Literary history, though, can explicitly measure her
hard-won reaffirmation of these very criteria. If the pre-Modern vis-
age of her Janus-face looks on individual and collective trauma as his-
torically prescient despair, her late-Romantic visage surveys just how
cultural, as well as personal, aftermath can fortify traditional hope.
Dickinson escapes the midcentury limbo of aesthetic transition. She
finds positive new meaning in Romantic-era versions of postexperi-
ence as experience.
Like the previous chapter, yet even more often, this chapter will
allude to, quote, and parallel Anglo-American writers of belletristic
prose, fiction, and poetry. As explicitly as possible, yet in the short-
hand manner of Matthew Arnold’s “touchstones” of literary quality
(compare Arnold, “The Study of Poetry” [1880], paragraphs eight
and nine), the method for marking Dickinson’s more late-Roman-
tic than either Victorian-American or pre-Modern place on the arc
from Romantic to Modern can build on Nicholson Baker’s homage
to John Updike in U and I (1991). Just as Baker’s closed-book,
self-administered testing of his loving memory of Updike’s novels
alludes to, and quotes, only what he recalls, so the present discussion
can draw largely on such scattered bits of Anglo-American literature
as spring to mind in this context. Thus, without betraying density,
the chapter aims at a pastiche, a mosaic, of allusive, conversational
argument, in the conviction that the best-written, most substantial
literature lodges in the mind (compare Frost, “The Figure a Poem
Makes” [1949]), and through the observation that the cultural
130 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

poetics of Dickinson’s art can thrive especially on her immersion in

belles lettres.

* * *

Although Dickinson’s speakers of “sumptuous Destitution - ” can

suffer terribly from loss, absence, and rejection, and although gain,
presence, and embrace can frequently elude them, seldom do they
settle quietly into contentment or desperation. On the contrary, their
posttraumatic stress disorder can arrive at cognition. They can learn
from, as distinct from merely dwelling on, or coping with, abandon-
ment, or deprivation.5 Reeling from, but able to speak after, their
throes, they can proceed, only by stops and starts, toward intellectual,
spiritual, and imaginative solutions to problems faced by humankind
in general, and by themselves in particular (thus they reenact Job’s
advancement from self-absorption to empathy). Above all, they can
lead lives of strenuous abundance, for, as befits their origin in glad-
ness, and by way of perpetuating this joy, they can accumulate spiritual
wealth. “Redeem[ing] the time” of their postexperiential existence,
“glory[ing] in [their] tribulations,” they can keep up appearances—
can recover not just splendid expression of selfhood but even power-
ful representation of others and of otherness.6 And they can do all this
despite, if not in part because of, having been forsaken, deserted, and
robbed, for Dickinson’s aftermath—the muddled but not-so-belated
middle of her experience—does not so much set despair off against
hope as, Shelley-like, spark hope from the ashes of despair.7
To be sure, one of Dickinson’s earliest poems of aftermath can
seem full of so much more despair than hope as to sound entirely
hopeless:

I breathed enough to take the Trick -

And now, removed from Air -
I simulate the Breath, so well -
That One, to be quite sure -
The Lungs are stirless - must descend
Among the cunning cells -
And track the Pantomime - Himself,
How numb, the Bellows feels!
(Fr308)

Nevertheless, Dickinson relishes clarity here: her postexperiential per-

spective in general, if not in this poem in particular, harks back to the
 Despairing Hope 131

by no means entirely hopeless procedure of Tennyson’s aftermath, as

in the well-known section 54 of In Memoriam beginning

O, yet we trust that somehow good

Will be the final goal of ill,

and ending:

but what am I?
An infant crying in the night;
An infant crying for the light,
And with no language but a cry.
(Lines 1–2, 17–20)

At this “grim center of In Memoriam,” Timothy Peltason writes, “we

are characteristically given no single moment of greatest despair, but
a pattern of related moments, a virtuosity and variety of despair. And
this despair, like the charged and changing grief of earlier lyrics, is both
the evidence and the cause of imaginative activity, an incitement to us
to re-chart the poem’s course” (84). As though virtuosity of despair
somehow yields the good, even “I breathed enough to take the Trick - ”
advances in firsthand, almost scientific language the scarcely hope-
less proposition that airlessness, lunglessness, comprises the working
model, the metaphysical conceit, of suspended animation.
“If we place the agoraphobic syndrome at the center” of “I breathed
enough to take the Trick - ,” according to Maryanne Garbowsky, “we
gain a deeper insight into the physical discomforts the poet documents,
as well as into the nature of the psychic disturbances that fueled them”
(89). This criticism proves more helpful than narrowly expert, or reduc-
tively clinical. Garbowsky’s insight blends with Peltason’s. Dickinson’s
insight into “psychic disturbances” and into “physical discomforts”
does not shrink back from facing the truth, whatever it might be.
“I breathed enough to take the Trick - ” constitutes “a virtuosity and
variety of despair” that signify “imaginative activity,” and hence hope.
Dickinson’s “post-experiential perspective,” as “Too happy Time
dissolves itself” can illustrate, poses riddles for her readers to puzzle
over, or be diverted by.

Too happy Time dissolves itself

And leaves no remnant by -
‘Tis Anguish not a Feather hath
Or too much weight to fly -
(Fr1182)
132 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

Residue of happiness, by turns, can appear like dissolved sugar, or

like a bird either newly featherless or grown too heavy to leave the
ground.8 The poet, in another such poem of aftermath, has learned
enough from her experience to articulate what Blake calls “Proverbs
of Hell,” on the one hand, and to substitute them, on the other, for
the outmoded, greeting-card-like sentimentality of such conventional
wisdom as “time heals all wounds.”9

They say that “Time assuages” -

Time never did assuage -
An actual suffering strengthens
As Sinews do, with Age -
Time is a Test of Trouble -
But not a Remedy -
If such it prove, it prove too
There was no Malady -
(Fr861)

In the mid stages of her postexperience, the speaker here claims to know
little. She conveys ambiguity concerning whether her suffering gets
worse or whether she grows stronger the worse her trial becomes. To
apply to Dickinson’s case the language of Shelley, and of Dylan Thomas,
she remains sentient enough “to repeal / Large codes of fraud,” if not of
“woe”—that is, to gut cliché by means of her “craft, or sullen art.”10
To read between the lines of “They say that ‘Time assuages’ - ,”
Dickinson knows that, to use Hopkins’s words, her “cries” have become
“a chief- / woe, world-sorrow” (compare Hopkins, “No Worst, There
Is None” [1885], lines 5–6). To think of “Too happy Time dissolves
itself” and of “They say that ‘Time assuages’ - ” as companion pieces,
her chief woe has matured, as the world-sorrow of Wordsworth did, in
“Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears” (compare Wordsworth,
“Ode: Intimations of Immortality” [1802–04], line 203). She might
now pore over, and even might assimilate, Wordsworth’s own vein of
fierce self-correction.

Through what power [Wordsworth writes],

Even for the least division of an hour,
Have I been so beguiled as to be blind
To my most grievous loss!
(“Surprised by Joy” [1815], lines 16–19)

Dickinson the late-Romantic poet of aftermath would no longer even

want the facile consolations of nostrums about the passage of time.
 Despairing Hope 133

As though her postexperiential perspective were a “dark night of the

soul” phase of her spiritual as well as natural autobiography, she pre-
fers the hard truths of her blended despair and hope. Thus Dickinson’s
darkness, like that of St. John of the Cross, is a good thing—that is, at
once the occasion for meditation and the cause less of blindness than
of insight, and perhaps even of revelation.
To be sure, the apathy, or at best the aimless, obscure searching, of
Dickinson’s aftermath, can appear more corrosively cynical than either
ironic or straightforward:

From Blank to Blank -

A Threadless Way
I pushed Mechanic feet -
To stop - or perish - or advance -
Alike indifferent -
If end I gained
It ends beyond
Indefinite disclosed -
I shut my eyes and groped as well -
‘Twas lighter - to be Blind -
(Fr484)

Kenneth Stocks emphasizes the historical importance of this poem,

which “extends beyond the purely personal and subjective into the
consciousness of the age” (97). This consciousness, according to
Douglas Novich Leonard, proves to be pre-Modern: “The absur-
dity of life, the unknowableness of its purpose, and sheer fatigue
overwhelm the speaker and leave her in a state of spiritual apa-
thy” (“Emily Dickinson’s Religion” 337–38). Cynthia Griffin Wolff
expresses the nihilistic implications of these lines: “‘Blank’ is almost
a totemic word in Dickinson’s work to identify a course of human
affairs that has been stripped of larger significance. Now . . . there are
no defined beginnings or endings to be acknowledged or rejected.
Even the structure that the drive toward death had imposed has
been lost” (473). Shira Wolosky, too, acknowledges the pessimism
of “From Blank to Blank - ”: “When space has no definition, [see-
ing and not seeing] become functional equivalents—except that
blindness raises no doomed expectations. Blindness is therefore
chosen, but as a darkness which remains itself: an incomplete dia-
lectic un-synthesized into any all-inclusive divine light” (Emily
Dickinson 23–24). Nevertheless, as though remembering the posi-
tive dimension of darkness in the annals of Christian mysticism,
134 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

Wolosky emphasizes, besides the blank despair of the speaker, her

continued deliberation, if scarcely her robust activity. As Leonard
also acknowledges, knowing, by implication, that much worthwhile
is even yet being written on the dark tablet of Dickinson’s soul in
postexperience, “[t]he very blankness of the poem becomes a kind
of vision, its own reward for the heroic seeker after light” (“Emily
Dickinson’s Religion” 338).
Again within the stark confines of Dickinson’s postexperiential per-
spective, and with no irritable reaching, on her part, after renewed
experience, her poetry shows itself capable of more than tenebrous,
if not clear-sighted, cognition. For instance, to assume a psycho-bio-
graphical aspect to a lyric that looks back on summer, the following
exemplar of her personae of “sumptuous Destitution - ” so vividly
recalls “the Affairs of June” (shades of a lost beloved) that she now
plumbs new depths of love:

Like some Old fashioned Miracle

When Summertime is done -
Seems Summer’s Recollection
And the Affairs of June
....
Her Memories like Strains - Review -
When Orchestra is dumb -
The Violin in Baize replaced -
And Ear - and Heaven - numb -
(Fr408, lines 1–4, 13–16)

“We learn it in Retreating,” declares another speaker, “How vast an

one / Was recently among us - ”; this persona then adds, with exqui-
site paradox,

A perished Sun
Endear in the departure
How doubly more
Than all the Golden presence
It was - before -
(Fr1045)

Dickinson’s postexperience appears of itself able to advance new

understanding of Charles, of Sue, of both.
The poems discussed in this chapter have generally received insuf-
ficient critical attention, because, notwithstanding their emphasis on
loss, even they can sound too upbeat for post-Modern taste. In the
 Despairing Hope 135

subtlest, if not the most profound, of these relatively unfamiliar lyr-

ics, Dickinson suggests, in keeping with the laws of optics, that her
clear vision of one of her others departing (again, perhaps, a beloved)
depends on his or her having moved out of the poet’s sight (“wick”
implies his).

By a departing light
We see acuter, quite,
Than by a wick that stays.
There’s something in the flight
That clarifies the sight
And decks the rays
(Fr1749)

Thus “None can experience stint / Who Bounty - have not known - ”
(Fr870, lines 1–2). At the same time that such lines do not neces-
sarily clarify whether the relation between then and now is good
or bad, Wolosky is right to observe of “By a departing light” that
“Recompense is posited here” (Emily Dickinson 82). After all, “decks”
could mean “adorns,” as well as “covers,” or “floors” (as in “knocks
down”). Wordsworth’s positing of “Abundant recompense” as the
payoff of his postexperience—that is, his awareness of the more hellish
than heaven-bound partings to be endured in death-in-life—comes
to mind as an analogue to the way Dickinson’s poetry of aftermath
acquires strong aesthetic vision even, or perhaps especially, in reced-
ing light (compare Wordsworth, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above
Tintern Abbey” [1798], line 88).
An unusually comprehensive account of Dickinson’s experience
of postexperience contrasts the speaker’s wounded and imprisoned
condition in the beginning ten lines and in the ending six, with her
moments of relief, release, freedom, and ecstasy in the middle eight:

The Soul has Bandaged moments -

When too appalled to stir -
She feels some ghastly Fright come up
And stop to look at her -
Salute her, with long fingers -
Caress her freezing hair -
Sip, Goblin, from the very lips
The Lover - hovered - o’er -
Unworthy, that a thought so mean
Accost a Theme - so - fair -
136 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

The soul has moments of escape -

When bursting all the doors -
She dances like a Bomb, abroad,
And swings opon the Hours,
As do the Bee - delirious borne -
Long Dungeoned from his Rose -
Touch Liberty - then know no more -
But Noon, and Paradise -
The Soul’s retaken moments -
When, Felon led along,
With shackles on the plumed feet,
And staples, in the song,
The Horror welcomes her, again,
These, are not brayed of Tongue -
(Fr360)

Of course, the speaker’s horror of living in a metaphorical prison,

absence from the beloved, perhaps, never entirely dissipates, and
indeed returns with the uppercase vengeance of annihilated love, as
well as of enervated life (Joseph Conrad’s Modern-era personification
of evil/nihilism/atheism also comes to mind). Still, what is original
about this poem of aftermath, what is not often “brayed of Tongue - ,”
is its realization that while the alpha-and-omega of postexperience
is death (the ultimate posttraumatic stress disorder), the muddled
middle of aftermath need not be either death-in-life (lovelessness) or
“The Horror” of death itself. Rather, Dickinson’s “post-experiential
perspective” can include—can frame with realism, and hence can set
off all the more dramatically—the imagined ideal, the virtual but very
present help in trouble, of joy through love, and vice versa.
Does Dickinson here use “the traditional distinction between
female powerlessness and male aggression” (Wendy Martin 120)?
Undoubtedly, but surely the aggressor is not “The Lover,” whether
male or female, but the usurping “Goblin” of death, and the speaker’s
feeling for “The Lover,” in any case, remains powerful and empow-
ering. “The ability of the speaker’s ‘Soul’ to flip between images of
lover and goblin is unnerving. To depict desire as always vulnerable
to control by death equates desire with threat” (Budick 374–75).
However, not even this death threat of desire can take away the
jouissance of stanzas three and four, which match any other passage
of sustained optimism in Dickinson’s works, for, precisely because
life does not last, one kisses. “The tone of these stanzas on manic
release overpowers even the reader’s judgment to the point that one
 Despairing Hope 137

regrets the psychological bomb’s forced return to captivity and hor-

ror” (Eberwein Strategies 125). Yes, but since one’s regret registers
power in the speaker’s idiom of release, one might replace “manic”
with “ecstatic,” for, even in her opening lines of postexperiential
pessimism, such language as “the very lips / The Lover - hovered -
o’er - ” can seem more than spiritually—can appear lustily—autobio-
graphical. If “The Lover” may refer to the Wadsworth of Dickinson’s
imagination, then there occurs no more joyous an expression of her
transporting, redeeming esteem of him, perhaps especially during
the long years of his physical absence from her, than in stanzas three
and four.
Dickinson’s “moments of escape” within the walls of her postex-
periential prison testify to the persisting possibility that her love will
continue to sustain her long after she has seemed to lose it. That
explains why “A Prison gets to be a friend - ,” “A Geometric Joy - ,”
to the point that “the Liberty we knew” of, is “Avoided - like a
Dream - ” (Fr456, lines 1, 16, 29–30). As Wordsworth put it, in
1807, “Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room.” Freedom also
appears to exist only within, if not because of, the prison walls of
Beethoven’s Fidelio (1805), of Byron’s “The Prisoner of Chillon”
(1816). Dickinson’s four citations of Byron’s “Prisoner,” not so inci-
dentally, make this hopeful poem of high-Romantic aftermath the sin-
gle most-mentioned Romantic work in all of her letters and in all of
her prose fragments (see L233, L249, L293, L1042).11 Since one of
these citations occurs in a “Master” letter (L233), Dickinson appears
to have associated Romantic-era postexperience with just such a lost
beloved as Wadsworth.
In Dickinson’s definition, freedom emerges as her choice to do
something, anything, on the assumption that even within the pen-
umbra of her aftermath, the fact of her doing trumps the question
of whether or not her doing can ever grow meaningfully, truthfully
effectual.12

At leisure is the Soul

That gets a staggering Blow -
The Width of Life - before it spreads
Without a thing to do -
It begs you give it Work -
But just the placing Pins -
Or humblest Patchwork - Children do -
To still it’s noisy Hands -
(Fr683)
138 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

These lines concern “the woman in her dealings with Power” (Wendy
Martin 65), but the woman in quest of, and with residual faith in, the
abiding power of action, however unspectacular, speaks here, as well.
“At leisure is the Soul” suggests, by corollary, that the fact of doing
can constitute faith, perhaps even if the doing can appear ineffectual.
“Yet go,” Tennyson writes, in similar vein,

and while the holly boughs

Entwine the old baptismal font,
Make one Wreath more for Use and Wont,

for Tennyson parallels Dickinson’s insight that staying busy, simply

going through the motions, fills in for faltering faith (In Memoriam
29:9–11).
“The Soul / That gets a staggering Blow - ” says nothing. Thus,
Dickinson’s intimation in “At leisure is the Soul,” that the fact of
doing trumps the question of whether or not language proves effec-
tual, can appear to benefit, however ironically, however paradoxically,
from Carlyle’s vaunted preference for deeds over speech:

The cloudy-browed, thick-soled, opaque Practicality, with no logical

utterance, in silence mainly, with here and there a low grunt or growl,
has in him what transcends all logic-utterance: a Congruence with the
Unuttered. The Speakable, which lies atop, as a superficial film, or
outer skin, is his or not his: but the Doable, which reaches down to the
World’s centre, you find him there!13

Of course, Dickinson is not cloudy-browed or thick-soled. Still, like

Carlyle, and like Keats before him, the persona of “At leisure is the
Soul” all but explicitly places fine doing above fine writing.
The tension between Tennyson’s “practice . . . expert / In fitting
aptest words to things” (In Memoriam 75:5–6) and his logic of silence
also comes to mind here. What makes Tennyson more late-Romantic
than either high-Victorian or pre-Modern is the force of his prefer-
ence for life over art, his faith in experience. Thus Bloom rightly con-
cludes that “the Tennyson who counts for most is certainly a Romantic
poet, and not a Victorian anti-Romantic resembling the [belated]
Arnold of ‘Merope’ or the straining Hopkins of ‘The Wreck of the
Deutschland’” (Modern Critical Views 9). Bloom adds, with telling, if
amusing, near-redundancy, that Tennyson “is a major Romantic poet”
(Modern Critical Views 9). Emerson’s late-Romantic faith in experi-
ence, likewise, parallels the ironically stated preference for acts over
speech: “Central Unity [Emerson writes] is . . . conspicuous in actions.
 Despairing Hope 139

Words are finite organs of the infinite mind. They cannot cover the
dimensions of what is in truth. They break, chop, and impoverish it.
An action is the perfection and publication of thought. A right action
seems to fill the eye, and to be related to all nature” (“Nature” [1836]
in Murphy, ed. 1:843). The relation between what Emerson says here,
though not the voluble way he says it here, and the laconic style of the
Myth of Amherst constitutes a sense in which his imagination haunts
hers. Dickinson’s thus Emerson-linked conviction that “Publication -
is the Auction / Of the Mind of Man - ” (Fr788, lines 1–2) can
mean that genuine publication is not popular, sell-out, poetry, but
the unbought, unbuyable, deliberately chosen, and ultimately read-
able inwardness that precedes, accompanies, and ensures literature of
cohesive, lasting, and infinite truth.
The final quatrain of “I can wade Grief - ” provides perhaps the
best opportunity to drive home the presiding idea of Dickinson’s as
well as of Nietzsche’s postexperience—namely, that what does not kill
her makes her stronger:

Give Balm - to Giants -

And they’ll wilt, like Men -
Give Himmaleh -
They’ll carry - Him!
(Fr312, lines 13–16)

“Here Dickinson identifies power with pain, because, by means of

one’s own discipline, one can possess it” (Juhasz “Reading Doubly”
58). “Here Dickinson explicitly argues against accepting any surro-
gate: permit no one to suffer in your behalf, the poem entreats, for
when you seek to evade sorrow, you only relinquish the means to
strength. Even God’s mercy can be castrating” (Wolff 214–15). Thus
in “I can wade Grief - ” “pain strengthens and provides a stimulus
to extraordinary action, whereas prosperity debilitates and renders
ordinary” (John Cody 15). Pain that makes the Myth of Amherst
stronger resembles the painfully posttraumatic effort that goes into
the acquired and accruing strength of Atlas. To make the point in
religious terms, the pain of Dickinson’s aftermath proves tantamount
not so much to her natural grace as to what Wesley might describe as
her “responsible” grace—that is, the strenuous role that she elects to
play in her own salvation.14 Her balance between choosing and being
chosen—that is, her inquiring and acquiring grace—boasts in common
with Wesley’s responsible grace “The Fascination of What’s Difficult”
(Yeats’s title [1910]) about the experience of postexperience (the
140 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

Christian myth of the fall of man, after all, is the founding example of
aftermath in the West).
The fact that action turns out to be possible “after,” and in part
because of, as well as during, “great pain,” yields sublime, transcen-
dent nobility.

Superiority to Fate
Is difficult to gain
‘Tis not conferred of any
But possible to earn
A pittance at a time
Until to Her surprise
The Soul with strict economy
Subsist till Paradise.
(Fr1043)

Here, it is true, Dickinson “challenges the idea of having objectives

and seeking to reach them, of judging life by targets which are or
are not attained. Such purposefulness . . . makes someone vulnerable
to circumstance, whereas her hope . . . is that someone who manages
in different terms may be liberated” (Robinson 22). Nonetheless,
besides being oddly embedded in the past, as opposed to sounding
forward-looking, the quality of Dickinson’s hope lingers in the pres-
ence of difficult circumstances.
Lest one go too far toward imputing stoical, static stance to the
speaker of “Superiority to Fate,” Douglas Leonard reminds readers that
“[t]he poem is faithful, even in its equivocation, to Emerson’s concept
of self-reliance . . . The paradox still intrigues her: fate, necessity, and
chance are present and inescapable, yet the soul can achieve its own
will by constant striving” (“Emily Dickinson’s Religion” 340–41).
The poem modulates from philosophical to religious language. The
Calvinist/Arminian controversy of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, like the theological tendency of “Superiority to Fate,” pits
predestination against free will, and perhaps even tilts toward the
latter.15 The “arminianized Calvinism” of Dickinson’s day—that is,
the paradoxically strong-armed imposition of human choice on fore-
ordination—“softened the fundamental Calvinist dogma asserting
depraved man’s total dependence on God for salvation by allowing
for a person’s cooperation in the work of salvation through exercise of
free will” (Eberwein review 98). The Arminian, freewill ascendancy in
Dickinson’s thought and practice, as in Wadsworth’s, would be well
 Despairing Hope 141

worth revisiting, if any scholar should ever feel so inclined, or if the

next volume in this series ever gets written.16

* * *

Insofar as the speaker of these lines,

Paralysis - our Primer dumb

Unto Vitality -
(Fr284, lines 7–8)

and her fellow-sufferers from aftermath (witness “our”), are “dumb /

Unto Vitality - ,” Dickinson’s postexperience represents mute death-
in-life. To inflect these lines a different way, however, and to imply
paradoxical progression from the stunned silence to the determined
reticence to the eloquent incisiveness of the poet’s “post-experiential
perspective,” the persona and her others—for rich conversation
resumes here—are “dumb / Unto Vitality - .” Insofar as these six
words, “Paralysis - our primer dumb / Unto Vitality - ,” make up
the signature lines of the aftermath-subcategory of Emily Dickinson’s
works, even the “Paralysis” of aftermath can comprise a schoolbook
for living on, and so fits crucially, after all, into her experiential art of
knowledge as a whole.
The species of vitality specific to Dickinson’s experience of postex-
perience can look at once natural and spiritual:

Before I got my eye put out -

I liked as well to see
As other creatures, that have eyes -
And know no other way -
But were it told to me, Today,
That I might have the Sky
For mine, I tell you that my Heart
Would split, for size of me -
The Meadows - mine
The Mountains - mine -
All Forests - Stintless stars -
As much of noon, as I could take -
Between my finite eyes -
The Motions of The Dipping Birds -
The Morning’s Amber Road -
142 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

For mine - to look at when I liked,

The news would strike me dead -
So safer - guess - with just my soul
Opon the window pane
Where other creatures put their eyes -
Incautious - of the Sun -
(Fr336)

Whether or not these lines can seem increasingly intuitional, can

appear residually sense-based, or somehow both, one would not wish
to overestimate the optimistic outlook of the speaker. The poet’s
chief loss here remains “the faithless beloved” (Patterson Riddle
44). Equally downbeat, the “metaphorical (and perhaps occasion-
ally literal) blindness in this poem” functions, harking back to
Sophocles, “as a castration metaphor” (Gilbert and Gubar 595–96).
By implication, the persona sorely misses the direct physical sight
of whom she once knew, still loves. But Dickinson also suggests
here that “the superiority of insight over visual sight is given in the
claim that she now sees more when blinded than she did sighted”
(Robinson 65–66). Whichever kind of vision wins out, the speaker
saw much before, and continues to see much, through natural/
spiritual double-ness.
Thus the “sublimities of the household seer” come across as “more
authentic” than the sublimities she knew before (O’Hara 176–78).
The “two kinds of perception” implied by “Before I got my eye
put out - ”—namely, the experiential visual and the nonexperiential
intuitive—emerge as “ambiguities deliberately left unresolved” (Greg
Johnson 8–9). Despite, or in part because of, the conditional mood
of the middle stanzas, their intensity illustrates the poet’s new dis-
pensation of spiritual experience. And these 13 lines virtually restore
Dickinson’s world of sense experience.
The best paraphrase of Dickinson’s “sumptuous Destitution - ” has
come from Douglas Anderson. Anderson understands that Dickinson’s
postexperience is well attuned to natural and spiritual vitality. With
special sensitivity to “Before I got my eye put out - ,” he argues that
“the condition of perception that Dickinson describes . . . is both
something less and something more than ordinary human power”
(220–21). To clinch his balanced view, Anderson concludes: “To
maintain its poise between the remembered fact and the present mira-
cle of memory is the poet’s chief objective” (222). The chief glory of
the poem, Dickinson’s hopeful tone, grows out of, and depends on,
the perennial miracle of memory.
 Despairing Hope 143

Dickinson’s poems that follow upon her loss of Charles or of Sue

or of both, or of someone else such as William Smith Clark (Ruth
Owen Jones) or Judge Otis Lord (Walsh), or of something equally
momentous (natural religion? faith in God?), evince paradoxically an
emotion quite like happiness, if not beatitude. “Transport’s mighty
price is no more than he is worth” (L359). Dickinson suggests here
that ecstasy grows more valuable for its fleeting quality. The residue
of ecstasy (she implies) substitutes for the experience. One thinks, in
this connection, of Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquil-
ity,” or, as Keats would say, since joy ever bids adieu, bursting its grape
can extend its savor.17 Dickinson’s Wordsworth- and Keats-like phi-
losophy or science of aftermath excels Frost’s later nostalgia-inducing
view that “happiness makes up in height what it lacks in duration”
(“The Figure a Poem Makes” [1949]). Dickinson’s postexperience by
no means starves her, and perhaps even sustains her. If what remains
to the Myth of Amherst turns out to be only a strategy of survival or
of spiritual discipline, this plan transcends any mere defense mecha-
nism against manic depression or, for that matter, against just plain
depression.
Do Dickinson’s close encounters of this remnant kind revive
her late-Romantic soul? Do her high-Romantic “Superior instants”
(Fr630, line 1), when her heart, like Wordsworth’s, leaps for joy (com-
pare “My Heart Leaps Up” [1802]), extend to the late Romanticism
of her aftermath? Quite possibly, yes to both questions, for, from
moment to moment, and not simply from time to time, the poetic
personae of her “sumptuous Destitution - ” can illustrate the paradox
of their posttraumatic hope. Though fallen from the grace of experi-
ence, it is felix culpa, for these speakers expect the world to lie all
before them, anyway. Thus, they can bear the resonance of, can aspire
to the animated suspension between, despair and hope, not unlike
John Milton’s postlapsarian couple.
The lingering effect of Dickinson’s loves equates to abundant rec-
ompense for her losses. As her contemporary Tennyson declares, in
perhaps his keenest anticipation of her works,

’Tis better to have loved and lost

Than never to have loved at all.
(In Memoriam 27:15–16)

“Quoted by now into meaninglessness,” observes Peltason of these

lines, “they evidence an important new understanding. The end of
experience is not the sum of experience or the only source of meaning.
144 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

The poet has loved and he has lost, but the second of these has not
canceled out the first” (61). The epilogue to In Memoriam rejoices
that “love is more / Than in the summers that are flown” (lines
17–18). Tennyson adds,

I myself with these have grown

To something greater than before. (Lines 19–20)

Even the Tennyson who has loved and lost, and not just Tennyson in
his ecstasy, assumes the efficacy of natural, if not spiritual, experience.
In like manner, even the Dickinson of aftermath, and not just the
Dickinson whose heart leaps high, cultivates the faith that time and
experience can define character. Time and experience can make us
know our selves, as Wordsworth implies, in

the world
Of all of us,—the place where in the end
We find our happiness, or not at all!
(The Prelude [1850] 11:142–44)

—and let us commit these 20 most Dickinson-pertinent words that

Wordsworth ever wrote to memory.
In short, Emily Dickinson’s poems about “post-experiential per-
spective” include experience. George Bernard Shaw, as though he,
too, thought of writing as living, had an answer for those bemused
by the fact that his love for actress Ellen Terry consisted entirely of
his 25 years’ worth of letters to her: “Let those who may complain
that it was all on paper remember that only on paper has humanity yet
achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love”
(qtd. in Peters 159). Dickinson’s poetry of aftermath, at any rate,
contributes a greater degree of dramatic urgency than of either/or
logic to the perennial debate between art and life. As evidenced even
in these lyrics, as well as in the darkest hours of her letters and of
her prose fragments, her ongoing “afterlife” can stay far from being
merely unalloyed grimness. It can become, if not exactly an overrun-
ning cup, then new life, at least.
On the evidence of Dickinson’s set pieces of aftermath, specifically,
the physical absence of Wadsworth and of Susan Dickinson enhances
their ghostly power in the poet’s imagination. Notwithstanding
Pollak’s persuasive view that Emily Dickinson’s loss of the two great
relationships of her life creates an “awful Vacuum” in her art (Fr887,
line 3), Dickinson’s continuing, if only imaginary, experience of
 Despairing Hope 145

Charles and of Sue proves almost more than merely metaphorical,

and perhaps even partly positive (Pollak Anxiety 190–221). In fact,
all manner of others and of otherness abides in her imagination, not
just as anticipation or sustaining memory, but even as presence or
revivifying force. An awe-filled vacuum, after all, signifies, if not the
fulfilled potential of Dickinson’s optimism, then the mysterious possi-
bility held in reserve for her by her hope. Whatever “fallings from us,”
whatever “vanishings,” she might appear previously to have incurred,
including her strained but enduring friendship or star-crossed love for
Charles or for Sue, the poet whose life seems to have passed her by
appears yet to enjoy her life (compare Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations
of Immortality,” line 143).
Dickinson’s “sumptuous Destitution - ,” like her late-Romantic
imagination, resounds with her mimetic as well as expressive convic-
tion that, as Emerson prefigures it in his own blend of the ideal and
the actual, “[m]y book should smell of pines and reverberate with
the hum of insects” (“Self-Reliance” [1842] in Murphy, ed., 1:899).
Just as Emerson’s “smell of pines” pertains to Dickinson’s “old house
under the pines” (Bianchi Life and Letters 27), so the rich strangeness
of this aroma serves to evoke the nonverbal or preverbal aspect of
her continuing experience. Just as Emerson’s “hum of insects” rever-
berates as the “spectral Canticle” of Dickinson’s lines entitled “My
Cricket” (Fr895, line 11), so this entomological music signals the ver-
bal and aesthetic character of her continuing experience. Contrary to
the solipsism of her times, and of Modernism and post-Modernism,
Dickinson’s signature conundrum of “sumptuous Destitution - ”
views the external world as more than a window on her soul—that is,
as an objective correlative to her desire and to her cognition.
Striking a balance between comparison and contrast, Jed Deppman’s
take on Dickinson’s foretelling of post-Modernism allows for her
active, connected subjectivity. While “post-Modern theory makes vis-
ible important aspects of her work,” Deppman points out, she “played
more seriously, engaged more sharply with . . . vocabularies, and had
more all-around faith in the agency of the writer than does your
average post-Modern” (Trying to Think 87). Dickinson’s poetry of
aftermath, accordingly, scarcely prevents her from reexpressing, with
however subtle or muted a tone, the perennial Western belief that
life remains well worth living and perhaps even quite full of promise.
By reopening personal access to otherness through others, and vice
versa, even Dickinson’s postexperiential perspective revamps, in par-
ticular, the foundational strategy whereby the naturalized imagina-
tion of her poetry in general grasps what Tennyson calls the mystery
146 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

of “all in all” (compare Tennyson, “Flower in the Crannied Wall”

[1869], line 5).
Despite whatever traumas of aesthetic crisis, flawed epistemology,
challenged faith, or fading friendship have crossed her mind, soul,
and heart, Dickinson’s paradox that less of one thing means more
of another, and perhaps even an ongoing version of that one thing,
reflects and re-sounds the ultimate Western conundrum of felix culpa.
Her strangely maximal minimalism—that is, the harder her fall, the
more her grace—emerges from, entails, and augurs her experience,
as well as that of the 34 poetic personae presented in this chapter.
Notwithstanding such destructively and deconstructively skepti-
cal poems in this category as “I like a look of Agony” (Fr339) and
“Severer Service of myself” (Fr887)—to read them is to weep—her art
of aftermath bids scant farewell to her life. On the contrary, although
the Dickinson of postexperience “see[s],” with Wordsworth, only
“by glimpses now,” “the hiding-places of [her] power,” like those of
Wordsworth’s, “Return upon [her]” nonetheless,

enshrining,
Such is her hope, the spirit of the Past
For future restoration.
(The Prelude [1850] 12:279, 281, 284–86)

Such harking back links the present to the past, and the present and the
past to the future. Her definition of “Retrospection” as “Prospect’s
half, / Sometimes, almost more - ” (Fr1014, lines 7–8) fits the “defini-
tion” of her poetic definitions as “the universal, structural, and essen-
tial aspects of an experience” (Deppman “‘I Could Not’” 53). That is,
a given definition expressed even during Dickinson’s aftermath repre-
sents not just her inward life—not just “the consciousness of the one
involved in the experience,” whether “the one” be Dickinson herself,
her aesthetic self-projection, or her reader—but also such outward
circumstances as those that exist in memory and in expectation (53).
The lyric in which Dickinson’s language of prospective retrospec-
tion explicitly occurs proves conclusive with regard to understanding
both her own experience of postexperience and that of the others in
her social circle:

This was in the White of the Year -

That - was in the Green -
Drifts were as difficult then to think
As Daisies now to be seen -
 Despairing Hope 147

Looking back, is best that is left

Or if it be - before -
Retrospection is Prospect’s half,
Sometimes, almost more -
(Fr1014)

Dickinson sent this poem to her Norcross cousins in 1865; it prob-

ably refers to the deaths of their father and mother. The poem scarcely
glosses over the challenge posed by pessimism. “The d alliteration and
the short syllables suggest the difficulty which her thought strives to
express, and the auxiliaries are used for their contribution to the [bro-
ken or mournful] effect she is expressing” (Scherrer 40). On the other
hand, Dickinson’s description of retrospection as prospective allows
Frances and Louise Norcross some consolation. If only through the
green thoughts of green shades that spring, following the winter of
grief, can offer, the poem intimates natural, if not spiritual, immortal-
ity. The capitalization in the penultimate line suggests that the only
seemingly receded earthly lives of the Norcross parents “roll round”
in the white-and-green of “earth’s diurnal course” (Wordsworth’s lan-
guage), and perhaps even appear in the rayless, presence-of-all-color
light of the stars, “pinnacled dim,” that is, in Shelley’s astronomically
transcendent “white radiance of Eternity.”18

* * *

If Wadsworth’s aphorism “The grand secret of contentment is found,

not in increasing our supplies—but in diminishing our necessities”
was food for Dickinson’s thought, she played with this notion in
her own way. For example, her arrival at “Quartz contentment, like
a stone - ” (Fr372, line 9) reflects Wadsworth’s modest goal, but
the signature lyric of aftermath in which these words of hers occur—
namely, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes”—does so more
imaginatively. Dickinson rarely makes more than a reluctant, uneasy
peace with any such strict injunction against self-indulgence, for even
such an otherwise similarly destitute poem of aftermath as “I felt a
Funeral, in my Brain” (Fr340) can appear to fall on the hopeful side
of “sumptuous Destitution - .” Of course, the last words of “I felt a
Funeral”—namely, “I . . . finished knowing - then - ”—can mean that
the speaker is cut off, obliterated by death. Still, this speaker’s cryptic
bow-out can also signify his/her “Finished”—that is, accomplished/
perfected (as well as truncated)—“knowing” at the end of life (line
20). Does Dickinson thus write “finis” to her alternately, nay, her at
148 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

once, experiential and postexperiential art of knowledge, as though her

infinite yearning were at long last satisfied and the rest were silence? Is
this wise speaker-from-the-grave ready, now, for revelation in his/her
afterlife, as though there were such a restrospective prospect in store
for him/her, after all?
Although Dickinson’s “dearest earthly friend” counsels his con-
gregation that straitened circumstances can build character, the poet
would go further than the preacher. For Dickinson, less of one person
or thing, however unwelcome the diminishment, signifies expecta-
tion—signals presence—of someone or of something else, purified by
adversity. Her unfulfilled need leads, meanwhile, to surprising com-
patibility between material want/physical desire and moral/spiritual
community. As philosopher Gaston Bachelard concludes, as though in
dialogue with Wadsworth/Dickinson, “The attainment of the super-
fluous causes a greater spiritual excitement than the attainment of
necessities. Man is a creature of desire and not a creature of need” (qtd.
in Donoghue “Discreet Charms” 91). Dickinson would agree, for her
“sumptuous Destitution - ” alleviates misgivings of “blank desertion”
(compare Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” line 144).
Dickinson’s choice of renunciation cultivates deep hopefulness. Thus,
as opposed to merely illustrating the experience of being a recluse, the
Myth of Amherst embodies experience.
Dickinson’s gnomic equivalent to high-Romantic inference of inti-
mation from recollection—that is, her definition of “Retrospection”
as “Prospect’s half, / Sometimes, almost more - ”—culturally as well
as personally equates looking backward and looking forward. Her
faith in progress deepens as her looking backward yields a sense of
historical immediacy and prophetic foreknowledge. Not even her
speakers of aftermath, aware as they are of collective human experi-
ence, finally commit the collective sin of pure nostalgia, the enemy of
hope. Rather, their “historiography” outhistoricizes Hegel. That is,
Dickinson avoids the nemesis of cyclical monotony. To echo Hobbes,
she understands time and experience as naturally inexorable, if not
spiritually efficacious. This Dickinson, as this chapter has tried to show,
appears all the more dynamically paradoxical for becoming Anglo-
American Romantic in hindsight, as well as pre-Modern in foresight.
As much as anti-Romantic signs of Victorian-American belated-
ness, and as much as ominous fragments shored against pre-Modern
ruins, Dickinson’s most prescient poems prove to be remnants saved
by late-Romantic hope. To quote Robert Langbaum’s phrase for
the lyric expression that began in the early nineteenth century and
extended far into the twentieth, “the poetry of experience” jibes with,
 Despairing Hope 149

and includes, Dickinson’s poetry of aftermath, as well as the more

straightforwardly experiential poetry sampled in part I of this book.
Especially the last phrase of John Updike’s statement of novel-reading
goals—“What we seek, gropingly, in fiction, is enlargement, a glo-
rification of the furtive and secret and seemingly trivial, a valoriza-
tion of human experience” (108; emphasis added)—applies, as well,
to the entire body of Dickinson’s lyrical works. Thus, although even
the best moments of her “post-experiential perspective” scarcely
rival the “Superior instants - ” of her poetry of full-blown experi-
ence (Fr630, line 1), her poetry of aftermath nonetheless earns well
the not-so-muted optimism of outcome that augurs further harvest.
These personae, too, share Wordsworth’s deliciously vague sense of
“something evermore about to be,” of an imminence that includes,
in Dickinson’s case, not just auspicious engagement with past and
present but even the prospect of an afterlife perhaps more vivid than
Wordsworth’s “intimations of immortality” themselves. Dickinson’s
poetic personae of “sumptuous Destitution - ” play on, and hence
they also keep in play, the religious as well as philosophical and scien-
tific coordinates of her art of knowledge.
Although the double perspective of Dickinson’s late-Romantic
imagination achieves her strongest combination of natural models
with spiritual metaphors, and although this counterintuition champi-
ons both the androgynous ideal of her nineteenth-century feminism
and her provisional belief in immortality, her “post-experiential per-
spective” riddles with special skill, including a unique grasp of oxymo-
ron. Notwithstanding the decidedly un-sumptuous enervation of their
pre-Modern mode and the relentlessly antisumptuous anomie of their
post-Modern intimations, her speakers of “sumptuous Destitution - ”
reap the bracing harvest of bald, cold truth, and revive her hope-
against-hope, if not precisely Wordsworth’s hope-after-hope. Though
without ever quite professing Experiential Faith, and though only
sometimes reengendering her all-seasons as well as late-Romantic
dialogue between joyful wisdom and spiritual wealth, Dickinson’s
personae of aftermath yet “dwell in Possibility - ” of abundant life.
The rich conversation among Dickinson’s aesthetic self-projections,
her literary precursors and contemporaries, and her friends and loved
ones occurs perhaps especially in her poems of despairing hope, defin-
ing intriguingly, and against the odds, the possibility of personal access
to others through otherness, and vice versa. Yes, Dickinson can form
a party of one, like Milton’s Abdiel. She rarely parties alone, how-
ever, not even through her only seemingly noncommunitarian poetry
of aftermath. Thus, like the speaker of “The Soul selects her own
150 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

Society - ,” she can “Choose One,” that is, can pick not just herself
alone, and not just one other person besides herself, but a “Society”
of at least two others besides herself (see Fr409, line 10, and please
recall the discussion in the introduction to this book). That latter,
larger society is—even within the realm of her postexperience—made
up of multitudes that she contains—namely, her personae and those
of many real people besides. Thus, just as Dickinson’s word society
pertains to Locke’s social contract and Wesley’s societies alike, while
at the same time harking back to the Royal Society, so this key term
embodies her philosophical and scientific, if not spiritual communion,
perhaps all the way through her works, and not just in her poetry of
experience.
The frequent literary references in this chapter have suggested,
then, that Dickinson knew Romantic-era authors well, and, in any
case, these quotations, as dialogue with her letters and poems,
have surely proved telling here. The desirability of juxtaposing, say,
Shelley’s love poetry with hers, inheres in the common frames of tonal
and thematic reference that have by now become clear between the
Romantics and the Myth of Amherst. True, among the master figures
of Anglo-American Romanticism whom this chapter makes primary,
Blake, Coleridge, Shelley, and Carlyle receive no mention in her 1,049
letters (she wrote many more, though) and 124 prose fragments (so
much, then, for any significance to Carlyle on her wall?).19 And yet,
the letters name Tennyson four times (L23, L243, L320, L616) and
Emerson eight times (L30, L330, L353, L457, L481, L486, L750,
L962). The letters and prose fragments quote Wordsworth three
times (L96, L315, L398), Byron three times (L233, L249, L293),
Tennyson four times (L353, L486, L506, L801), and Emerson five
times (L436, L794, L823, L1004, PF116), as well as alluding to
Wordsworth once (L400), Byron once (L1042), and Emerson twice
(L269, PF10). Her poetry of aftermath, like her works in general but
more subtly, participates in Romanticism with particular affinities for
Wordsworth. For instance, this important subcategory of her work,
like a major strain of Wordsworth’s verse, resolves itself into

joy! That in our embers

Is something that doth live,

and so makes interiority and language integral to experience (compare

Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” lines 129–30).
Dickinson’s personae of “sumptuous Destitution - ,” accordingly,
go beyond mere intuition of familiar near-nihilism. They aspire to the
 Despairing Hope 151

more than simply “poetic” faith espoused among the most optimis-
tic of her speakers. Her late-Romantic, anti-Victorian art differs from
Arnold’s anti-Romantic, high-Victorian

Wandering between two worlds, one dead,

The other powerless to be born.
(Arnold, “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse”
[1855], lines 85–86)

Dickinson’s “postexperiential perspective” revives one world in order

to grace the other’s “growing gloom” (compare Hardy, “The Darkling
Thrush” [1900], line 24).
In sum, according to this occasionally ironic but rarely anti-Roman-
tic reading of Dickinson’s poetry of aftermath, this canon-within-the-
canon sometimes nearly regains the very paradise that the poet’s more
tender singing almost never loses.20 Dickinson’s pre-Modern mode, if
not her post-Modern intimations, in fact, overlaps her late-Romantic
imagination at the very point, perhaps, where her faith in experience
resets her experience of faith (but this is largely a matter for the future
book to look at). On the one hand, her “formal feeling” of “great pain”
connotes closed-system, nothing-outside-the-text nihilism, thereby
denoting the slough of her pre-Modern despond wherein, metaphori-
cally speaking, she wonders stiffly whether or not to eat a peach. Her
bleaker confession of this feeling presounds, if not the Modern to
post-Modern cry of Sisyphean futility, then “the atonal banshee of the
emerging egomania called The Modern” (A. N. Wilson 12). On the
other hand, to inflect her phrase differently, the “formal feeling” that
follows “great pain” might, just might, relieve it, as well as constitute
heartache, uncertainty, doubt, or silence. Her grander confession of
this feeling, even according to the set pieces of aftermath considered
throughout this and the previous chapter, plays again, re-sounds, the
old, sweet, Romantic song of love, joy, and hope. Dickinson’s “post-
experiential perspective” defamiliarizes itself, opens her very aftermath
from within, to wise, well-earned, and anything but foolish optimism,
alert to the intimation of undying hope.
 Conclus ion

To recapitulate: Emily Dickinson’s rich conversation with her pre-

cursors and contemporaries in Anglo-American belles lettres, first of
all, counts as her dialogical inspiration. In effect, she took her cue
from the lower case orthography and the inductive modesty of Charles
Lamb’s scientific label for William Wordsworth’s poetry: “natural
methodism.” Accordingly, she turned down the volume of Ralph
Waldo Emerson’s revival idiom and grounded his Transcendentalism in
the senses. More succinctly than her counterparts in Anglo-American
Romanticism, she laid the strengths and weaknesses of sifting and
weighing data (“I ponder, and I cannot ponder,” as William Blake’s
Thel puts it) alongside subjective and intersubjective values for doing
so (“yet I live and love,” as Blake’s Thel adds; compare The Book of
Thel [1789], Plate 5, line 6). Thus, before Wallace Stevens, Emily
Dickinson discovered “what will suffice”—that is, again to apply the
language of Blake to her case, she found religion “Too much” and
science just “Enough!”1
Emily Dickinson’s rich conversation with the likes of John Locke,
John Wesley, Charles Wadsworth, and Charles Darwin, moreover,
enriched her art of knowledge, as distinct from her “art of belief.”
At a distance, she took her cue from Locke, for, notwithstanding her
poet’s natural headiness, she defined thoughts as inseparable from,
and as in partnership with, sense perception. She harbored nostal-
gia for the sense-favoring faith of Wesley and of Wadsworth, but, as
opposed to keeping that faith whole in the “holiness” of her “heart’s
affections,”2 her bracing realism traded the transatlantic revivalists’
will to believe in the supernatural, the miraculous, for the uncertainty
and mystery of experience. Her admiration for Darwin, whose evo-
lutionary biology scourged religion (despite his reluctance to have
done so), confirmed her toughness.3 Consistent with the Higher
Criticism of sacred texts, Dickinson’s empirical voice called the Bible
to account, and into question.4 She brought the presiding idea of the
transatlantic revival—namely, the spiritual sense—closer to science
than Wesley and Wadsworth did. Since she could not at the same
time rely on experience and profess faith, and since she could not
154 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

compartmentalize the two (as though they were “non-overlapping

magisteria”), she tended to choose the former over the latter.5 Yet
empirical philosophy and physical and life science yielded freer play
among the subjects of her poetry than all the forms of faith in her
English-language milieu.
Dickinson’s methodical imagination, then, did not envision things
unseen but searched out things seen in the company of Experiment,
the guide of all natural enthusiasts like her. The signature poem
of her art of knowledge, “Experiment escorts us last - ” (Fr1181),
puts searching out things seen at the top of her readers’ lists of proce-
dures to apply at will, and to good effect. Her word us means those
among her partners-in-discussion who would follow not the “wise
passiveness” but the wise activity of Emily Dickinson herself. The
poem suggests that Anglo-Americans from the Enlightenment to the
Romantic era would have echoed, perhaps even as her readers still
can, the four indelible words of that savvy first line (and title) of this
lyric. In agreement with the “pungent company” (Fr1181, line 2)
of her literary, philosophical, religious, and scientific ancestors and
coevals, Dickinson enlisted the hard truths of sense-based reason and
of sense-driven method on the side of aesthetic complexity and sat-
isfaction. She appeared braver than the visionary company she kept
in England and in New England. Far from being as rootless as, say,
an orchid, the “Columnar Self - ” on which she “amply rel[ied]”
(Fr740, line 2) was well grounded in her English-speaking milieu,
steeped in reason and the senses as these British Enlightenment fac-
ulties modulated into Romantic Anglo-America. Especially richly did
she converse with Keats, whose “Negative Capability,” whose “con-
dition of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irri-
table reaching after fact & reason,” intensified how she dwelt in the
possibility of all things natural, while at the same time holding out
hope of some things spiritual.
“Experiment escorts us last - ,” significantly, declares Dickinson’s
dialogical intent. Through her “common” sense, reporting her expe-
rience and learning from the experience of others, her concept of
science as group effort adumbrated Modern- to post-Modern-era
cooperation among cognitive scientists in particular.6 Her poetry
invites readers less to put things to the test than to try them out, and
hence to answer the call of “Love” “to the things of this world,” not
in bland reconciliation of these things, but with “sustained tension,
without victory or suppression, of co-present oppositions.”7 At the
same time that Dickinson’s imagery feels rich and strange, she would
have “us” realize that her metaphors stay natural, or, as Rainer Maria
 Conclusion 155

Rilke puts it, just as though he were summing up a presiding idea of

Emily Dickinson’s art,

To see landscape thus, as something distant and foreign, something

remote and unloving, something entirely self-contained, was neces-
sary, if it was ever to be a medium and an occasion for an autonomous
art; for it had to be distant and very different from us, if it was to be
capable of becoming a redemptive symbol for our fate. It had to be
almost hostile in its sublime indifference, if it was to give new meaning
to our existence . . . For we began to understand Nature only when we
no longer understood it; when we felt that it was the Other, indiffer-
ent toward men, which has no wish to let us enter, then for the first
time we stepped outside of Nature, alone, out of the lonely world.
(“Concerning Landscape” [1902], qtd. in Rilke xxv)

Thus, although Dickinson and Wordsworth would perhaps have

found Nature no less mysterious for being somewhat less alien, if not
more sociable, than Rilke’s, she would have “us” rest content, like
Wordsworth and like Rilke, with “see[ing] into the life of things”
(compare Wordsworth, “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern
Abbey” [1798], line 49). Dickinson could only infrequently embrace
the religious explanation, the solace, which Tennyson tended to par-
rot. Unlike some of her companions in dialogue, Dickinson could
not justify the ways of God to man as much as she would have liked.
She would have applied the principle of natural selection as a means of
separating out the timid from her society, theodicean chapter.
Dickinson’s poetry of philosophy and of science would have tough-
ened the minds of her favorite and otherwise kindred belletristic
authors of the Anglo-American world, for it is uncannily as though
she read all works by Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats,
Carlyle, Tennyson, and Emerson, and they hers. Her core strategy of
realism constituted her countermove to their temperamentally tender
gambit. In accord with Wordsworth’s signature predicate, she could
“see into the life of things” with the best of them. However, she drew
back from the pathetic, anthropomorphic fallacy committed by the
Romantic era—that is, “the treatment of inanimate objects as if they
had human feelings, thoughts, or sensations,” as in “the sea is angry at
us.”8 Does Wordsworth’s word life, as applied to things, falsify the non-
human world, and flatter human-centered agendas in it, as Dickinson
appears to ask him? And as she appears to wonder, in response to his
six-word imperative see into the life of things, do inanimate objects only
seem to possess life, by leave not so much of Wordsworth’s egotistical
sublimity as of his delusions of grandeur? Finally, are lifeless things, on
156 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

the one hand, and living beings who are dying, on the other, unpo-
etic, as Dickinson appears to query Wordsworth?
Dickinson brightened and sharpened the sepia of Wordsworth
et al., though she would have recognized, with Kipling, that such a
romanticized, brownish tint was “a sweet material to work with” (see
the definition of sepia in the OED). For her repertoire of realism, she
heightened the particularism of the Romantics. She tempered their
elevation of the human. Despite some evidence to the contrary, like
the opening, yet not the closing, lines of “Of Bronze - and Blaze - ”
(Fr 319), she rejected their apotheosis of humankind, except that her
Darwin-like assessment of “Retrospect” and “Prospect” (Fr1014, line
7) intensified the somber dignity of Homo sapiens, however ironic
Darwin-“Prospect” might appear. In effect, she returned her liter-
ary precursors and contemporaries to their homegrown, grounded
vision, eradicating the air-plant of their borrowed French rationalism
and of their imported German idealism. She reaffirmed her heritage of
imagining that mind mattered more for not being the location of all
reality. Her “natural methodism” wore as well as, perhaps even better
than, Wordsworth’s. If “she had the best mind of all our poets, early
and late,” she could outthink him, and perhaps even outobserve him
(compare Bloom Western Canon 300).
“Experiment escorts us last - ” signifies, above all, that Dickinson’s
poetry of philosophy and of science edges out her more religion-
poised lyrics. The latter seek the evidence of things not seen, yet
finally fail to find it: like the all-penetrating eye of Wordsworth, and
of Darwin, too, the former can “see into the life of things,” well and
truly. “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower /
Drives [Dickinson’s] green age,” to coopt the language of Dylan
Thomas, yet scarcely dwells above her (compare Thomas, “The Force
that through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower” [1934], lines 1–2).
Without necessarily calling all unseen things into doubt (to “see into
the life of things,” after all, can be to look for something vital, yet
hidden, behind, beneath, or within things), Dickinson’s verbal self-
projections submit system and creed to the point blank, piercing test
of experience. This Dickinson kills, puts out of its misery, what was
already moribund.
Dickinson’s Wordsworth-like “language of the sense,” in con-
sequence, rivals that of Locke, Wesley, Wadsworth, Darwin et al.
(compare Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey,” line 108). Her imagina-
tion directed Ockham’s razor to the empirically charged, experiment-
attuned model of spiritual experience devised by Wesley and developed
by Wadsworth. Her close-shaven art scarcely emulated the fuzzy
 Conclusion 157

plenitude of the Anglo-American religion of the heart. However

much he wished to join the congregation, Hardy’s persona, too,
could neither share what those people appeared to feel, nor see what
they seemed to envision (compare Hardy, “The Impercipient (At a
Cathedral Service)” [1898]). Neither biblical testimony nor spiritual
witness, however desired or desirable, either could soften or was even
needed to cushion the rough paradise of the world gathered for her
select society by the narrow but wide-ranging hands of the Myth of
Amherst.
Of course, the skip from sense base to sense analogy might con-
ceivably have closed the gap between experience and faith. Still,
the abrupt sleight-of-hand fell short, as far as Emily Dickinson was
concerned. Her art of knowledge subsisted on, and consisted of,
experience eschewing the leap of faith. Her “art of belief” remained
apart, despite her yearning to reconcile her empirical voice with
her evangelical vernacular. The former augmented, and the latter
waned, as her career progressed. In the end, she resisted the temp-
tation to synthesis. Did her faith in experience outlast her religious
belief? Whatever the answer, her experience of faith visited her works
by fits and starts, like Shelley’s inconstant “Power” in “Hymn to
Intellectual Beauty” (1817).
To be sure, Dickinson’s poetry of experience could yield to her
poetry of postexperience, of aftermath, which preempted, and tried
with some limited success to solve in advance, the Modern-era poet’s
dilemma concerning “what to make of a diminished thing” (compare
Frost, “The Oven Bird” [1916], line 14). Before Hardy, Dickinson
felt “growing gloom,” for, philosophically speaking, she foresaw that
“the experience of the real hinges on a constant preparedness to distrust
experience” (Pfau 21; Pfau’s emphasis). Religiously speaking, similarly,
her “lost saints” prefigured “fragments” and “ruins” of the Modern
soul’s world.9 Scientifically speaking, she anticipated what Roland
Barthes would soon enough come to say—namely, that “Method,
too, is a fiction” (qtd. in Thirlwell 28). The Romantic to Modern col-
loquy in which Dickinson’s poetry spoke, in both directions, included
her pre-Modern mode, her foreboding of attenuated epistemology,
desiccated spirit, and illusory knowledge. Nevertheless, though it rep-
resents her most pessimistic mood and an eye-catching, now-fashion-
able subset of her poems besides, even her poetry of postexperience,
of aftermath, reflected the vitality of her poetry as a whole. Thus,
although her testimony that “I find ecstasy in living” (L342a) can
seem to whistle in the dark, her wisdom that “The mere sense of liv-
ing is joy enough” (L342a) contributed “abundant recompense” to
158 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

her imperfect, flawed knowledge, and perhaps even ample consolation

for the loss of her childhood saints (compare Wordsworth, “Tintern
Abbey,” line 88). This wisdom survived in her aftermath, where her
fading but persistent sense of joy could no longer simply drown her
sorrow, yet where it still preserved, however barely, both her optimism
and her hope.
Yes, the Romantic to Modern colloquy in which Dickinson’s
poetry played a leading role—how decisively she weighed in on this
conversation!—came late to anxiety about science. Robert Burton’s
Anatomy [or Science] of Melancholy (1621), after all, foreshadowed
how, in the works of Donne, Swift, and Johnson, the “new philosophy
[science] calls all in doubt” (Donne’s language). Consistent with the
nineteenth-century genius for doubt, however, Dickinson’s disquiet
signaled as much of a crisis of faith in empiricism as of a crisis of faith
in faith or, for that matter, of a predicament of love. She always exer-
cised enough trust in science for Experiment to check her on-again,
off-again religious belief. And Knowledge Avenue, for her, intersected
with Aftermath Byway. On that smaller road, if only near that impor-
tant junction, she came to view nostalgia for her “lost saints” as mis-
placed, unhealthy emotion, the enemy of hope. Notwithstanding the
numbed senses, the paralyzing effect, of her pre-Modern mode, her
poetry of postexperience, of aftermath, offered a remnant of sense-
based reason, saved a share of sense-driven method. Dickinson’s
personae of postexperience could therefore join her speakers of expe-
rience at the nerve center of a Romantic to Modern choral company
that sang of philosophical effort and of scientific expectation alike.
Perhaps the biggest payoff of Dickinson’s retro/pro position on the
arc from Romantic to Modern is the complex, aesthetically satisfying
quality of her optimism, her hope. At least as decisively as Coleridge
embraced melancholy (Eric G. Wilson reads him thus), Dickinson
rejected “the willed and willful, feel-good optimism” of Benjamin
Franklin and of “the Prozac nation” that sought, and still seeks, to drive
all unhappiness out of consciousness, and into Disney-fied lobotomy-
land.10 Although her enchanting lack of guile can substitute for simple
happiness, “the true path to ecstatic joy” for Dickinson, as for her lit-
erary precursors, contemporaries, and heirs, lay through what Wilson
calls the “acute melancholia” of all these writers (compare Eric G.
Wilson Against 146). As opposed to the mere happiness that tries to
stand alone, “the deep power of joy” dwells with, and within, “world-
sorrow,” or so Dickinson appears to have thought, as though, in a
stroke of genius rivaling the British Renaissance invention of tragi-
comedy, she conflated Wordsworth’s phrase with Hopkins’s term.11
 Conclusion 159

To typify her conversation with Keats, and to locate her melancholia

in his (as well as in that of her Modern to post-Modern descendants),
her “sumptuous Destitution - ” “glut[s]” her sorrow “on a morning
rose,” drowns her sorrow in joy.12 Her “sumptuous Destitution - ”
more than merely wallows in the lugubrious Victorian mindset, nor
does this signature conundrum, proto-Modern, just shore fragments
of existential richness against the ruins of her bereaved psyche. Rather,
Dickinson’s role in the Romantic to Modern colloquy focuses, too,
on her traditional (not just prescient) melancholia that paradoxically
keeps Romantic-era hope for the here and now alive, however barely.
Dickinson’s late-Romantic imagination, finally, overlapped her
pre-Modern mode and her post-Modern intimations, and thus the
Romantic to Modern arc described continuity as well as contrast. Her
recognition of doom and gloom, perhaps even as this pessimism of
hers originated in the era of high Romanticism, matched her remi-
niscence of high-Romantic hope and progress, perhaps even enough
to extend her optimism in attenuated form to the Modern era. Of
course, Dickinson’s despair bears on Modern-era hopelessness. Still,
her epistemological robustness and scientific brio not only thrived
on Romantic-era optimism but also survived in Modern-era hope-
against-hope (this wan emotion struggled against Great War horror
and reeled from Titanic/iceberg convergence).13 Dickinson’s faith
in experience hovered near her poetry of postexperience insofar as
her bald, cold truths held as tightly in her pre-Modern mode as her
clothed, warm truths in her late-Romantic imagination. Accordingly,
as though Dickinson agreed with Tennyson’s (by this point even
more) familiar sentiment that

‘Tis better to have loved and lost

Than never to have loved at all,

the continuing presences or afterlives of Susan Dickinson and of Charles

Wadsworth in Dickinson’s poems of aftermath leavened the poet’s pes-
simism there. Thus, as distinct from lamenting lost friends and loved
ones as high-Romantic Beethoven did in his mood of aftermath—hear
his “An die Ferne Geliebte,” “To the Distant Beloved” (1816)—some
of the most mournful words of Dickinson’s poems of postexperience
can define new bounds of love.14 Even these lyrics can promise mean-
ing, and perhaps even knowledge and truth, as distinct from forebod-
ing meaninglessness.
Can sons and daughters of Anglo-America still hear the woes, yet
echo the sighs, of Dickinson’s personae of aftermath? Can her posterity
160 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

reflect, affect retroactively, the living embers of her hope, as expressed

in these poems of her postexperience? Whether or not, in the spirit
of her rich conversation, the answer to both of these questions is yes,
her theme of aftermath can nonetheless illustrate her most mine-able
ore at the present time. Its less-is-more subject matter can appeal to
Modern- and post-Modern-era minimalism, at the same time that
the metaphorical half-life of her poetry of postexperience can temper,
relieve, and perhaps even substitute for, the literal-mindedness of now
rampant fundamentalism. Such a potential benefit of dialogue with
the Myth of Amherst can live in, and revive, one’s dreams.
Can Dickinson’s fellow-feeling for her literary precursors, contem-
poraries, and heirs contain the seed of one’s own resilience? George
Steiner epitomized so much of what this book has tried to argue that
extensive quotation from his Errata: An Examined Life (1999) is
needed here. First, like Dickinson, Steiner poses the question of opti-
mism and of hope, despite, or in part because of, his understanding of
pessimism and of despair:

An irrefutable realism [Steiner writes] empowers the archaic Greek pos-

tulate whereby “It is best not to be born and next best to die young,”
old being, with so very few exceptions, a malodorous waste, an incon-
tinence of mind and body made raw by the remembrance of the unful-
filled. What, then, is the well-spring of our ineradicable hopes, of our
intimations of futurity, of our forward-dreams and utopias, public and
private? . . . [F]rom where rises the high tide of desire, of expectation, of
an obsession with sheer being defiant of the pain . . . ? (94–95)

Then, as though saying what Dickinson sings, Steiner answers his own
questions, Wordsworth- as well as Dickinson-tinctured (and Steiner’s
lyrical brief can serve, for that matter, as higher education policy for
the care and promotion of language arts departments):

[T]hese liberations from the constraints of the physical, from the

blank wall of our own death and a seeming eternity of personal and
collective disappointment [Steiner continues], are in crucial measure
linguistic. Bio-socially, we are indeed a short-lived mammal made
for extinction, as are all other kinds. But we are a language-animal,
and it is this one endowment which, more than any other, makes
bearable and fruitful our ephemeral state. The evolution in human
speech—it may have come late—of subjunctives, optatives, counter-
factual conditionals and of the futurities of the verb . . . has defined
and safeguarded our humanity. It is because we can tell stories, fic-
tive or mathematical-cosmological, about a universe a billion years
hence; . . . it is because “if”-sentences . . . can . . . deny, reconstruct, alter
 Conclusion 161

past, present, and future, mapping otherwise. It is in these determi-

nants of pragmatic reality that existence continues to be worth experi-
encing. Hope is grammar. The mystery of futurity or freedom—these
two are intimately kindred—is syntactical . . . [T]he available vocabu-
lary will comprise a wealth of exact discrimination, of psychologically,
materially, and socially recognized density and shading . . . The riches
of experience, the creativities of thought and of feeling, the pene-
trative and delicate singularities of conception made possible by the
polyglot condition are the preeminent adaptive agency and advantage
of the human spirit. (97–100; Steiner’s emphasis)15

In the company of her masters of belles lettres, Dickinson’s sublunary

rage less for order than for wonder and awe could bless us in our
worst of times. The very depth of her premonitory despair can sound
the mystic chord of our lyrical lilt or lift. Her avant la lettre dialogue
with Pater, Hardy, Frost, Yeats, Woolf, Stevens, Bishop, Rich, Wilbur
et al. can hark back to Romantic-era relish of moments as they pass,
despite how disjointed, destabilizing, or ominous such moments could
be to Romantics, as well as to Pater or Eliot (and as well as to us).
Dickinson’s voice in the Romantic to Modern colloquy, as distinct
from her conversation with Locke, Wesley, Wadsworth, and Darwin,
highlights to this day the dialogue between her literary heritage and
her literary posterity.

* * *

Like the five previous volumes in this series, this book has tested
E. D. Hirsch’s extension of the concept of literature from les belles
lettres to les bonnes lettres. Of course, Dickinson’s oeuvre remained
more than sufficiently aesthetic. At the same time, however, her
verse stayed broad, scarcely decadent. She consciously or subcon-
sciously included not only Wordsworth, Emerson et al., but also
Locke, Wesley, Wadsworth, Darwin et al., in literal or figurative
colloquy with one another and with herself. The surprisingly bel-
letristic sermons of Wadsworth signal the fact that her fellow-lover
of Romantic-era literature was himself a poet (Sewall Life 2:444–62)
whose especially dialogical, philosophical and scientific (as well as
theological) prose provides Dickinson with perhaps her widest bridge
to Anglo-American letters, belles and bonnes.
To be sure, the not-so-exclusively introspective art of Emily
Dickinson echoes the oral tradition of revival testimony and of hym-
nody. The spoken and sung words of folk consciousness hummed in
the background of her dialogical aesthetic. Nevertheless, her personae
162 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

prove “rich in conversation,” too, with the written words of others

(Dickinson’s emphasis). Although optimism and hope came hard for
her, and although she could not as readily put on as many powers with
her knowledge as these others did, she scarcely inscribed her poems at
home alone. Her speakers spoke their piece to their virtual but lively,
their metaphorical but genuine, companions, who, for all practical
purposes of literary criticism, spoke theirs back to her, and so on up
to the limits of her readers’ imaginations. She and her counterparts in
belles and bonnes lettres exchanged their views on the imagination as
it worked for poets, philosophers, divines, and scientists alike. For her,
and for these associates in literary and intellectual history, the model-
producing faculty of the collective consciousness of popular and elite,
if not folk, culture, arose from, and transmuted, sense-based reason-
ing. She thereby enjoined her select society of partners in discussion
to undertake the common pursuit of freedom for all hearts and minds,
and perhaps even for all souls.
The more written than oral sense in which Dickinson’s poems
can sound dialogical finds belletristic illustration in the philosophi-
cal and scientific aspect of her colloquy with literary history. Blake,
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Carlyle, Tennyson, Emerson,
and other such luminaries of the Anglo-American Romantic milieu
appealed to her in no small measure because of the rationally empiri-
cal strengths and glories of their respective visions. Like the especially
proto-Darwin scientific prowess of Wordsworth, Keats, or Emerson, in
particular, hers meant that she home-grounded the Euro-continental
perpendicularity that dominated even her (occasional) philosophi-
cal idealism (compare Morey). Of course, her more than occasional
evangelical idealism can appear dialectically to supersede both her
immersion in rational empiricism (please review appendix A) and her
concentration on evolutionary biology. Still, her late-Romantic imagi-
nation rather entertains oscillation than drives toward synthesis; the
former strategy, after all, is closer than, say, any warmed-over method
of Hegel’s, to her conduct of rich conversation between the aesthetic
temperament and the scientific understanding of all her partners in
Anglo-American discussion.
In concert with the likes of Wordsworth and Emerson, in particu-
lar, Dickinson worried about how a poet can cope with the reduced
circumstances of being human in a nature unrelated to spirit. In a
world such as that (to adapt to her case Jack Stillinger’s language for
Keats’s “naturalized imagination” or for Keats’s “poetry of earth”),
“process” would appear “[Dickinson’s own] and man’s chief good”
(compare Stillinger 99–118, esp. 100). Transcendentalism of any kind,
 Conclusion 163

therefore, whether belletristic, philosophical, religious, or pseudosci-

entific, would constitute “a false lure” (100) for any would-be artist.
This book has attempted, from the standpoint of Dickinson’s literary
heritage, to give a full account of what Dickinson came strongly to
believe. That is, a high-Romantic poet should conclude, and a late-
Romantic poet must conclude, that truth lies only near, and perhaps
even dwells primarily in, experience and experiment alike, and that this
condition is not only what can suffice for, but also what can assure,
any art at all worthy of the name.
Like her forerunners and peers in the English-speaking realm of
belles lettres, Dickinson gave up none of the difficult fascination with
subject/object paradox and observer/participant overlap that made
philosophy and science not so much an exercise as an embodiment of
the creative imagination. Her relationship with these fellow-authors
personified the depth of her international draw. She faced reality even
more forthrightly than they. Just as her empirical language grew stur-
dier than their empirical idiom, so her evangelical idiom tapered off
from their evangelical language. She thereby avoided the maudlin
defensiveness with which they could parry fact. She thereby escaped
the self-seriousness with which they could stiffen spine. Despite her
belated, pre-Modern position on the high- to late-Romantic arc, how-
ever, her heart did resemble the irrepressible hearts of Romantic-era
writers, and her senses, like theirs, too, much of the time, did assert
themselves as irrefutable, for they could all scarcely disbelieve their
own lying eyes. Though with an empirical leaning, on her part, that
flinched at few realities, and though with her biting, trademark appre-
hension of incongruity on the road to whatever wisdom she could
muster in this best and worst of all possible worlds, the Romantic-era
drama of her tough and tender imagination ensued.
The more written than oral sense in which Dickinson’s poems can
sound dialogical finds biographical illustration, finally, in the philo-
sophical and scientific aspect of her colloquy with religious tradi-
tion. The rational empiricism of Locke informed the spiritual sense
of Wesley. Wesley, in turn, inspired the eighteenth- to nineteenth-
century, intellectual as well as emotional transatlantic revival in which
Dickinson’s “dearest earthly friend,” Wadsworth, participated. Unlike
their opposite numbers in twenty-first-century America (please do not
forget that there remain few evangelicals, intellectual, emotional, or
otherwise, in England), Wesley and Wadsworth accepted empiricism.
In the context of this book, it can scarcely too often be said that
“[e]ven to write against something is to take one’s bearings from it”
(Donoghue Third 18). But Wesley and Wadsworth also theologized
164 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

empiricism. And Dickinson, with respect for, but in resistance to

them, did not.
The historical, interdisciplinary, and biographical method of this
book has described Dickinson’s conversation not just with Wordsworth,
Emerson et al., but even with Locke, other empirical/pragmatic phi-
losophers of the Anglo-American world, Wesley, Wadsworth, other
empirically minded ministers of that world, and that domain’s pre- to
late-Romantic-era scientists. A salient fact of Wesley’s career, that he
was a self-described “philosophical sluggard,” should seldom, if ever,
go missing from accounts of his influence (please review appendix B,
if not Chapter 1 through Chapter 3 of Brantley Locke!). Wadsworth,
as chapter 1 of this book has attempted to bring out, acknowledged
Wesley’s empirically philosophical, medically scientific contribution,
and, as vividly as Wadsworth lived in Dickinson’s heart (please recall,
for good measure, appendix C), he and Wesley through him haunted
her mind and her imagination (just as part I has made cumulatively
evident her familiarity with his sermons). Not only Locke and Wesley,
but also Darwin, peopled Wadsworth’s prose, and hence Dickinson’s
art of knowledge, as distinct from her “art of belief,” and she read
about (then read in?) Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (as part I has
emphasized). More consistently than Wesley and Wadsworth and with
a fresh result for literary history, Dickinson valued sense-based reason
and sense-driven method alike—that is, British empiricism and a range
of science from technology to evolutionary biology. With an open-
ended tone appropriate to art but with something of a polemical edge
to her empirical voice, her faith in experience and in experiment talked
with, tempered, tested, and talked back to Experiential Faith—that
is, transcendentally capitalized Natural Methodism. Therefore, the
likes of Locke and Darwin played composite Epicurus to her protean
Lucretius, notwithstanding that the God who fled out of her door
sometimes came back in her window (a phenomenon reserved for
consideration later in the series).
Part II has answered yes to whether or not Dickinson’s philosophi-
cal and scientific imagination can sustain, in the age of Darwin and
the US Civil War, a robust and mutually verifiable outlook. Even her
pre-Modern, supposedly crypto-hermetic and pessimistic poems of
aftermath or of postexperience, like the lyrical but colloquial lilt of
her late-Romantic resilience, evinces hopeful “dialogism”—that is,
interpersonal warrants of “continuity in the midst of change” (if not
intersubjective reaffirmations of dynamic joy).16 If a fiction writer’s
voice thrown “in chorus,” “in a dialogue,” tends toward optimism
and toward hope, the same holds true for this lyric writer’s stance
 Conclusion 165

in whatever mood of her career, and more credibly for her tragic
awareness.17 This expressive pragmatist, whose blend of intellectual
autobiography with a sense of like-minded audience pinpointed her
academically inflected (as well as accessibly presented) originality,
enlisted communal power on the side of comic knowledge. Thus her
lyric monologues contain multitudes. Or rather, her lyric dialogues
about poetry, philosophy, and science heed the less dueling than dual
watchword implicit throughout her writings—namely, that “life is
meeting” (if only in books, and in anticipation) and that meeting is
knowledge (if not truth).18
Dickinson’s literary world, on the one hand, and her philosophical
and scientific world, on the other, especially as she encountered the lat-
ter on the horizon of the religious prose she preferred, crossed paths in
her manuscripts. Sally Bushell’s compositional criticism of Dickinson’s
poems, along with those of Wordsworth and of Tennyson, scrutinizes
not the “teleological movement from early stages to finished prod-
uct” but “a textual field that extends backwards and forwards between
avant-texte and text” (35). Bushell follows Jerome McGann’s watch-
word that “social forces and communal activity . . . bring the text into
being” (Bushell 12; Bushell’s paraphrase). Those forces and that
activity are especially evident in how Dickinson’s manuscript variants
add aesthetic nuance to her philosophical emphasis on un-decidabil-
ity, thereby redefining “the nature of understanding” (Bushell 210)
and pushing Locke’s Essay to the limit. Bushell acknowledges that
Dickinson’s openness “also emerges from a far more ancient, self-
enclosed sense of spiritual identity, behind which lies the presence
of God as supreme Author” (211; Bushell’s emphasis contra Roland
Barthes). Dickinson’s undecidability functions as a mark of her reli-
gious humility, for instance, in such manuscripts as Dickinson’s four-
stanza version of “No other can reduce” (Fr738)—see Bushell’s
discussion of Houghton Library, Harvard, MS97a (211–14). On a
more philosophical, scientific level, though, Dickinson foresaw Hans-
Georg Gadamer’s concept that the “dialectic of experience has its
proper fulfillment not in definitive knowledge but in the openness to
experience that is made possible by experience itself” (qtd. in Bushell
210)—specifically, by dialogical experience in “the world / Of all of
us” (Wordsworth’s resonant language).
Dickinson’s personae and her select society of partners in discus-
sion reasoned together, with a fresh result for the collective sense
perception—the compounded visionary imagination—of her Anglo-
American milieu of lettres belles and bonnes. Whatever the hard-
ness of the truth they all found in league with one another, even she
166 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

made every effort to cultivate optimism. Even she maintained the

kind of muted but reasonable hope that bent not with the remover
to remove. Her pursuit of natural truth, though scarcely winning
near the goal, arrived not so much at the poetic faith as at the poetic
knowledge that might, just might, yet release her readers into their
free play of the mind.
Just as Dickinson submitted system and creed to the test of experi-
ence until faith either deepened or reeled (or both?), so she offered
optimism and hope to those among her partners in discussion who
would imbibe instruction from Experiment. She realized that scientific
method replicated results only imperfectly—her poems on technol-
ogy took this cold truth to heart—and that Nature, her metaphysical
sparring partner par excellence, evinced only scant obligation, if any,
to return straight answers to her “obstinate questionings / Of sense
and outward things” (recall Wordsworth’s language). Her empirical
voice, however—her incisive version of Negative Capability—can yet
set her readers free from claptrap and from cant. She defined “Hope”
in reductive, scientific terms as “electric adjunct,” yet commended its
“unremitting action” and so capitalized it as a poetic but naturalized
transcendentalism (Fr1424, lines 3, 5). She refused to take refuge in
the Christianized empiricism by which her evangelical forebear Wesley
and her evangelical friend Wadsworth sanctioned the experience of
religious conversion and through which her literary associates claimed
creative, if not spiritual, renewal. Her Congregational-inflected works
fashioned and sponsored response to literary figures, philosophers,
ministers, and scientists whose ideas of sensation and whose labora-
tory skills heralded her distillation of knowledge felt on the pulses
as distinct from the uncertain trumpet of her sometime experience
of faith (her faint heart-religion). These stakes of her lyrical calling
proved modest but high: Dickinson’s sense-liberated brain grew wider
than the transatlantic sky under which she and her international soci-
ety of significant others breathed.
Dickinson understood experience as knowledge, and, in no uncer-
tain terms of art, she said so. Theodore Roszak, similarly, limits
“experience” to “that which is not a report but knowledge before
it is reflected in words or ideas: immediate contact, direct impact,
knowledge at its most personal level as it is lived” (57). Dickinson
would have taken the point. She, too, connected the preverbal with
experience and with knowledge. If, however, like Roszak, she was not
so interested in the preconscious, then, unlike Roszak, she was as fas-
cinated as Emerson by “a report” of experience, and not just by expe-
rience per se. She would have gone further than Roszak, however,
 Conclusion 167

for she would have declared that words and the ideas to which they
pointed (here is Locke’s theory of language in a nutshell) ranked,
too, as experience and as knowledge, and this latter point takes a step
beyond Locke.19 Language and concept, for Dickinson, could pro-
vide “immediate contact, direct impact,” in the sense that words and
ideas became interpersonal—that is, her “report” does not mediate
but incarnates, perpetuates, her human interchange (to refute again,
if refutation were needed, her so-called reclusiveness).
Much of what and how Emily Dickinson felt and thought, then,
like much of who she was, derived less from the evidence on which
the high argument of her poetry stood, and less from the logic of
its assumptions, than from people. Her lyric genius boasted a dra-
matically dialogical as well as introspectively autobiographical dimen-
sion. If Wadsworth belonged among her cohort of beloveds, so did
Wordsworth. The mutuality of teaching and learning, which she often
encountered at a subliminal level that harked back in time, changed
her sense of traditional presence to her spirit of skeptical counterinter-
pretation. What she understood from, and imparted to, her reflective
cadre of partners in productive discussion, virtual and real, she passed
along, in turn, to her posterity. She can still build up in her readers
their equal measures of dynamic and salutary realism.20 She believed
that empirical procedure can make life rich and strange, knew that
scientific refinement can make art strong and true. Her method, in
consequence, can countervail ignorance—that is, her personae and
their others can win through to the finish of knowing, and to the
prospect of what next.

* * *

Of the sometimes childlike poet Dickinson, one might almost say

what Wordsworth writes of “a Child Three Years old”—namely, that

solitude to her
Is blithe society, who fills the air
With gladness and involuntary songs.
(“Characteristics of a Child Three Years Old”
[1811], lines 12–14)

The etched sibilance of “The Soul selects her own Society - ” sig-
nals Dickinson’s preparation for choosing a soul mate, for reaching
an audience, or for both. The line signifies, as well, however, that
her “Soul” seeks to converse with a “select” few kindred spirits other
168 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

than, prior to, along with, and following after her distant beloved(s)
and her letter-poem, poem-letter readers.21 Her will in the world was
renunciation of the world paradoxically for the purpose of channel-
ing, of contributing to, the best of what had ever been, would ever
be, thought or said in the world. Her renunciation began and ended
in her desire to correspond with elected but numerous, not merely
metaphorical company, from whom even she had much to learn, and
to whom (paradoxically) she had much to say (however laconically).
Dickinson’s sometimes real and sometimes metaphorical dialogue
with the living and the dead favors voices over soliloquy, the efficacy
of engagement over the lonely pursuit of truth. Joan Kirkby invokes
Freud and Derrida to explain how Dickinson keeps the dead alive in
her conscious experience: “When the death of a friend occurs [Kirkby
writes], the friend remains within us, but, where classic psychoanal-
ysis has said that we must resist this uncanny tenant, Derrida, like
Dickinson, says that we must remain in dialogue with him and thereby
dialecticize death” (“A Crescent” 135). Jonathan Bate’s new history of
English literature, accordingly, substitutes “conversation between liv-
ing and dead authors, and authors and their readers,” for the “canon”
of an “inert traditionalism” (English Literature xiv; emphasis added).
Hence the method of this book has been to juxtapose the words of
Dickinson and those of her counterparts not only in belles lettres, but
also in bonnes lettres. Her “Ecstasy of Influence” (compare Lethem)
has appealed here, in effect, to Emerson’s authority, as in “By neces-
sity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. It is as difficult to
appropriate the thought of others as it is to invent” (“Quotation and
Originality” [1876]).
To be sure, the difficulty of Dickinson’s poetry might perplex and
retard the dialogical aim of her art, and so might be cause for concern,
rather than for celebration. The attention span of readers, after all, is
now much reduced, and the audience for literature in general is dimin-
ishing at almost as fast a pace as poetic illiteracy in particular is grow-
ing. Nevertheless, in keeping with her advice to her readers—that is,
“[A metaphor] won’t bite” (L34)—consider how Douglas Leonard,
for one, rises to the challenge of thinking with Emily Dickinson, of
turning one of her most inscrutable anti-images into a sharp picture of
wisdom, and perhaps even of truth. Leonard argues that her “Dome
of Abyss . . . / Bowing into Solitude - ” (Fr327, lines 18–20) betokens
a sunset “slant of light,” an experience-won perspective “on death
and grief” (128). Even though the “Dome of Abyss,” to say the least,
might yet seem a hermetic metaphor, the sunset image evoking the
near-religious fear that begins wisdom echoes down the decades,
 Conclusion 169

speaking to Dickinson’s partner-in-discussion Leonard. Please recall,

from the appropriate segment of chapter 1, the rich conversation
between Emily Dickinson and her others about astronomy in general,
and hence about the sunset image in particular. Dickinson’s sunset
slant of experience-won perspective encompasses the philosophical
and scientific truth contemplated not only by her and her precursors
and contemporaries in belles and bonnes lettres but also by her and
her descendants in the world of academe. Her outlook has thus con-
tributed to knowledge mutually aimed-at in the present.
Will ever more devotees choose, feel compelled to join, the select
society behind, around, and within Dickinson’s canon? Will they
form The Gathered Church of Truth and of Otherness from Where
Emily Dickinson and Her Significant Others Stand? Yes and yes: Her
ostensibly monologist lyric writing shades into dialogue of such broad
appeal that, against all odds “in these bad days” of declining litera-
ture enrolments (compare Matthew Arnold, “To a Friend” [1849],
line 1), she will win increasing interaction from such readers and
writers as can surely always survive. Her participation in belles lettres
can even taste as other-directed as drama was, until that of Samuel
Beckett, whose dramaturgy took on something of Dickinson’s intro-
spective subjectivity but little of her ability to sing and still less of
her courtesy to the audience. Since Dickinson’s poetry-motivated
withdrawal from society allowed her to scorn delights, live laborious
days, and attain excellence, and since people have therefore remained
curious about the Myth of Amherst, her reputation has grown apace,
ever since the 1890s, when three separate collections of her lyrics
sold well and pleased critics. Do her poems fly off the shelves at least
as quickly as those of best-selling former American poet laureate and
Dickinson’s twenty-first-century partner in literary discussion Billy
Collins? Whether or not the answer is yes, Dickinson’s standing is
now unparalleled among poets (see Coghill and Tammaro; Gardner)
as well as among scholars.22 Insofar as this book has succeeded in sig-
naling how her poetic idiom occupies the midpoint of a cross-cultural
continuum that joins her experience to that of her readers, it can
admit new members to the eighteenth- as well as nineteenth-century
circle of her signification.
One of the best poets in Europe after 1950, Paul Celan translated
Dickinson’s verse and wrote, in German, the sort of undeceiving
poetry that she did. Celan’s watchword, “He speaks to truth / Who
speaks the shade,” harks back to Dickinson’s slant truth (see the dis-
cussion in Felstiner, ed., trans., xix–xxxvi). Although John Felstiner
does not systematically compare Celan and Dickinson, a series of his
170 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

insights into Celan evokes (and the last of these insights refers to) her
salient characteristics (and squares with the findings of this book).

* Paul Celan’s writing touches [men and women] like no other: clears
their vision, fires their hope, braces their pain. (Felstiner xxii–xxiii)
* Celan’s most compelling, inspiriting poems presuppose duress and
distress. (xix)
* Celan’s voice was intense, precise, sometimes monotone, grave yet
resonant, registering nuance and emotion without excess. (xxxii)
* Celan is a touchstone—for his life-and-death lyric seriousness, his
uncompromising verbal honesty, and his courage in . . . driving language
to the verge of unexpected revelation. (xxiii)
* In Emily Dickinson, vastly removed though she was, Celan found
kindred voicings of mortality and theological skepticism. (xxx)

Of course, the word monotone scarcely describes Dickinson’s late-

Romantic, far-from-benumbed (far-from-Holocaust) empirical voice.
One might want to stipulate, as well, that her “theological skepticism”
is a function of her scientific method. Still, the affinity that Celan finds
between his poetry and hers suggests how the Myth of Amherst yet
brings the highest talent within the dialogical purview of her philo-
sophical issues and of her scientific complexities.
To be sure, as even the author of Emily Dickinson and the Hill
of Science (2010) points out, such poems as “‘Arcturus’ is his other
name” (Fr117), “I never saw a Moor” (Fr800), and “Soto! Explore
thyself!” (Fr814) reject “the authority of the empirical method and
the supremacy claimed for direct observation. The poet does not have
to see things to know them” (Peel 117, 222). Benjamin Franklin
Newton, Edward Dickinson’s law clerk, taught the poet “a faith in
things unseen” (L282). So when, on the front page of The Hampshire
and Franklin Express, in 1855, appeared the aphorism “It is often
said that the effect of a little Science is to make men skeptical; of
much, to make them reverential” (qtd. in Peel 281), one can well
imagine the 24-year-old Dickinson nodding her head in agreement,
and thereby subordinating science to religion. Nevertheless, as Robin
Peel is careful to emphasize, it is probably more accurate to think of
Dickinson’s metaphor for the relation between science and religion
as “a tennis match” (107) and of her art as more of a “hybrid of sci-
entific observation and poetic speculation” than as a preoccupation
with religion (80). Emily Dickinson’s rich conversation was indeed
primarily scientific in nature, for, as Peel also points out, “nineteenth-
century dialogue-books . . . consciously created . . . science for women
 Conclusion 171

and children” (162). For Peel, even Dickinson’s key phrase “out opon
Circumference” rings scientifically. Eccentric he remarks, means not
so much psychologically as scientifically “off center, away from the
center” (148).
Thus it can be said of Dickinson what Frank M. Meola writes of
Emerson, that

[a]t times it seems, Emerson wanted to overwhelm himself with the

world’s material reality, as if in a determined effort to correct his per-
petual tendency to idealize and dream. Harsh truth became his Sancho
Panza. On at least one well-known, unsettling occasion, he apparently
went to extremes, seeking out the horror of untransfigured reality; the
March 29, 1832, entry in his journal contains one matter-of-fact state-
ment: “I visited [late wife] Ellen’s tomb & opened the coffin.” There is
no further description or comment. (119)

Dickinson’s version of “the horror of untransfigured reality” was the

large body of her lugubrious, voice-from-the-grave poems (Poe comes
to mind here, as well), an inescapable implication of which was the
nineteenth-century, state-of-the-art-scientific incompatibility between
belief in the world as materialistic and faith in a world elsewhere. She
would have approved of how Emerson made this same point:

The religion that is afraid of science [Emerson writes] dishonors God

& commits suicide. It acknowledges that it is not equal to the whole of
truth, that it legislates, tyrannizes over a village of God’s empire but is
not the immutable universal law. Every influx of atheism, of skepticism
is thus made useful as a mercury pill assaulting & removing a diseased
religion & making way for truth. (Journal entry for March 4, 1831,
qtd. in Meola 116)

Should creation “science” take note?

Why did Emily Dickinson, unlike Helen Hunt Jackson, Frances
Osgood, and Lydia Sigourney, survive into the twenty-first century?
Such Dickinson-influenced writers as Lucy Brock-Broido, Alice Fulton,
Jorey Graham, Robert Hass, Susan Howe, Cristine Hume, Marilynne
Robinson, Larissa Szporluk, and Charles Wright provide cases in point
(see Fathi; Annie Finch). Perhaps it was because authors living in this
young century and in the last were attracted to her “strategies of indi-
rection to represent awe toward the unknown” (Fathi 78). Perhaps it
was because such authors gravitated toward her prescient perspective
on subjects like death, God, the death of God, despair, and the inef-
fable (see 81–88). From the vantage point of this book, however, it
172 Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation

was finally because she established not only a “philosophical or idea-

based presence” in contemporary poetry (78), but also a scientific or
hypothesis-based presence there.
Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation: Poetry, Philosophy, Science,
then, has attempted to illustrate how Dickinson’s literal and figura-
tive dialogue with a range of Anglo-Americans focuses on the material
world. She reimagines Wordsworth’s and Emerson’s “natural method-
ism” as her faith in experience. She carries Locke’s sense-based reason
to its logical conclusion—that is, she turns the empirical evangelism
of Methodism founder John Wesley and of Dickinson friend Charles
Wadsworth into her evangelical empiricism. She makes Darwin’s
evolutionary biology her bone-pick with God. As a palliative to the
postexperiential perspective of her pre-Modern pessimism, she writes
the late-Romantic version of Keats’s “poetry of earth.” She thereby
earns optimism in, thereby holds out hope for, the here and now.
What difference does Dickinson’s allegiance to dialogue make to
her art of knowledge, as distinct from her art of belief? The answer is
that Locke’s epistemology in general and the laboratory procedures of
cutting-edge scientists in particular guide her verses on steam technol-
ogy, geology and astronomy, the healing arts, and natural selection.
Despite its respect for, its nostalgia for, faith, this canon-within-
her-canon searches out things seen, as opposed to envisioning the
unseen. Thus, just as Dickinson’s much-penetrating eye can “see,”
like Wordsworth and Darwin, “into the life of things,” so her skepti-
cism can amplify Shelley’s “voice . . . to repeal / Large codes of fraud
and woe.” And thus, although Dickinson’s realism can prove harsh,
her wisdom can stay salutary—that is, her empirical voice can turn
experience into words. Her poems of physical and life science can even
substitute grounded imagination for a diminished thing—namely,
attenuated faith. Demythologizing the religious enthusiasm of Wesley
and of Wadsworth, Dickinson found, for her part, that “the mere
sense of living” was “joy enough,” perhaps even for all who would
take heart from her watchword: “Experiment escorts us last - .”
In sum, Emily Dickinson’s art belongs to a global context.
Sometimes consciously and sometimes subconsciously, she engages
Anglo-American poetry, on the one hand, and Anglo-American phi-
losophy and science, on the other. She keeps her counsel as she mod-
erates debate and seeks consensus within her select society of partners
in discussion. When the influence is direct, it is perhaps less finally
anxious than auspiciously mutual, for her language thrives alongside
Wordsworth’s, Emerson’s, Locke’s, and Darwin’s. When the influ-
ence is indirect, critical insight yet flows from comparison/contrast
 Conclusion 173

between the words of these and other such unwitting participants in

Emily Dickinson’s rich conversation and her equally epistemological,
just as scientifically methodical letters and poems. This interdisciplin-
ary, historical, and biographical approach to her works has drama-
tized her faith in experience and in experiment alike. However barely,
however surprisingly, the Apollonian imagination can thus edge out
the Dionysiac in the late-Romantic thought and practice of the “lady
whom the people call the Myth.”
 A ppe nd ix A

E m p i r i cis m and Evang el ic al ism:

A C o m b ination of R oma n tic ism

T he twin pioneers of transatlantic revivalism, John Wesley (1703–

1791) and Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), absorbed and spiritual-
ized the sensationalist epistemology of John Locke (1632–1704) and
then passed along to the nineteenth century their empirical idiom of
evangelical expression. As a direct as well as indirect result of this com-
plex process of cultural osmosis, such British Romantics as William
Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe
Shelley, and John Keats could conceive of the physical senses as por-
tals to epiphany and not just as analogies of spiritual insight. As an
illustrative Anglo-American trio of late-Romantic writers, Thomas
Carlyle, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Ralph Waldo Emerson contin-
ued to blend what Wordsworth called “the language of the sense”
with what Coleridge, anticipating the fin-de-siècle apprehension of
art as religion, and vice versa, called “poetic faith.”1 Emily Dickinson
(1830–1886), herself as much of a late-Romantic as of a Victorian-
American (anti-Romantic) or pre-Modern poet, also gravitated toward
the amalgamation of scientific method with the varieties of religious
experience.2 Like her precursors and contemporaries on the high- to
late-Romantic arc of literary history, the ark back and forth across the
Atlantic, Dickinson grew more apt to expect truth, joy, and grace, like
Locke, Wesley, and Edwards, than like Marx, Nietzsche, or Freud to
suspect consciousness as false.
Thus, as distinct from Euro-continental Romanticism of either
a French rationalist or a German idealist stripe, Anglo-American
Romanticism generated language at once empirical and evangelical.
For example, this local habitation of the long Romantic Movement
from the late eighteenth to the second half of the nineteenth century
176 Appendix A

perceived rather than deduced or intuited “whatsoever things” were

true, honest, just, pure, lovely, and “of good report” (compare Phil
4:8). On the one hand, in a skeptical turn, this binational brand of
Romanticism proclaimed a twofold imperative—namely, Trust in
Experiment! Test Religion! On the other hand, with guileless receptiv-
ity Romantic Anglo-America could also dwell in the possibility of the
spiritual sense, perhaps even reimagining as worth a try in an “age
of wonder” (Holmes) the warm heart of faith. At any rate, so radi-
cally immanent were both the philosophy and the religion of eigh-
teenth- to nineteenth-century Anglo-America that English-speaking
Romanticism stayed grounded, for better or worse, in spiritual as well
as in natural experience.
To be sure, if one may read back-in-time Stephen Jay Gould’s phrase
for the proper relation between science and religion in the twentieth
century, the empiricism and the evangelicalism of Romantic Anglo-
America could seem to be “non-overlapping magisteria.” Moreover,
if one may apply to the shortcomings of religion Keats’s language for
the limits of the creative imagination or of “poetic faith,” faith could
scarcely move mountains “so well / As she is fam’d to do, deceiving
elf” (compare Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale” [1819], lines 73–74).
Nevertheless, Anglo-American Romantic writers anticipated that
through dust and heat but for better not worse, faith in experience
would lead to an experience of faith. Experience and faith emerged
from this climate, this transatlantic weather, as “Contraries” that did
not so much clash or meld as produce “progression” (witness Blake’s
dialectical terms in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell [1790–1793],
Plate Three). Instead of nihilistic unbelief, constructive skepticism
informed all that the Anglo-American century from 1770 to 1870
found resonant in “the burthen of the mystery,” and in mystery itself
(Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey,” line 38).
This appendix, having epitomized the series-to-date, can now signal
how this book differs from previous installments in this ongoing proj-
ect in Anglo-American cultural poetics. Without precluding a future
study of Dickinson’s spiritual experience per se, the present, sixth vol-
ume of this historical, interdisciplinary approach to English-language
Romanticism constitutes a strategic drawing back from the emphasis
in Volume 5 on Dickinson’s experience/faith fusion. Of course, her
perennial human yearning for transcendence drew her toward dialectic
in the first place.3 Still, she rarely hesitated to apply Ockham’s razor to
what was not absolutely required to explain the case at hand. Scarcely
ever did her blessed rage for order foreclose her aesthetic choice to
stick with physical evidence. She more often tended to migrate from
 Appendix A 177

evangelical training to empirical discipline than tried to reconcile the

two on any paradoxical, counterintuitive, or oxymoronic ground of
providential chance, on the one hand, or of random grace, on the
other. The emphasis of the present book lies less on the empirical
thesis and the evangelical antithesis of her poetic synthesis (for that
case, though, see Chapter 4 of Brantley Experience and Faith) than on
the more philosophical and scientific than religious flow of her literary
conversation. Hers was not so much the destination of system as the
journey of method.
 A ppe nd ix B

L ock e and We s ley :

A n E s s e nce of Inf luen c e

D oes the great principle of empiricism—namely, that one must see

for oneself and be in the presence of the thing one knows—extend to
evangelicalism? Does each of these -isms operate along a continuum
joining emotion to intellect? Does one of these methodologies link
the external to words through ideas of sensation as though perception
were mediation? Does the other link the external to words through
ideals of sensation as though grace were perception? If empiricism
refers to direct impact from, and includes immediate contact with,
objects and subjects in time and place, does evangelicalism entertain
the similarly reciprocating notions that religious truth is concerned
with experiential presuppositions, and that experience itself need not
be nonreligious?
Yes, since John Locke’s influence on John Wesley and Wesley’s
Locke on Wesley’s followers can constitute the twofold case in point.
This nexus of thought and feeling connected the sense-based rea-
son of British empiricism to the spiritual sense of immediate, if not
traditional, revelation. This mode of philosophy and of theology
morphed the analogy between sense perception and spiritual sense
into experience/faith continuum, and perhaps even into experience-
faith identity. Wesley spread this state-of-the-art word of natural to
spiritual efficacy throughout his parish, the world. Thus his trans-
atlantic revival became an experiment in life force and took on the
forceful life of an experiment. His all-encompassing alignment of the
Enlightenment with heart religion laid the groundwork for proexpe-
rience heart leaps of Romantic Anglo-America, and shows to this day
how different from neoclassical evangelism is its science-averse off-
shoot in the twenty-first-century reaches of the post-Modern world.
180 Appendix B

It may be helpful, in this appendix, to summarize those previous

arguments of this series that pertain to Wesley’s immersion in Locke’s
Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690). Wesley, after all,
will figure prominently in this book about how Emily Dickinson’s
experience/faith dialogue favored experience at the expense of,
though with continuing respect for, faith. Locke’s rational empiri-
cism galvanized Wesley to express the ineffable occurrence of sense-
like grace through the language of sense-based method. It was as
though natural and spiritual experience could be one and the same.
Besides being scriptural, classical, and colloquial, Wesley’s prose was
pervasively philosophical. His rich and strange but readable hybrid,
his composite thought nameable as philosophical theology, harked
back to British empiricism, and leaped forward to evangelical practice
in the nineteenth-century Anglo-American world.
Here, preliminary to the analytical as well as chronological con-
centration on Wesley’s decisive decade of the 1740s, is a narrative
overview of his empirical study. In 1730, intrigued by an obscure fol-
lower of Locke, Peter Browne, bishop of Cork and Ross during the
1720s and 1730s, Wesley abridged Browne’s Procedure, Extent, and
Limits of Human Understanding (1728), a theologizing of empiri-
cism. In 1763, Wesley published his condensation of Browne’s work
in Wesley’s anthology of science, A Survey of the Wisdom of God in
the Creation: or a Compendium of Natural Philosophy, which formed
one of Wesley’s many educational enterprises. In 1781, Wesley wrote
annotations to Locke’s Essay, and published them, with extracts from
the Essay, in Wesley’s serial for his followers, The Arminian Magazine,
during 1782–1784. Thus generations of laity encountered empiricism
per se as well as empirical evangelicalism. It is especially significant
that Wesley took women seriously as philosophical and theologi-
cal discussion partners, encouraging their abilities as did few of his
contemporaries.
Well before, long after, and as catalyst of his strange warming of
the heart at a quarter to nine on the evening of May 24, 1738, in
Aldersgate Street, London, Wesley was steeped in Locke’s sense-
based theory of knowledge. A spiritual watershed of English cultural
life, Wesley’s conversion had as much to do with the tabula rasa of
Wesley’s mind, and hence with the times and places of Wesley’s sense
experience, as with the state of his soul. Thus, besides designating the
devotional exercises of his Holy Club at Oxford during the 1730s,
and besides referencing the religious discipline of his followers there-
after, Wesley’s intellectual as well as emotional, originary brand of
Methodism denotes their induction of knowledge from experience.
 Appendix B 181

The decade to conjure with is the 1740s, when Wesley developed

his Locke-derived breakthrough in experience/faith conundrums.
For example, just as Locke’s view that words correspond to things
through ideas led him to advocate a simple style (see the discussion of
Essay 3 in Brantley Locke 31–33), so his theory of language informed
Wesley’s Character of a Methodist (1742), and turned this message
into an intellectual treatise:

The most obvious, easy, common words, wherein our meaning can be
conveyed [Wesley writes], we prefer before others, both on ordinary
occasions, and when we speak of the things of God. We never, there-
fore, willingly or designedly, deviate from the usual way of speaking,
unless when we express scripture truths in scripture words, which, we
presume, no Christian will condemn. (Jackson 8:340)

Of course, both Locke and Wesley recognized the fundamentally

metaphorical and analogical nature of language, and hence they both
acknowledged, as well, the potential for arbitrariness and imprecision
in the capacity of words to represent and communicate truths, whether
natural or spiritual. Still, if only at the level of diction, both the philoso-
pher and the preacher held that simplicity and clarity of speech could
augur purity, stability, reliability, and transparency of understanding.
The combination of message and intellectual treatise in An Earnest
Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion (1743) kept not only the Bible
but also Locke’s Essay in the direct line of Wesley’s central vision:

You know [Wesley writes emphatically and at length] . . . that before it

is possible for you to form a true judgment of the things of God, it is
absolutely necessary that you have a clear apprehension of them, and
that your ideas thereof be all fixed, distinct, and determinate. And seeing
our ideas are not innate, but must all originally come from our senses, it
is certainly necessary that you have senses capable of discerning objects
of this kind—not those only which are called “natural senses,” which
in this respect profit nothing, as being altogether incapable of discern-
ing objects of a spiritual kind, but spiritual senses, exercised to discern
spiritual good and evil . . .
And till you have these internal senses, till the eyes of your understand-
ing are opened, you can have no apprehension of divine things, no idea
of them at all. Nor consequently, till then, can you either judge truly
or reason justly concerning them, seeing your reason has no ground
whereon to stand, no materials to work upon. (Cragg 56–57)

The sense-based word choice—namely, “materials,” “ground,” “eyes,”

“internal senses,” “natural senses,” “objects,” and “things”—constitutes
182 Appendix B

perhaps the fullest statement of Wesley’s spiritual sense. The philo-

sophical demand for empiricism, which in Locke’s is rational as well
as sense-based, is also met in Wesley’s far from antirational concept
of inspiration, which he associates with terms such as “discern,” “rea-
son,” “understanding,” “ideas,” “apprehension,” and “judgment.” As
though to maintain Locke’s balance between reason and its ground,
Wesley indicates a radically metaphorical, far from arbitrary relation
between rational apprehension and the spiritual sense. Consistent with
his endorsement of tabula rasa as the first principle of theology as well
as of philosophy, he signals his dependence on, as well as his affinity
for, Locke’s method. The operative phrase, the heart of the matter, in
Wesley’s words “not those only which are called ‘natural senses,’” is
natural senses.
To be sure, in suggesting that sense perception is crucial to reli-
gion, Wesley avoids ever claiming that one can often, or even finally,
stand on any common ground between experience and faith. Like An
Essay concerning Human Understanding, An Earnest Appeal to Men of
Reason and Religion stresses that natural understanding cannot easily,
or ever clearly, apprehend spiritual truth: “What then [Wesley asks]
will your reason do here? How will it pass from things natural to spiri-
tual? From the things that are seen to those that are not seen? From
the visible to the invisible world? What a gulf is here!” (Cragg 57).
Nevertheless, faith is defined by Wesley not simply in accordance with
scripture but even according to a balance between the sensing and the
reasoning powers per se:

[Faith] [Wesley observes] is the feeling of the soul, whereby a believer

perceives, through the “power of the highest overshadowing him”
[see Luke 1:35] both the existence and the presence of him in whom
he “lives, moves, and has his being” [see Acts 17:28], and indeed the
whole invisible world, the entire system of things eternal. And hereby,
in particular, he feels “the love of God shed abroad in the heart” [see
Romans 3:5]. (Cragg 47)

By feeling, Wesley does not mean “inner trend of belief” so much

as “faith in relation to the senses,” for An Earnest Appeal to Men
of Reason and Religion speaks of “faith” in reference to “the eye,”
“the ear,” and even “taste” (see, e.g., Cragg 46). Wesley’s definition,
finally, both by its diction (“whereby a believer perceives”) and by its
development throughout the treatise, intimates his view that religious
feeling, like sense data, comprises matter for the mind to work upon.
Thus the Earnest Appeal pays homage to Locke explicitly, or at least
 Appendix B 183

perspicuously. This important but surprising document of the growth

of Wesley’s mind during the 1740s draws an analogy between faith
and empirical observation: “Faith is with regard to the spiritual world
what sense is with regard to the natural” (Cragg 46). The precisely
analogical structure of this breakthrough in religious epistemology
rests on such far from arbitrary, if not radically metaphorical, associa-
tion of faith with the natural senses that one hears here the identi-
fication of experience with faith that was to mark Methodism as a
phenomenal new species of philosophical theology.
From 1745 through 1748, Wesley wrote letters to Mr. John Smith
(an alias for Thomas Secker, bishop of Oxford and later bishop of
Canterbury) in which appears such an arresting statement as this: “To
this day, I have abundantly more temptation . . . to be . . . a philosophi-
cal sluggard, than an itinerant Preacher” (Telford 2:68). Throughout
these letters, Wesley combines evangelistic goals with his love of phil-
osophical theology, and especially pronounced is his Locke-derived
method, for even to traditional revelation he applies Locke’s as well as
Descartes’s skepticism. “I am as fully assured to-day [Wesley discloses
to Smith], as I am of the rising of the sun, that the scriptures are of
God. I cannot possibly deny or doubt of it now; yet I may doubt of
it tomorrow; as I have done heretofore a thousand times, and that
after the fullest assurance preceding” (Telford 2:92). Thus, the mind
remains open even after carefully searching for, and apparently find-
ing, what is not subject to doubt. The letters to Smith, moreover,
acknowledge both poles of Locke’s method, for the sense-based
nature of mind is implicit in Wesley’s phraseology “so far as men can
judge from their eyes and ears” (Telford 2:44).
Rise and progress, a phrase characteristic of eighteenth-century
British book titles, as in The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul
(1742) by Philip Doddridge, assumes the British philosophy of expe-
rience. When Wesley writes Smith that “we are speaking, not of the
progress, but of the first rise, of faith” (Telford 2:48), he suggests,
for one thing, that no more than knowledge does faith exist innately
and, for another, that faith, like knowledge, must be datable by exact
moments in personal history. “It cannot be, in the nature of things
[Wesley tells Smith], that a man should be filled with this peace, and
joy, and love, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, without perceiving
it as clearly as he does the light of the sun” (Telford 2:64). Thus, just
as one knows what one experiences naturally, so one has faith in what
one encounters spiritually.1
In a sermon entitled “The Great Privilege of Those that are Born
of God” (1748), Wesley affirms a real correspondence between
184 Appendix B

universally describable experience and experience that, though pos-

sible for all, would remain quite ineffable were it not for Locke’s
linguistic instrument of analogy-cum-metaphor. With regard to the
interpenetration of sense perception and the world of here and now,
“The Great Privilege” sounds precisely Locke-initiated:

No sooner is the child born into the world [Wesley teaches], than
he . . . feels the air with which he is surrounded, and which pours into
him from every side, as fast as he alternately breathes it back, to sustain
the flame of life: and hence springs a continual increase of strength,
of motion, and of sensation; all the bodily senses being now awak-
ened, and furnished with their proper objects. (Sermons 76; Wesley’s
emphasis)

In this passage, the mind’s wakeful involvement with sense data is

just as clear as in whole sections of An Essay concerning Human
Understanding where Locke insists that the mind’s response to sense
experience is almost at one with what one needs to know about the
world. The entire sermon preaches that “the circumstances of the nat-
ural birth” provide “the most easy way to understand the spiritual”
(Sermons 175)—that is, that the invisible world is familiar to twice-
born people whose spiritual sense parallels the limited but sufficient
operation of the natural faculties. Wesley’s description here of “senses,
whereby alone we can discern the things of God” bespeaks a vital
interaction—namely, what is “continually received” is “continually
rendered back” (Sermons 176). At the mental level, and with reference
to the senses, spiritual experience is depicted throughout “The Great
Privilege” as coalescence, as near identification, with the condescen-
sion of God. Thus Wesley’s alternation, nay oscillation, between rea-
son- and sense-based wording signifies, again and again, that through
immediate revelation God and man are en-sphered, or rather that a
clear intercourse occurs not just between man as object and God as
subject but even between man as subject and God as object.
A Letter to the Reverend Dr. Conyers Middleton (1749), finally,
expresses a paradoxically Locke-consistent theology of immediate
revelation:

Traditional evidence [Wesley admits, concerning the Bible] is of an

extremely complicated nature, necessarily including so many and so
various considerations, that only men of a strong and clear understand-
ing can be sensible of its full force. On the contrary, how plain and
simple is this; and how level to the lowest capacity! Is not this the sum:
“One thing I know; I was blind, but now I see”? [see John 9:25].
 Appendix B 185

An argument so plain, that a peasant, a woman, a child, may feel all

its force.
The traditional evidence of Christianity stands, as it were, a great way off;
and therefore, although it speaks loud and clear, yet makes a less lively
impression. It gives us an account of what was transacted long ago, in far
distant times as well as places. Whereas the inward evidence is intimately
present to all persons, at all times, and in all places. (Jackson 10:75–76)

The language here does not so much look down on women (see the
discussion, in part I of this book, of Wesley’s protofeminist streak) as
democratically affirm the at once reason-strong and all but sensate
capacity of all people to see the spiritual as well as natural object as in
itself it really is. Wesley’s attitude toward scripture here does not so
much anticipate the Higher Criticism of the Bible during the nine-
teenth century as subordinate Bible reading to near-identity between
sense perception of natural knowledge and immediate revelation of
the Holy Spirit’s ongoing and unfolding truth.2 Although Wesley is
sedulous here to manifest reticence about just how much one can
know from spiritual sense and discernment—there is no mere know-
ingness of self-indulgent enthusiasm in this passage—his fully episte-
mological tone signals his relative confidence in immediate revelation
as avenue to enlightenment.

Is it not so [Wesley asks Middleton]? Let impartial reason speak. Does

not every thinking man want a window, not so much in his neigh-
bour’s, as in his own, breast? He wants an opening there, of whatever
kind, that might let in light from eternity. He is pained to be thus feel-
ing after God so darkly and uncertainly: to know so little of God, and
indeed so little of any beside material objects. He is concerned, that
he must see even that little not directly, but in the dim, sullied glass
of sense; and consequently so imperfectly and obscurely, that it is all a
mere enigma still.
Now, these very desiderata faith supplies. It gives a more extensive
knowledge of things invisible, showing what eye had not seen, nor ear
heard, neither could it enter into our heart to conceive [see I Cor. 2:9].
And all these it shows in the clearest light, with the fullest certainty and
evidence. For it does not leave us to receive our notice of them by mere
reflection from the dull glass of sense; but resolves a thousand enigmas
of the highest concern by giving faculties suited to things invisible.
(Jackson 10:74–75)

Couched in the doubly empirical context of a not-so-buried optics

metaphor (notice the lens-focusing implication of “resolves a thousand
186 Appendix B

enigmas”) and experientially philosophical language for and from the

Bible, this statement is more than in keeping with An Essay concern-
ing Human Understanding. The avowal epitomizes Wesley’s at once
spiritual and natural mode of knowing and of speaking—that is, his
brand of faith as less different from, than enhansive and extensive of,
the senses.
Wesley not only drew an analogy between sense perception and rev-
elation but also attempted, in an almost more than merely metaphori-
cal manner, to bridge the gap between natural and spiritual experience.
Insofar as he shaped an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century kind of
thought and feeling, the empirical and the evangelical understand-
ing of experience came together for the Anglo-American middle class.
British authors as late as Thomas Carlyle and Alfred, Lord Tennyson
and American authors as late as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emily
Dickinson descended intellectually as well as spiritually from Wesley
insofar as all four of these writers of belletristic prose and of poetry
accepted as well as theologized empiricism. This quartet grounded
transcendentalism in mind and world, balanced religious myths and
religious morality with scientific reverence for fact and detail, allied
this-worldly assumptions with spiritual discipline, and shared the
rational and sense-respecting reliance on experience as the less royal
than public road to natural knowledge and divine truth alike.
 A ppe nd ix C

W a d s w orth and D ickin son :

A M ar riag e of M i n ds

S econd only to Brooklyn Congregational Reverend Henry Ward

Beecher in national clerical renown (Applegate; Strickland),
Philadelphia Presbyterian Reverend Charles Wadsworth inspired in
Emily Dickinson a decades-long series of honorifics. These range
from her deferential, near-infantalized “my Shepherd from ‘Little
Girl’-hood” to her allusive “My Philadelphia” (compare Antony to
Cleopatra: “My Egypt”) to her heartfelt “my closest earthly friend”
and “my dearest earthly friend” to her affective but formal and
professionally correct “beloved Clergyman” and “My Clergyman”
(L750, L765, L766, L790, and L807). Alfred Habegger’s brief
for Wadsworth as the addressee of Dickinson’s sexually charged
“Master Letters” (L187, L233, and L248) is judiciously understated
(Habegger 419–23). If Habegger is correct, and he is far from alone
in proposing Wadsworth as “Master,” then these three letters are
the only ones known, at present, from Dickinson to Wadsworth.1
The (so far) sole surviving communication from Wadsworth to
Dickinson (L248a) is undated: it consists of two brief sentences of
vague, rather perfunctory pastoral counseling, as though it were a
routine response to a parishioner’s request for spiritual guidance and
comfort. Although the record shows just a pair of face-to-face meet-
ings between Wadsworth and Dickinson, one in 1860 and the other
in 1880 (were there other such encounters?), the emotional tinges
and the passionate character of their relationship have formed the
focus of educated guesses by Habegger, Pollak, Shurr, Strickland,
and others. Their collective investigation, based on parallels between
Wadsworth’s sermons and Dickinson’s letters and poems, has proved
quite plausible, as well as inherently intriguing.
188 Appendix C

This appendix, for its part in this necessarily more provisional

than definitive scholarly conversation, suggests a cerebral twist to the
possibility of a romantic attachment between the preacher and the
poet. Yes, their intellectual as well as emotional love for one another,
like the friendship between George Bernard Shaw and Ellen Terry,
stayed largely an epistolary embodiment. But Wadsworth’s letters to
Dickinson could well have referenced his sermons, and hers to him
probably enclosed her poems. The circumstantial but strong evidence
that she read his printed works—namely, a striking set of verbal as well
as gist-specific correspondences between his and her works—is gath-
ered cumulatively throughout this book, and to some extent serves this
appendix, as well.2 For instance, the fact that during the early 1880s,
Wadsworth’s friends the Clark brothers delivered to Dickinson (or
sent her) a collection of Wadsworth’s sermons will figure prominently
here. The most important and surprising aspect of the Wadsworth/
Dickinson connection, if this essay comes near the mark, was their
“marriage of true minds.”3 Notwithstanding how clearly this union
may appear to have been the sublimation of their powerful (but sup-
pressed) psychosexual energies, this interaction of two rather oppo-
site, yet mutually attracted, mentalities constituted, nonetheless, the
subject-to-subject drama of their composite consciousness.
Charles Wadsworth and Emily Dickinson may have met in March
1855, during a visit paid by Dickinson and her sister, Lavinia, to
their Philadelphia friends, the Coleman family. The Colemans may
have belonged to, and were from time to time undoubtedly among,
Wadsworth’s congregation at the Arch Street Presbyterian Church.4
In the Presbyterian language of The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson
(1924) by Dickinson’s niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi (daughter of
Susan and Austin Dickinson), the “two predestined souls” were “kept
apart only by a high sense of duty.”5 Although Bianchi’s Dickinson-
loves-Wadsworth story is a melodramatic outpouring full of embellish-
ment, if not hyperbole (Bianchi was working from distant memories
of events), her account contains more than a grain of truth.6 This
appendix, while erring on the side of caution, will select quotations
from Bianchi’s narrative and blend these markers of romance with
such indications less of romance than of mind-marriage as Dickinson’s
letters to the Clark brothers, several of her other letters, and certain
poems. Certain love-theme dimensions of literary history in general
and of Dickinson’s cultural milieu in particular will also prove per-
tinent to this discussion. Thus, in an Anglo-American atmosphere
of compatibility and, for that matter, of interdependence between
romance and intellect, Dickinson tilted, however slightly, away from
heart and soul, and toward mind.
 Appendix C 189

Although Wadsworth traveled to the Dickinson family homestead

in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1860, “the one word he implored,”
according to Bianchi’s account of the journey, “Emily would not say”
(Dickinson’s recluse-like behavior began at about that time). In 1863,
perhaps because his parishioners had disapproved of his pro-Southern
leanings (this detail is not in Bianchi, though), Wadsworth “silently
withdrew with his wife and an only child” to Calvary Presbyterian
Church in San Francisco, “a continent’s width remote” (savor
Bianchi’s flourish). In 1869, he accepted a second Philadelphia pastor-
ate, the Third Reformed Dutch Church, and, in 1880, while serving
Immanuel Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia, he visited Dickinson
again. In 1882, after a throat ailment had begun to hinder his career,
he died at 68, four years before her demise at 55.
If, with however large a grain of salt, one may credit Bianchi’s read-
ing of motivation, Dickinson appeared scarcely inclined to cause “the
inevitable destruction of another woman’s life.” Mrs. Jane Wadsworth
(this indeed has a ring of truth) “knew nothing of this instantaneous,
overwhelming, impossible love.” After 1860, “without stopping to
look back,” Dickinson, if one can countenance more of Bianchi’s
rather overblown but chronologically convincing prose, “fled to her
own home for refuge—as a wild thing running from whatever it may
be that pursues.” She henceforth, if one may recover the kernel of
biographical conceivability from Bianchi’s sentimental, and somewhat
condescending (even belittling), language,

went on alone in the old house under the pines . . . From this time on
she clung more intensely to the tender shadows of her father’s home.
She still saw her friends and neighbors from time to time, but even then
her life had begun to go on in hidden ways . . . Her little form flitted
tranquil through the sunny small industries of her day, until night gave
her the right to watch with her flowers and liberated fancies.

Only “Sister Sue” (here, there may well be much psychosexual and
psychosocial verisimilitude in what Bianchi has to say) knew that “love
had been home to [Emily Dickinson] for an instant.”
To be sure, Bianchi’s story of hopeless love might seem formu-
laic, might be negligible as mere boilerplate allusion to “One Word
More” (1855) by Robert Browning, three lines of which presage,
from the man’s point of view, Bianchi’s implication of a double life for
Wadsworth and for Dickinson alike:

God be thanked [Browning writes], the meanest of his creatures

Boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with,
One to show a woman when he loves her! (17:15–7).
190 Appendix C

Perhaps Bianchi’s narrative is just a pale, failed micro-version of a

triple-decker, Victorian-era romance. Nevertheless, lovers of biogra-
phy will want to keep Bianchi’s sepia diptych on an at-hand shelf in
the storehouse of resources for interpreting the life and art of Emily
Dickinson. Does Dickinson’s love poetry, for instance, suggest that
she was looking for a father figure? Sixteen years older than she
(the same age difference obtains between Mr. Knightley and Emma
Woodhouse), Wadsworth held maturity, “a certain age,” in com-
mon with such other Dickinson-admired men as Benjamin Franklin
Newton, Samuel Bowles (he was only four years her senior, though),
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Otis Lord.7 One thinks, in this
connection, of another December-May romance, a love-match his-
torically, yet not substantively, far removed from Wadsworth and
from Dickinson—namely, the Bible story of Boaz and Ruth (was their
body-and-soul-mating, for all practical purposes, the first, most com-
plete romantic comedy in the West?).
The words already quoted from Bianchi jibe with the ideas and,
for that matter, with the negative and positive diction of Dickinson’s
poems and letters. The poet, as fleeing “wild thing,” comments on
the primal fear of her speaker in “I started Early - Took my Dog - ,”
in which a dreamlike but masculine sea hotly but unsuccessfully pur-
sues the poet’s wily self-projection (Fr656; Dickinson elsewhere,
though, feels no ambivalence about “Wild nights!” of love-making!
[Fr269, line 1]). “Her father’s home” brings to mind her decision,
taken at about age thirty, not “to cross my Father’s ground [i.e., the
Homestead] to any House or town” (L330). Her “hidden ways” par-
allel the main idea of her melancholy poem “I tie my Hat - I crease my
Shawl - ,” in which her (lovelorn?) persona withdraws not only from
the world into her (father’s?) home but also (shades of Miss Havisham)
from her surrounding house into herself (Fr522). Thus the “instan-
taneous” and “overwhelming” quality of Emily Dickinson’s love for
Charles Wadsworth, as Bianchi portrays it, turns out to be directly
proportional to the “impossibility” of this love, as Bianchi reports on
it. The “instantaneous” and “overwhelming,” if unfulfilled, quality of
the poet’s love for the preacher, however, “dwell[s] in Possibility - ”
indeed (Fr466, line 1)—that is, lingers in her “liberated fancies,” her
creative imagination, and her accomplished poems (her blooming
“flowers”), where, as Tennyson would have it,

’Tis better to have loved and lost

Than never to have loved at all.
(In Memoriam [1850] 27:15–16)
 Appendix C 191

Bianchi’s conclusion—that is, that Dickinson’s “instantaneous” and

“overwhelming” love for Wadsworth “had been home [to her] for an
instant”—echoes the poet’s muted insight, her lyrical implication, that
even star-crossed, and hence fleeting, love graciously leaves behind,
and beautifully preserves in amber, the “Soul’s Superior instants”
(Fr630, line 1; emphasis added).8
If aficionados of Dickinson’s poetry appear unlikely to confirm
Bianchi’s details—Wadsworth had two small children in 1863, not
one—then neither need her readers do entirely without Bianchi’s ver-
sion of events. Of course, William Wordsworth’s “spots of time” and
all the consequent proto-Joycean epiphanies, quasi-mystical unions,
and quasi-divine afflatuses of nineteenth-century poetry pertain to
the literary-historical inspirations of Emily Dickinson’s writings.9
Still, something was at work in her life, and thence in her imagina-
tion, besides purely aesthetic influence, and if it was not her love for
Susan Dickinson or for Charles Wadsworth, or for Otis Lord, or for all
three or for someone else, then it was her encounters with otherness
through others, and with others through otherness. Something in the
poet’s personal history, after all, surely feels of sufficient importance
to steady and to center her art, for which Bianchi’s witness serves
well enough as a flawed but working model. The “romance” aspect
of The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson issues Bianchi’s call for bio-
graphical criticism, however speculative in tendency such biograph-
ical criticism must be.10 Some of the particulars of Bianchi’s book
appear exaggerated, even preposterous, but, whatever her reliability,
Dickinson’s niece was as close to the poet as almost anyone else, and
the mystique of her account comes across as perennially indicative of
what lively insights the biographical critic of Dickinson’s art can gen-
erate. Bianchi concludes that the Myth of Amherst was “as truly a nun
as any avowed celibate, but the altar she served was veiled from every
eye save that of God.” Perhaps “altar” signifies here the religious oth-
erness of Wadsworth’s presence in Dickinson’s poetry.
In August 1882, four months after Wadsworth’s death, Dickinson
declared to his friend James D. Clark, “He was my Shepherd from
‘Little Girl’hood, and I cannot conjecture a world without him, so
noble was he always—so fathomless—so gentle” (L766).11 Now
this poet never praised anyone or anything lightly. As far as she was
concerned, the inconceivability of a world without Wadsworth sig-
naled her love for him, notwithstanding her implication of a father/
daughter, or a minister/protégée-parishioner, arrangement between
them. Her love for him, she implies, has endured, if not from “’Little
Girl’hood,” then for well over two decades. Her romantic as well as
192 Appendix C

mentor/student allegiance to a man of deep mystery—she would be

equally fathomless to him—vies as the main event of her life—and
ranks as perhaps the chief fact behind the metaphors of her love poems
(along with her friendship for Sue, of course).12
To be sure, William H. Shurr’s twofold belief (a) that Wadsworth
and Dickinson consummated their love and (b) that she had an
abortion has made Shurr’s readers definitely wince.13 Nevertheless,
although Dickinson’s “historical reality” and her “imaginative trans-
formations” are two different things, scarcely interrelating literally,
the former underpins the latter, and vice versa.14 So Bianchi’s report
can lead into an interpretive clearing. Bianchi’s Presbyterian diction—
recall “two predestined souls . . . kept apart only by a high sense of
duty”—finds excellent match in Dickinson’s Presbyterian idiom. Such
words as “Synods” and such mysteries as “The Presbyterian Birds
can now resume their Meeting” (Fr1400B, line 4; Fr1620, line 3)
can reinforce Habegger’s near-location of the Presbyterian minister
in Dickinson’s “Master” poems.15 The creative imagination flowers,
after all, whenever love germinates.16 Thus, if Dickinson’s personal
history in fact forms part of her imagination, then Wadsworth makes
much difference to her poetry. Perhaps he even makes all the differ-
ence in it, inspiring her 40 fascicles in particular (roughly 45 percent
of her 1,789 lyrics).17
The Wadsworth/Dickinson connection, at any rate, can become
an ascendant means of reading Dickinson’s poems biographically, if
only because, until recently, the love between preacher and poet has
suffered scholarly neglect compared with the understandable peak
of interest in Susan Dickinson.18 To complement romance, one may
analyze the intellectual character of the Wadsworth/Dickinson friend-
ship. This “marriage of true minds” becomes no less dynamic for sub-
limating, trends even more explosive for repressing, Eros. Martha
Nussbaum’s phrases “upheavals of thought” and “the intelligence
of emotions” (emphasis added) prove apropos. Just as Dickinson’s
love for Wadsworth stays truer for developing mind, as well as soul
and heart, so her poems plot “abundant recompense” for embodied
presence.19
The Wadsworth/Dickinson connection, accordingly, marks the
poet’s maturity. “Friendship often ends in love, but love in friendship
never.” Schoolgirl Dickinson copied this proverb on the inside back
cover of her edition (1838) of the works of Vergil.20 The budding
poet shared the conventional view, handed down from Rochefoucauld
to Sterne to Byron, that in the behavior of men toward women, and
perhaps even of women toward men, love and friendship must remain
 Appendix C 193

mutually exclusive.21 Alongside the adult Dickinson’s “reading” of

Wadsworth, her reading of Keats and of Emerson, as this appendix can
now roundly conclude, probably changed her thinking, undoubtedly
mended the view captured by the schoolgirl’s jotting.
Through conning Keats, first, Dickinson would have known that
friendship and love can turn out nothing if not simultaneously viable.
“Love and friendship” together make up, for Keats, the “crown” of
“happiness” that “sits high / Upon the forehead of humanity” (com-
pare Keats, Endymion: A Poetic Romance [1818] 1:776–77). Keats
adds, for good measure, that the “entanglements” of friendship with
love—that is, the friction between, and the interpenetration of, these
concepts—grow “[r]icher,” and “far / More self-destroying,” than
even that mystical

moment [when humanity] step[s]

Into a sort of oneness, and our state
Is like a floating spirit’s.
(Endymion 1:778–802)

As far as Wadsworth’s presence in Dickinson’s poetry goes, her art,

like Keats’s canon, demonstrates that friendship/love can comprise
an alternative to, as well as a fountain of, mysticism (Wadsworth’s
faith, after all, if Part I of this book pans out, can feel considerably less
retrospectively preternatural than boldly sense-related). Thus, prov-
ing neither the same nor regressive from one to the other, friendship
and love can emerge from Dickinson’s experience, and move into her
words, as progressive from one to the other, and as, for that matter,
overlapping, imbricated.
For Emerson and his circle, too (ultimately including Dickinson),
friendship and love together represent the blessings of life.22 “We are
associated in adolescent and adult life,” Emerson writes,

with some friends, who, like skies and waters, are coextensive with our
idea; who, answering each to a certain affection of the soul, satisfy our
desire on that side; whom we lack power to put at such focal distance
from us, that we can mend or even analyze them. We cannot chuse but
love them . . . [M]uch intercourse with a friend has supplied us with a
standard of excellence, and has increased our respect for the resources
of God who thus sends a real person to outgo our ideal. (“Nature”
[1837] in Murphy, ed., 1:844)

Emerson’s phrase “a certain affection of the soul” couches his syn-

thesis of friendship with love in the language of Jonathan Edwards.
194 Appendix C

John Wesley’s abridgment of Edwards’s Treatise concerning Religious

Affections (1746; abridged 1773) imports “a certain affection of
the soul” into British sensibility, adding binational resonance to the
religious background of Emerson’s friendship/love coalescence and
of his friendship-love interpenetration.23 As one places Dickinson’s
thinking in this Anglo-American context, one thinks, as well, of the
friendship-love synthesis in such Romantic-era doctrines of sympathy
as those of Blake, Coleridge, and Shelley.24
“A man,” declares Emerson (one could substitute “Emily
Dickinson” and change, as well, the gender of the following personal
pronouns), “will see his character emitted in the events that seem to
meet, but which exude from and accompany him” (“Fate” [1852] in
Whicher, ed., 349). “Some people,” Emerson continues, “are made up
of rhyme, coincidence, omen, periodicity, and presage: they meet the
person they seek; what their companion prepares to say to them, they
first say to him; and a hundred signs apprise them of what is about to
befall.”25 Dickinson, it is true, might seem little thus to favor whom
she meets. The persistent view of her as a lonely heart, as an eccen-
tric loner, after all, can yet mislead her readers. Nonetheless, through
her personae, she characterizes the dialogue of love/friendship as the
impetus to knowledge, perhaps even more than as the aid to belief (or
so this book everywhere signals). Giving rise to her signature theme
of wonder, of awe mixed with fear, her friendship/love combination
will not let her go (compare Hosea 11:4), and it augurs her more than
merely metaphorical connection with worldly reality as the proxy for
unworldly faith. Thus, according to the larger perspective of this book,
the truth as well as the grace and joy that the poet offers her read-
ers is what she also continually receives from her array of such incar-
nate to ghostly beloveds as Wadsworth. Just as friendship and love,
for Dickinson, cross over from one to the other, so the others and the
otherness of her life form the phenomenal to numinous, if primarily
the phenomenal, dimension of her aesthetic vision.
The quality of Dickinson’s “marriage of true minds” is that it
lasts, for, though her combination of friendship with love can waver,
it scarcely vanishes. Of course, she refused to marry Judge Lord,
to whom she explained, “‘No’ is the wildest word we consign to
Language” (L562). Still, she wrote to Judge Lord regularly, and, dur-
ing the many years when she received virtually no other visitors, she
saw him. Her even greater love for Susan Dickinson and for Charles
Wadsworth lasted for decades, despite the inevitable friction in even
these relationships. Dickinson was not so much at once, as alternately,
in love and friends with all such members of her social circle, but her
 Appendix C 195

mind stayed married to theirs in Blake’s best tradition of “marriage”

not as “reconciliation” but as “the sustained tension, without victory
or suppression, of co-present oppositions.”26
Susan Dickinson gets most of the credit, nowadays, for inspir-
ing some of the best love poetry in the language. Habegger faults
this focus, however, for “trying to see [Emily] Dickinson through a
single lens.”27 At some risk of using a “single lens” here, yet often
acknowledging the power of Susan Dickinson to stimulate bio-
graphical assumptions about, and approaches to, Dickinson’s art,
this appendix, and indeed this book, seek to correct the imbalance
to which Habegger often refers. One may take the poet’s superlative
language “dearest earthly friend” seriously. One may proceed heu-
ristically, as though Charles Wadsworth were “first among equals” in
Dickinson’s sometimes really imagined and sometimes imaginatively
real social circle.
“Finally,” Christopher Benfey concludes, “Dickinson suggests
that we can relinquish certainty in our relations to others, and yet
acknowledge our relatedness to them. She will often call this relation
one of ‘nearness.’”28 Thus, without necessarily excluding eroticism,
however ungratified; passion, however shackled; or romance, how-
ever unfulfilled, from her mix of friendship and love, she nonethe-
less represents both friendship and love as at all times reflecting not
only varying degrees of heartfelt emotion but also heaping measures
of mind-filled soul.29 Things equal to the same thing, one learns in
school, are equal to each other. Love is equal to “the marriage of true
minds”; so is friendship; therefore, with apologies to Rochefoucauld
et al., friendship and love can prove equal to one another, perhaps
for men and women in particular. Dickinson, paradoxically, finds this
axiom empirically true.
In large part because of its unwillingness to “bend with the remover
to remove,” a poem that Dickinson composed in, or about, 1882, the
year of Wadsworth’s death, would appear to take the measure of the
poet’s “marriage” to the preacher, and perhaps even of his to her:
My Wars are laid away in Books -
I have one Battle more -
A Foe whom I have never seen
But oft has scanned me o’er -
And hesitated me between
And others at my side,
But chose the Best - Neglecting me - till
All the rest have died -
How sweet if I am not forgot
196 Appendix C

By Chums that passed away -

Since Playmates at threescore and ten
Are such a scarcity -
(Fr1579)

Habegger reasons that “the Best” (line 7) means Wadsworth, who

died on April 1, and that “Books - ” (line 1) means the 40 fascicles,
the manuscript books or the more than 800 poems that Dickinson
might well have addressed to Wadsworth even as Wordsworth—what
a fortuitous coincidence of names!—wrote The Prelude (1805 version)
for Coleridge.30 Thus “My Wars are laid away in Books - ” appears to
take for granted the central role among Dickinson’s poetic personae,
as well as within her social circle, of the man whom she calls “my
Clergyman” (L790). Poised between her having written about him
and her faint, all but unexpressed hope of seeing him in heaven, she
pays tribute in these lines to his importance to her on earth. The poem
might well identify Wadsworth as the chief muse of Dickinson’s art.
According to Thomas H. Johnson, the editor of the first of the
(so far) two complete variorum editions of Emily Dickinson’s poems,
“The handwriting of ‘Those - dying then,’ suggests that the lines
might have been written after the death of Charles Wadsworth on
1 April 1882” (Poems 3:713 n):

Those - dying then,

Knew where they went -
They went to God’s Right Hand -
That Hand is amputated now
And God cannot be found -
The abdication of Belief
Makes the Behavior small -
Better an ignis fatuus
Than no illume at all -
(Fr1581)

These late-career lines nag at Roger Lundin’s effort to anatomize

Dickinson’s belief, haunting both Lundin’s study and the previous
volume in the present series of arguments concerning the evangeli-
cal as well as empirical language of Anglo-American Romanticism.31
As Charles R. Anderson understands Dickinson’s expression of her
tough mind here, the poem “sums up her lifelong problem as that of
one who was cut off from simple faith by the new currents of thought
in her day, mildly envious of the orthodox older generations” (257).
The pessimism of the poem contrasts sharply with Dickinson’s
 Appendix C 197

hard-earned optimism elsewhere.32 Her lament appears personal,

and “hope without belief” (Lambert 15) is about the best face that
could be put upon it. Johnson’s biographical approach to “Those -
dying then” magnifies more intensely than even the history-of-ideas
emphasis in Lundin’s sweeping study Dickinson’s apprehension of
the abdication, mutilation, or death of God. If God, by Dickinson’s
implication, is “changed, changed utterly” for the worse, then the
death of Wadsworth confirms a dreadful cosmic mutation from
divine plenitude and presence to the most unbearable emptiness and
absence conceivable (compare Yeats, “Easter 1916” [1920], line 79).
The horror, the horror, of Wadsworth’s death epitomizes Dickinson’s
stake in the larger demise announced in parallel but exclusively philo-
sophical terms by her contemporary Nietzsche, and “Those - dying
then” can even suggest that Wadsworth and Dickinson included
nihilism as an appalling but inescapable topic of their philosophical/
scientific/theological conversation.
To capture the interpersonally conditioned American atmosphere
in which Wadsworth and Dickinson breathed, and which she breathed
into her words, witness a passage from A Week on the Concord and
Merrimac Rivers (1849) by Henry David Thoreau. Imagine Dickinson
saying the following words to Wadsworth as part of instructions
about “how a Friend [or beloved] will address his [or her] Friend [or
beloved]” (Thoreau’s [expanded] language):

I never asked thy leave to let me love thee [Thoreau writes],—I have
a right. I love thee not as something private and personal, which is
your own, but as something universal and worthy of love, which I have
found . . . You are the fact in a fiction,—you are the truth more strange
and admirable than fiction. Consent only to be what you are. I alone
will never stand in your way. This is what I would like,—to be as inti-
mate with you as our spirits are intimate,—respecting you as I respect
my ideal. Never to profane one another by word or action, even by a
thought. Between us, if necessary, let there be no acquaintance. (Qtd.
in Shurr 126–27)

Shurr cites this passage in order to establish “in miniature much of the
same emotional galaxy” in which Wadsworth and Dickinson “oper-
ated” (127), and “You are the fact in a fiction,—you are the truth more
strange and admirable than fiction” speaks volumes about her life/art
paradox, and about the sphere of her beloveds, alike. Thoreau’s words
provide the flavor of the disembodied but real love that Dickinson feels
for Wadsworth, and perhaps even vice versa. Ideal, for instance, is cho-
sen over, and possibly selected to the exclusion of, mere acquaintance
198 Appendix C

(this word, if it implies Geoffrey Chaucer’s bawdy meaning, does so

with abundant intellectual recompense for such signification).33
Arlo Bates’s identification of Dickinson’s chief trait, “emotional
thought” (emphasis added), most fully describes, though, what she
and Wadsworth hold in common.34 The “emotional galaxy” of their
love contains more tension, more psychological and psychosexual
urgency, than Thoreau’s passage suggests love ever reflects. Their
“emotional galaxy,” in fact, leads to more intellectual colloquy than
Thoreau appears to think either possible or desirable in even the most
loving kinds of friendship. Thus, the ever increasing and the increas-
ingly satisfying complexities of their relationship are doubly assured.
Dickinson calls Wadsworth “my Clergyman” with proprietary inten-
sity and with propriety—that is, with respect for the mind of her prime
partner in discussion.35
The pastoral counselor/spiritual aspirant model of Dickinson’s emo-
tionally intellectual relationship with Wadsworth is “a more excellent
way” for nineteenth-century men and women to have followed than,
say, the teacher/pupil condescension suffered by Elizabeth Peabody at
the hands of then Harvard president John Kirkland.36 Kirkland warns
Peabody that when a woman “is raised by genius and knowledge above
the level of her sex, her neglect of . . . attentions called femininities, will
more than counterbalance all her advantages and reduce her below all
other women” (qtd. in Marshall 61). Dickinson accomplishes much
and leads an eventful life with a little help from her male friends and
mentors. This means not just brother Austin, legal aid Newton, jour-
nalists Lyman and Bowles, and lawyer Lord but ministers or ministers-
to-be or former ministers Aaron Colton, Daniel Bliss, John Grant,
John Gould, J. L. Jenkins, Washington Gladden, Horace Bushnell,
Edwards A. Park, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Ralph Waldo
Emerson.37 Whether or not Dickinson’s friendship with, and love for,
Wadsworth is “first” among all these “equals,” their intellectual as well
as emotional parity with her, their “marriage of [their] true minds” to
her mind, indeed entails a give-and-take, rather than a top-down, kind
of instruction. The “fellowship of kindred minds” (emphasis added) is
the philosophical and scientific, as well as theological, “tie that binds”
the poet to the preacher with all the cohesion that she would ever
know or could ever need to know on this earth.38
Walter Pater epitomizes the nineteenth-century kind of affection-
with-wisdom that distinguishes the Wadsworth/Dickinson sensibility.

While all melt under our feet [Pater writes], we may well grasp at any
exquisite passion, or . . . the face of one’s friend. Not to discriminate
 Appendix C 199

every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the
very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their
ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.
(Conclusion to The Renaissance [1873])

The preacher and the poet together occupied terra that grew firm, if
not sacred, because of the hard, gem-like flame of their loving friend-
ship. Their “marriage of true minds / Admit[ted] [few] impedi-
ments,” if one may redirect here the truths of the Bard (in Sonnet
116 [1609], lines 1–2). The love between Wadsworth and Dickinson
neither depended on face-to-face encounter nor, again to apply to
their case the words of Dickinson’s favorite author, “[bent] with the
remover to remove” (Sonnet 116, line 4).
 Note s

Introduction
1. For Emily Dickinson’s lifelong love of William Shakespeare’s art as the
primal scene of literature, see, e.g., Wolff, 165, 176, 205, 280, 352.
2. See, respectively, Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929);
Shakespeare, Sonnet 30 (1609), line 1; and Wallace Stevens, “The
Idea of Order at Key West” (1935), line 56. Quotations of British
and American authors, unless otherwise indicated, are from Damrosch
et al., eds., and Baym et al., eds. For a comparison of Shakespeare and
Dickinson, focusing on plays rather than sonnets and giving mean-
ing to her lyric poems as dramatic monologues, if not dialogues, see
Finnerty. For a comparison of Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson,
based on their shared debt to Shakespeare, see Novy, ed. As Dickinson
almost daily recorded her manuscript self-projections, she absorbed
words written by others; therefore, juxtaposing her words with those
of these fellow-writers can constitute the means of reconstructing her
conversation. This method can work, whether these various master
figures were all but literally at her side, or more than figuratively on
her horizon, or both.
3. For an exposition of Henry Sussman’s phrase “between the registers,”
see Chapter 4 of Sussman. These words epitomize Sussman’s goal of
collapsing distinctions among poetry, philosophy, and religion. The
subtitle of Sussman’s The Task of the Critic (2005)—namely, Poetics,
Philosophy, Religion—parallels the subtitle of this book (Poetry,
Philosophy, Science). Religion, though, forms the subtext of this book,
even as science does of Sussman’s.
4. Gravil Romantic Dialogues 95–96, 99–100, 106, 140, 147, 236. Gravil
argues that the American Renaissance builds on, rather than attacks or
parodies, British Romanticism. In his view, Cooper, Emerson, Thoreau,
Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson strive to supple-
ment British Romantic tentativeness, doubt, indirection, failure, and
compromise with American Romantic liberation, self-confidence, and
perfection. Shira Wolosky, similarly, understands Dickinson in dia-
logue with American authors: Dickinson’s poetic, Wolosky argues,
constitutes “a register of the world” (Poetry and Public Discourse 30).
For a pioneering study of the binational emphasis of this book, see
Lease Anglo-American Encounters. Gravil recognizes two “equally
202 Notes

viable stances for American literati” (xii), one represented by James

Fenimore Cooper’s antagonism toward British literary authority, and
the other by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s participation in that author-
ity. Nicholas Nardini discerns “a third tack” among British as well
as American writers—namely, a stance “look[ing] past all questions
of nations and language, to some universal grounding in ‘nature’”
(160–61).
5. Paul Crumbley’s Winds of Will: Emily Dickinson and the Sovereignty
of Democratic Thought (2010) does not claim interest, on Dickinson’s
part, in women’s rights, abolition, or war, but Crumbley’s emphasis on
her dialogical method, and on her multiple choices (her choosing not
choosing), carries the American experiment in democratic sovereignty
to its logical, proper conclusion. If one were to write the companion
volume on Dickinson’s religious thought, it might be titled Winds of
Will: Emily Dickinson and the Arminian (Free-Will) Character of Her
Soul-Competence. Crumbley’s two books understand the indetermi-
nacy of Dickinson’s dialogic style as the simultaneous existence of her
Gothic, Romantic, sentimental, and evangelical discourses. To these,
in the spirit of this book, one might add her empirical voice at the top
of her less indeterminate than possible triangle of Romantic, empiri-
cal, and evangelical perspectives, with Gothic and sentimental off to
one side, and lower down.
6. Quotations of the Bible are from Dickinson’s choice among trans-
lations—namely, the King James Version (Capps). The nineteenth
century was the high watermark of this perennial favorite among
English-language renderings (Alter; Gordon Campbell 148–76). The
KJV is holding its own (Bloom Shadow). Dickinson’s KJV, she writes,
“stills, incites, infatuates—blesses and blames” (L965). Thus, like
Horace Bushnell’s and Edwards Amasa Park’s mid-nineteenth-century
understanding of biblical metaphor as multilayered in meaning, and
unlike the unitary-criterion doctrinal emphasis of Charles Hodge’s
midcentury Princeton Reformed propositional theology, Dickinson’s
Bible retains the power to “elude stability” (L693). Thanks go to
Jennifer Leader for sharing her understanding of American theologi-
cal history. Ann Douglas, for her part, suggests that, along with Parks
and Bushnell, Dickinson admired Charles Wadsworth for “turning
religion into literature” (Ann Douglas 150).
7. This refers to Carl Sandberg’s refrain in The People, Yes (1936).
8. Ann Rigney’s way of branding the major means by which Sir Walter
Scott unwittingly achieved his “afterlives”—i.e., his ongoing and
great, yet almost universally unacknowledged, cultural influence—
is “invisible suffusions” (2). Rigney demonstrates, for instance, the
unrecognized but pervasive pertinence of Edward Waverly’s creative
suspension between two loves—Flora and Rose—to the present-day
“strong weakness” of a Briton’s pledging allegiance to England and
to Scotland at one and the same time. Even Hardy, notwithstanding
 Notes 203

his reputation for pessimism, called his philosophy “meliorism,” from

the Latin, “to make better.”
9. For the philosophical and scientific language of “known unknowns,”
etc., see Zizek.
10. Compare, respectively, Hardy, “In Tenebris” (1902), line 24; Beckett,
Waiting for Godot (1952); Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902); Yeats,
“The Second Coming” (1919), line 5; and Wordsworth, “Ode:
Intimations of Immortality” (1802–1804), line 126.
11. Compare Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850) 6:609. For Dickinson’s
prefiguring of Modernism, see Dickie; Porter. Robert Langbaum’s
studies of the arc from Romantic to Modern concentrate on intuition,
self-expression, and unmediated vision (Poetry 35–36), to which this
book adds sense perception, pragmatic appeal, and sensory insight.
Langbaum’s emphasis on Modern-era fragmentation, disjunction,
and disequilibrium (Word xiii–xiv) will influence (see part II) how this
book interprets Modernism in relation to Dickinson.
12. Dickinson channeled works she had not read, but which were cen-
tral to her concerns, such as John Keats’s “Epistle to John Hamilton
Reynolds” (1817). Dickinson’s living counterparts in this almost
more than merely metaphorical/imaginary discussion, would have
replied to her, were it not that only 10 of her 1,789 lyrics appeared in
print during her lifetime, and these not only against her will but also
considerably altered. Such fellow-writers would have selected her for
their society of belles lettres, inasmuch as their works often paralleled
hers in both form and content.
13. Since Emily Dickinson called her poems flowers, and since flowers can
mean “extracts from literary works” (Potter 114), it appears more
than plausible to think of Dickinson’s poems not only as excerpts
from but also as part and parcel of that larger poem called literary
history.
14. Compare Herman Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853). For a
pairing of Melville and Dickinson, based on how in their analogous
garrets they raised symbolic rather than economic capital, see Kearns.
No hint of community, similarly, leavens Emerson’s journal entry for
April 17, 1827: “I feel a joy in my solitude that the merriment of vul-
gar society can never communicate” (qtd. in Meola 115).
15. Candidates for Dickinson’s “permanent earthly beloved” include her
“dearest earthly friend” (L807), the Reverend Charles Wadsworth
(Habegger; Longsworth “‘Latitude’”; Sewall Life; Shurr; Strickland);
her sister-in-law Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson, wife of Austin
(Bennett; Hart; Smith); her confidantes Kate Scott Anthon (Patterson
Riddle) and Samuel Bowles, editor of The Springfield Republican
(Farr); and her father Edward’s liege companion and fellow-lawyer
(later judge) Otis Lord (Walsh). One suspects that, if it was any
of these (Lyndall Gordon calls it none of the above, not wanting
Dickinson to be thus overidentified with any man), or if it was yet
204 Notes

another (this book will mention others), her beloved was only one in
number (though she remained the friend of each candidate). See also
Eberwein “Lovers.”
16. Compare, respectively, Keats, “This Living Hand” (late 1819?), line
6; Yeats, “The Second Coming” (1920), line 5; and Wordsworth,
“Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” (1798), line 49.
17. The unforgettable but potentially misleading name “lady whom the
people call the Myth” was given to Dickinson by her friend and early
editor Mabel Loomis Todd, who was simply epitomizing how the citi-
zens of Amherst, Massachusetts, thought of their admittedly eccentric
neighbor. For Dickinson as a not-so-reclusive poet, see Richard B.
Sewall’s still-magisterial critical biography. If Dickinson did not
always deliberately speak with, or talk back to, her written others, her
scarcely lonely “Soul,” nonetheless, was not simply or entirely home
alone. Although she met people face to face more often than one
might think, given that “the people” still often regard this “lady” as
a recluse, words affected her less often by the hearing of her physical
ear than through print. She met her boon companions primarily on
the pages of her books in her upstairs room, where she kept to herself
incongruously to share their outreach or fellow-feeling.
18. For a path-finding essay on Dickinson’s global concerns, see Giles.
For a state-of-the-art discussion of Dickinson as a domestic poet,
see Mudge. One thinks, in this connection, of Ben Jonson’s double-
edged view of Shakespeare (a) that he was the “Soul of the age!” and
(b) that “He was not of an age, but for all time!” (“To the Memory
of My Beloved Master, William Shakespeare, and What He Hath Left
Us” [1623], lines 17, 43).
19. Jürgen Habermas’s watchword “the unforced force of the better
argument” can apply to the open-endedness of poetic quest, as well
as of philosophical and scientific inquiry (Habermas 78). For a less
admiring view of Habermas, see New and Reedy, eds., Theology,
xv–xix. The injunction “Stop in the name of the law!” is satirized in
Michel Foucault’s critique of aesthetically inimical Western power
(Foucault 31).
20. For Bloomian interpretation emphasizing Dickinson’s anxiety of
influence, see Diehl Dickinson; Homans. Just as in Dickinson’s poems
and letters one can hear her conversation with her fellow-authors in
the long Romantic Movement, so one can take heart from the gender-
complementary model generated by Stuart Curran. Curran juxtaposes
the style and substance of male and female poet-pairs without favoring
one sex. Beth Lau’s collection of essays tests the paradigm, and shows
how male/female pairings of “fellow-Romantics” “inhabited the same
or overlapping . . . milieus and . . . expressed many shared aspirations,
convictions, anxieties, and conflicts” (2). The same could be said
of the pairing of almost any male Romantic author with Dickinson.
Annie Finch argues that Dickinson “survived into the twentieth and
 Notes 205

twenty-first century” because she was a “hybrid” poet who mixed

what Louise Bogan calls the female “line of feeling” with what Bogan
calls the male “line of truth” (Bogan qtd. in Finch 28).
21. This detail of the poet’s interior decoration justifies inflecting how she
said she saw—i.e., “New Englandly” (Fr256, line 7; emphasis added).
Dickinson saw, in other words, less from her American than from her
Anglo-American perspective. Three other Britain-derived images on
the “text” of her wall were pictures of Windsor Castle, of Elizabeth
Barrett Browning, and of George Eliot (Longsworth “‘Latitude’” 49).
For Dickinson and Barrett Browning, see Swyderski. For Dickinson
and George Eliot, see Wolff 534, 555–57.
22. See, respectively, Blake, All Religions Are One (c. 1788), and
Wordsworth, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”
(1798), line 38.
23. For the philosophical transcendentalism of the British Romantics, see
Notopoulos; Newman Ivey White. For their religious transcendental-
ism, see Barth; Brantley Experience 165–89; Roe; Ryan; Ulmer. Colin
Jager has recently concluded, contra legions of secularizing critics, that
the “intentionality” embraced by British Romantics logically commit-
ted them to “divine intentionality” (224). Describing an arc from the
Enlightenment to Romanticism, Jager’s interpretation demonstrates a
self-critical “tradition of natural theology,” “substantially continuous”
from Hume to Blake, in which “practice” is preferred to “argument”
(36–37). For Dickinson, as she was influenced by the religious transcen-
dentalism of British Romantic writers and of Emerson (and for that mat-
ter of John Wesley and of Jonathan Edwards), see Brantley Experience
116–64. For subject/object coalescence and interpenetration as the key
to the British Romantics’ theme of sense perception and their love of
paradox, see Clarke; Wasserman “The English Romantics.” For a classic
argument that Wordsworth introduced this empirically philosophical
emphasis of British Romantic “epistemology,” see Davies.
24. For the importance of science to the British Romantic imagination,
see Bate Romantic; Holmes; Gaull; Grinnell; Macfarlane; McKusick;
Milnes; Nichols; Rigby. Jane Donahue Eberwein draws a distinction
between Dickinson’s “scientifically detached observational skills” and
“the counter-influence of Transcendental Romanticism” (“Outgrowing
Genesis?” 15). But there is not such a sharp distinction, perhaps,
between Dickinson’s “observational skills” and the empirical streak of
Anglo-American Romanticism.
25. For the prominence of Scottish Common Sense philosophy in Edward
Dickinson’s library, see Capps. For signs of the Common Sense
School in Emily Dickinson’s poetry, see Deppman Trying to Think.
For the importance of the Common Sense School in eighteenth- to
nineteenth-century America, see Manning.
26. This wording is indebted to that of Denis Donoghue in another con-
text: “Even to write against something is to take one’s bearings from
206 Notes

it” (Third Voice 18). This important and surprising idea will recur
throughout this book.
27. Compare Robert Frost, “To Earthward” (1923). Note well the final
word of William James’s title: The Varieties of Religious Experience
(1902).
28. For the relation between Charles Darwin’s science and literature,
and for his science as literature, see Beer; Levine; David Locke.
George Levine points to the metaphorical and paradoxical charac-
ter of Darwin’s language, and to Darwin’s comic rather than tragic
tone. For the centrality of the phrase “poetic faith” to Romantic-era
thought, see Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817), Chapter 14.
29. For a recent perspective on the American importation through James
Marsh and John Dewey of Coleridge’s British Romantic domestica-
tion of German idealism, see Harvey “Coleridge’s.”
30. See the discussion in Patterson Riddle Chapter 1. Of “Wild nights -
wild nights!” Sharon Leiter writes: “On the physical level, the image
of the speaker as a boat mooring in a harbor reverses the roles inher-
ent in male and female anatomy. The observation has led . . . to a
homoerotic interpretation. If the poem is about Dickinson’s love
for another woman (the most likely candidate would be her sister-
in-law, Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson), the problem is elimi-
nated” (232).
31. See Gerard Manley Hopkins, “I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, Not
Day” (1885). Here is the full passage: “I am gall, I am heartburn.
God’s most deep decree / Bitter would have me taste: my taste was
me; / Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse. //
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see / The lost are like this,
and the scourge to be / As I am mine, their sweating selves; but
worse” (lines 9–14). For the constructed nature of self-fashioning, see
Greenblatt Renaissance.
32. In 1969, Richard Howard dedicated a volume of dramatic mono-
logues to Robert Browning: “[T]o the great poet of otherness . . . who
said, as I should like to say, ‘I’ll tell my state as though ‘twere none of
mine’” (qtd. in Abrams et al., eds., 2:1,229). Does Browning antici-
pate T. S. Eliot’s formula: “The more perfect the artist, the more
completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind
which creates” (qtd. in Kirchwey 19)?
33. This conflates Walt Whitman’s language in “Song of Myself,” line
1,314, with Dickinson’s in line 3 of “Obtaining but our own extent”
(Fr1573). Agnieszka Salska’s philosophically perceptive comparison
of Whitman with Dickinson argues that, for them, “the self is central”
(36); Dickinson’s in Salska’s view, however, is more circumscribed and
isolated (Salska adduces Whitman’s as “kosmos” [“Song of Myself”
34:1]). Salska emphasizes such inward-looking poems of Dickinson’s
as “How happy is the little Stone” (Fr1570). This book, on the other
hand, suggests the dialogical and scientific as well as philosophical
 Notes 207

senses in which Dickinson’s poetic concerns match those of Whitman

in “Song of Myself” 4:2–4: “People I meet, the effect upon me of
my early life, or the ward and city I live in, or the nation, / The lat-
est dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new, /
My dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues.” Dickinson’s
“central consciousness” (Salska’s phrase) radiates as far and wide as
Whitman’s, as in her lines “The Only News I know / Is Bulletins all
Day / From Immortality” (Fr820, lines 1–3).
34. E. Derek Taylor 522. See also E. Derek Taylor and Melvyn New, eds.
Mary Astell’s Christian feminism calls ascetically for Protestant nun-
neries. See Astell’s Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694) and Astell’s
Reflections upon Marriage (1700).
35. Wesley respected Norris’s otherworldly, sense-suspicious Christian
Platonism, but Wesley’s conversations with Mary Pendarves, as
with Miss March, Mary Bishop, Hannah Ball, Anne Foard, Damaris
Perronnet, and his mother, Susannah, showed that Locke had won
the battle. For a study of the Wesley/Pendarves connection—
i.e., their common interest in the Locke-derived method of British
Enlightenment theology—see Brantley Locke 103–105, 111–12, 116,
205, 252. The focus on Mary Pendarves’s importance in Brantley
Locke is now supplemented by Molly Peacock’s fascinating, welcome
account of Mrs. Delany (formerly Mrs. Pendarves) as a collage or
flower-mosaic artist beginning at age 72. Peacock mentions Wesley
only in passing, but Peacock’s labor of love is a model of research.
36. Beginning with his 11 sisters, whose father referred to his “sixty feet
of daughters,” Edwards showed respect for the intelligence of women.
See Marsden Jonathan 18–19, 68, 93–95, 99, 105–109, 128, 172,
241–42, 254, 510. Recent overviews of the role of women in the
transatlantic revival (see Andrews; Mack) have emphasized emotion.
37. Debby Applegate offers the fullest account of the affair, which con-
stitutes as much of a late-nineteenth-century paradigm shift in the
history of male/female sexual relations as the Austin Dickinson/
Mabel Loomis Todd affair (see Gay; Longsworth Austin and Mabel).
For a pioneering study of the nineteenth-century intellectual alliance
between ministers and their female parishioners, see Douglas.
38. Just as some have drawn convincing theological parallels between
Wadsworth’s sermons and Dickinson’s poems (see Huffer; Lease;
Paul M. Miller; Sewall Life 2:449–54), so a future installment in this
series of arguments will join this conversation. This book, meanwhile,
focuses on what has not been thoroughly undertaken—i.e., a philo-
sophical and scientific comparison between their two bodies of work.
39. Religious specifics in Dickinson’s poetry are well established. See
Eberwein Dickinson; Linda Freedman; Keane Emily; Lundin; McIntosh;
Elisa New; Oberhaus. Elisa New’s suggestion that Dickinson rebelled
against Emerson’s bias against theology supplements the emphasis
on Emerson in this book. This book, however, will conclude that
208 Notes

Dickinson’s empirical procedure, her faith in experience, trumps her

evangelical yearning or experience of faith. Of course, poems like
“‘Arcturus’ is his other name” (Fr117) are antiscience, and Dickinson
credits Benjamin Franklin Newton for teaching her “faith in things
unseen” (L282). Still, just as science in Dickinson’s experience is “part
of an intellectual tennis match in which the other player is always going
to be religion” (Peel 107), so science often wins this game of hers.
40. Habegger writes well of Dickinson’s “Calvinist evangelicalism”
(10–13; see also 4, 7, 101–103, 167–69, 174, 196–205, 282–85,
287, 309–12). This is a more accurate label than the vague, sev-
enteenth-century term Puritanism, but the religious motif that
this book will continue to include adds Arminianism to the mix.
Jacobus Arminius’s doctrine of free will, as opposed to John Calvin’s
of predestination, explains the reverence for experience in many of
Wadsworth’s sermons and in most of Dickinson’s poems. The con-
troversy begun by Arminian John Wesley and Calvinist Jonathan
Edwards reached dénouement during the Second Great Awakening,
resolving itself in favor of Jacobus Arminius in the sermon-poem
nexus of Wadsworth (despite Wadsworth’s Calvinist/Presbyterian
beginnings) and Dickinson. Dickinson perhaps persuaded Wadsworth
to come down on her side. In any case, the Arminian view of experi-
ence as open-ended characterizes the religious pole of Dickinson’s
oscillation between experiential philosophy and experiential faith.
The erotic motor of seventeenth-century Puritanism will figure in a
planned book in this series, about the religious roots of Wadsworth
and of Dickinson alike; meanwhile, see Leverenz Language. For an
exploration of Edwards’s central paradox, that “the freedom of a
moral agent is compatible with determinism,” see Crisp (57). For
the experiential emphasis of nineteenth-century Presbyterianism, see
Marsden Evangelical Mind.
41. Dickinson heard or read other ministers for other reasons. Jane
Eberwein points out that she “heard more sermons from [Aaron]
Colton than from any other clergyman”; Colton “took a kindly and
hopeful approach to Calvinist doctrine” (“Ministerial” 8, 10). Horace
Bushnell and Edwards Park were appealing to Dickinson because these
progressive Congregationalists learned from Coleridge to emphasize a
theology of feeling rather than intellect (Peel 301–302).
42. For a comparison of Wesley’s style and that of Edwards, see Brantley
Coordinates 7–42. This comparison depicts these twin pioneers of
transatlantic revivalism in philosophical as well as theological terms;
for exclusively religious comparisons of the two, see Hindmarsh. As
far as Wadsworth’s spoken words were concerned, he was “one of
the most renowned orators in America, on a par with Henry Ward
Beecher” (Strickland 103). He “impressed believers and unbeliev-
ers alike, including Mark Twain, who heard him in San Francisco
and liked his humorous glare” (Habegger 330). This humor comes
 Notes 209

across, as well, in Wadsworth’s written words. Mark Twain’s response

to Wadsworth suggests that the dialogue between nineteenth-century
ministers and their male auditors merits attention, too. Witness the
connection between Joseph Hopkins Twichell and Mark Twain
(Strong). Dickinson’s art stands taller than Wadsworth’s, per-
haps even by homiletic standards: Jane Eberwein often argues for
Dickinson’s connoisseurship of sermons, and hence for Dickinson’s
alternately earnest and satirical sermons and antisermons in lyrics (see,
for instance, Eberwein “Ministerial”). Wadsworth, though, avoided
hackneyed phrases and ideas.
43. Keats’s “naturalized imagination” (Stillinger 99–118) prophesied his
“poetry of earth” (compare Keats, “The Poetry of Earth Is Never
Dead” [1817]).
44. “Human beings” in general, as David Brooks writes concerning cog-
nitive science in particular, “are engaged every second in all sorts of
silent conversation—with the living and the dead, the near and the
far.” For an overview of cognitive science, see Schacter. For cognitive
science and Romanticism, see Richardson. For cognitive science and
Dickinson, see Freeman “Cognitive.” Just as Dickinson knew that she
could “re-create a [literary] conversation” with “the dead” because
they leave “textual traces of themselves” that “make themselves heard
in the voices of the living” (Greenblatt Shakespearean 1), so in the
spirit of her age, understanding science as dialogue (see Peel 162–63),
she conversed with her scientific precursors and contemporaries.
45. Blake’s marginalium is in response to a statement by Joshua Reynolds—
namely, “Enthusiastic admiration seldom promotes knowledge.”
See Blake’s Marginalia in a copy of Reynolds’s Works (1798; qtd. in
Bentley 52–53).
46. Dickinson’s first reviewer, Arlo Bates, admired her “emotional
thought,” which her thorough biographer Richard B. Sewall, echoing
Wordsworth, praised as her “ideas felt on the pulses, in the blood-
stream” (see the quotation and discussion of Bates’s review in Sewall
“Teaching Dickinson” 31). Compare Wordsworth’s “Lines Written a
Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” (1798), lines 27–30.
47. Dickinson’s circle imagery, Shira Wolosky argues, parallels Emerson’s
“Circles” (1844): “The life of man [Emerson writes] is a self-evolving
circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides out-
wards to new and larger circles, and that without end . . . The instinct
of man presses eagerly outward to the impersonal and illimitable”
(qtd. in Wolosky “Dickinson’s Emerson” 136). There is thus some-
thing metaphysical in the idea of Dickinson as eccentric, which, Peel
points out, “means off center, away from the center” (148).
48. The word inane derives from the paleoscientific language of Lucretius,
yet in Shelley’s hands widens cyclically and “transcendentally.”
49. Cynthia MacKenzie, Marietta Messmer, and Marta Werner, among
others, have demonstrated the aesthetic excellence of Dickinson’s
210 Notes

letters. The Dickinson Editing Collective will make available the many
“books” Dickinson sent to her correspondents. Dickinson’s letters
make up one side of a substantial as well as passionate conversation.
50. For a classic, still explanatory study of the mimetic, pragmatic, expres-
sive, and objective functions of art, see Abrams Mirror. Contrary to
the received description of lyric as introspective, and in spite of the
pervasiveness of Descartes’s isolated self, the expressive function of
Dickinson’s art modulates into her other-directed appeal or audience
orientation. For the lyric genre as preeminently subjective, see Hardy.
For a provocative recent view of the Cartesian cogito as a deleteri-
ous interpolation into the Romantic-era culture of the Western world,
see Breuggemann 2–4. Virginia Jackson deplores the “lyricization” of
Dickinson’s poetry—i.e., the habit of interpreting Dickinson’s poetry
through the paradigm of the “expressive romantic” lyric (7). Jackson
recommends connecting Dickinson’s poetry to its manuscript con-
text, and hence to Dickinson’s role as an engaged, almost impersonal
public writer. Perhaps Jackson’s reading of Dickinson’s poetry is not
as far removed from Romanticism as Jackson implies, though, since
Gravil, for one, has emphasized the dialogism, and hence the prag-
matic function, of Romantic art.
51. Kershner 17; emphasis added. Dickinson wrote almost wholly in
hymn or ballad quatrains—i.e., she usually alternated iambic tetram-
eter with iambic trimeter. For Dickinson’s ironizing of hymns like
those of Watts, see England and Sparrow; Gelpi “Emily Dickinson’s
Word”; Weisbuch. For Charles Wesley’s hymns as belles lettres, see
Brantley “Charles.” Victoria Morgan’s full-length study of Dickinson
and the hymn tradition depicts the poet’s sisterhood of female hymn
singers, transcribers, writers, and composers. In Morgan’s view, they
were all engaged, especially Dickinson, in sometimes conventional and
sometimes unconventional exchanges with their hymn singing, tran-
scribing, writing, and composing brothers. For Dickinson and revival
testimony, see Brantley Experience 116–64. One of Dickinson’s favor-
ite stories, Harriet E. Prescott Spofford’s “Circumstance” (1860), fea-
tures “grand and sweet Methodist hymns,” as a seventeenth-century
Maine frontierswoman’s means of parrying a panther attack (qtd. in
David Cody 59).
52. The dialogical theory of M. M. Bakhtin whereby “I can mean what
I say, but only indirectly, at a second remove, in words I take and
give back to the community according to the protocols it estab-
lishes” is pertinent throughout this book (see, e.g., the conclusion).
Bakhtin would add, “My voice can mean, but only with others: at
times in chorus, but at the best of times in a dialogue.” See Michael
Holquist’s concise and accurate paraphrase of Bakhtin’s position,
qtd. in Greenblatt, ed., Allegory 165. Bakhtin’s dialogical theory set
a precedent for interpreting literature against the background of oral
culture. He and his followers, however, thought of such culture in
 Notes 211

almost exclusive relation to narrators and characters in belletristic fic-

tion. See R. B. Kershner’s application of Bakhtin’s theory to James
Joyce’s comic fiction (Kershner 17–22).
53. For folk, popular, and elite culture as background to Dickinson’s
poetry, see St. Armand.
54. For a recent, comprehensive history of the Royal Society, see Bryson,
ed. John Wesley was steeped in Milton (see Herbert), and so would
have known of the religious connotations of the word society, as in
Milton’s echo of Revelation 21:1–7 in his elegy “Lycidas” (1635):
“There entertain him all the Saints above, / In solemn troops, and
sweet Societies / That sing, and singing in their glory move, / And
wipe the tears for ever from his eyes” (lines 178–81). Wesley orga-
nized his hymn-singing followers into religious “Societies.” He also
knew, however, the philosophical meaning of the word society, as in
Locke’s social contract (see Dreyer). Society, then, is Wesleyan argot
for fellowship among Methodist, methodized, disciplined believers,
truth-seekers. All these implications of the word, philosophical and
scientific as well as religious, apply to Dickinson’s concept society.

1 Proclaiming Empiricism
1. In a letter to William Wordsworth, written perhaps in early January
1815, Charles Lamb regretted that the editor of The Quarterly,
William Gifford, had omitted from Lamb’s review of Wordsworth’s
Excursion (1814) Lamb’s argument for Wordsworth’s poetry as “nat-
ural methodism.” Lamb thought that Wordsworth would have liked
such an interpretation: “I regret only that I did not keep a copy. I am
sure you would have been pleased with it, because I have been feeding
my fancy for some months with the notion of pleasing you” (Lamb
2:149). See also Brantley Wordsworth’s 8, 135, 142, 174.
2. Thus the phrase natural methodism serves on the Anglo-American
Romantic scene to complement but at the same time to tone down
the phrase Natural Supernaturalism there. According to the Euro-
continental drift of M. H. Abrams’s classic argument for the rela-
tion between British and Euro-continental Romanticism, Natural
Supernaturalism gives a German idealist, Teutonic twist to the late-
Romantic imagination of, say, Sage of Chelsea Thomas Carlyle, who
makes full use of this uppercase phrase in his Sartor Resartus (1831)
(see Abrams Natural; see also Cazamian). In the early and middle
phases of Carlyle’s career, where his true genius lay, the Sage, too,
can sound like a “Natural Methodist,” yet with the stipulation that
his temperament stayed rather more transcendental-izing than Emily
Dickinson’s ever was, as though Carlyle thought of “natural method-
ism” as Natural Methodism. For Carlyle as this kind of an Anglo-
American writer, as distinct from being German Romantic at heart,
see Brantley Coordinates 43–76.
212 Notes

3. In a mode of analysis harking back to William James and German

Romantic theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, Stanford University psy-
chological anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann examines the religious emo-
tion cultivated by such contemporary evangelicals as the Pentecostals of
the Vineyard Christian Fellowship in Chicago and Northern California.
Luhrmann’s title, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American
Evangelical Relationship with God (2012), parallels the emphasis in this
book on poetic, philosophical, and scientific conversation.
4. For the language of John Locke in John Wesley’s Kingswood School
rules—the ban on holidays, the injunction against play, and the insis-
tence on simplicity of diet and starkness of accommodation—see Body
56–61. These rules enforce nurture against nature and carry tabula
rasa to its logical conclusion.
5. For the leading role of Locke’s Essay in the curriculum at Wesley’s
Kingswood School, see Body 33. For the pervasive influence of
Locke’s Essay on Wesley’s revival, see Brantley Locke 27–102. For the
pioneering study of Locke’s influence on Wesley, see Hindley. For
the impact of Locke’s Two Treatises on Government on Wesley’s idea
of community or of social contract, see Dreyer. Dreyer’s investiga-
tion can give additional Locke- as well as Wesley-drenched meaning
to Emily Dickinson’s signature utterance: “The Soul selects her own
Society - ” (Fr409, line 1).
6. For perspective on George Berkeley’s “bundling” or “clustering” of
sense impressions, see Brantley Locke 9, 18–19, 73, 145, 229n.23.
7. For soul-competence on the nineteenth- to twentieth-century
American revival scene (especially Baptist), see Bloom American
111–43. For postmodern-evangelical sensibility, see, e.g., books by
Joel Osteen.
8. Charles Wadsworth’s description of the intellectual scholar is the polar
opposite of John Wesley’s of the ideal clergyman as an unaffected
man of God whose well-prepared sermons should avoid “a dull, dry,
formal manner” and be delivered earnestly and from memory without
any lolling of the elbows. See the discussion in Brantley Wordsworth’s
25–28. Clergy who sound like Wadsworth’s portrait of professors are
satirized in William Cowper The Task 2:419–26 and in Wordsworth
The Prelude 7:546–56.
9. For an overview of Dickinson’s friendship with Wadsworth, including
the probable facilitating-importance of Elizabeth and Josiah Gilbert
Holland, see Sewall Life 2:444–62, 2:729–41. See also Lease 4, 6.
10. For the friendship between Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Emily
Dickinson, see Benfey; Wineapple. Howard N. Meyer’s recent edition
of selected works by the prolific Higginson can serve as an ongoing
basis for grasping how influential a figure Higginson was in general,
as well as in Emily Dickinson’s lifetime of writing.
11. For the argument that Eliza Coleman brought Dickinson and her
sister, Lavinia, to hear Wadsworth preach (philosophically?) at the
 Notes 213

Arch Street Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia, in March 1855, see

Leyda 1:lxxvi–lxxvii. Besides Wadsworth, as Alfred Habegger points
out, two ministerial candidates for intellectual and even philosophical
compatibility with Dickinson are Horace Bushnell and Edwards A.
Park (311–13).
12. See Sewall Life 2:262–68; Leyda 1:29, 1:37, 1:323, 2:33. For the
nationwide context of nineteenth-century women’s education in sci-
ence, see Peel 144, 146, 176.
13. For sustained perspective on Wordsworth’s theme of exalted humility,
see Brantley Wordsworth’s 37–65.
14. See, respectively, Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Adonais” (1821), line 418;
and Shelley, Prometheus Unbound (1819), act 3, scene 1, line 204.
Shelley thinks of inane as “the vacancy that nevertheless holds in itself
the potentiality of all that is” (Wasserman Subtler 209).
15. Shelley, “Adonais,” line 418. Again Frost’s “To Earthward”
proves apropos. The alternately heady and earthward excursions in
Wordsworth’s Excursion (1814) anticipate Shelley’s.
16. Many of Dickinson’s personae, for that matter, choose never to strike
out for the empyrean in the first place. They may venture out into
nature but go no further, stopping well short of “darting their spirit’s
light” into the universe. Thus they resemble Robert Frost’s persona in
“To Earthward” (1923).
17. Jerusha Hall McCormack understands Dickinson’s style as a form of
mid-nineteenth-century “telegraphese” (dashes, ellipses, and capital-
ized nouns).
18. For Dickinson’s somewhat less Wadsworth-related mastery of math-
ematics, chemistry, botany, ornithology, and entomology, see Brantley
Experience 35, 55–62, 90–93, 96–102. Peel addresses the first three of
these disciplines and also such pseudosciences as mesmerism, animal
magnetism, phrenology, and spiritualism (330–60). It is as though
Dickinson completed bits and pieces of the epic that at 25 Coleridge
planned would reflect mathematics, hydrostatics, optics, astronomy,
botany, metallurgy, fossilism, chemistry, geology, anatomy, and medi-
cine (Johnston 507). For Dickinson’s ethnocentrism, see Erkkila.
19. Wadsworth would agree with Thomas Chalmers’s 1833 reading and
Edward Hitchcock’s 1851 reading of the biblical six days of creation
as metaphorically a long time (for Chalmers’s and Hitchcock’s views
on the subject, see Eberwein “Outgrowing Genesis?”).
20. The December 1859 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, to which the
Dickinson family subscribed, included the lyric “The Northern Lights
and the Stars” and an article “The Aurora Borealis” (Peel 197).
21. Sources as otherwise widely divergent as Newton and the Calvinists
used astronomy as an argument, respectively, for modesty and for
humility. For Newton, see Dyson. For the Calvinists, see Eberwein
“‘Where’” 13. Contrast the perhaps overweening epistemological
confidence of Steven Weinberg’s astronomical science.
214 Notes

22. Sources as otherwise widely divergent as author Poe and astronomer

Denison Olmsted used star-gazing as an occasion for egotistical sub-
limity in the former case and for observer participation in the latter.
For Poe, see Delbanco 274. For Olmsted’s presence in the immediate
Dickinson milieu, see Ricca. Compare Peel on how Dickinson’s slant
truth parallels the image deflection and the angled lenses of telescopes
(248–49).
23. Susan Dickinson’s library contained O. M. Mitchell’s praise of the
“extraordinary powers of Leverrier as a mathematical astronomer”
and of his research on “the motions of Mercury” (qtd. in Peel 268).
24. For the possibility that Dickinson writes of Caroline and not of William
Herschel in her poem “Nature and God - I neither knew” (Fr803),
and for the prominence of such other women astronomers as Maria
Mitchell, see Peel 344–45.
25. Just as Kant declares that “Two things fill my mind . . . the starry heav-
ens above me, and the moral law within me,” so Dickinson’s poem,
here, links the ephemerality of stars to that of humankind, and vice
versa (qtd. in Peel 280).
26. Whereas astronomy provides the occasion of “wonder” for the
“Romantic science” (Holmes) of Keats in his “On First Looking into
Chapman’s Homer” (1816), Dickinson’s late-Romantic-era personae
can experience more terror in astronomical meditation than the exal-
tation of sublimity. Just as astronomy made Emerson lose his faith
(Peel 236) and terrified Ishmael (Delbanco 160), so Dickinson’s
astral contemplation was fraught.
27. To the more than 30 names Darwin places on his list of predeces-
sors in the fourth edition of Origin (1866), Rebecca Stott adds many
more. These notably include Abraham Trembley, Trembley’s nephew
Charles de Bonnet, and their teacher, René-Antoine Feuchault da
Réaumour. The entomologist Trembley, in particular, used his inter-
est in asexually producing polyps to ask why, if man is so clearly the
crown of creation, God did not give him this remarkable means of
perpetuating his kind! Stott strongly emphasizes the collaborative,
conversational interaction among Darwin’s predecessors and credits
Darwin with his generous acknowledgment of the scientific commu-
nity. Charles de Bonnet, incidentally, is well known for first identifying
the syndrome with which his name is still linked—namely, the halluci-
nation of multiple images that often replace darkness whenever one is
suffering from failing vision.
28. Compare Henry Ward Beecher in 1872: “I do not participate a par-
ticle with those that dread the idea of man’s having sprung from
some lower form of existence; all that I ask is that you show me
how I got clear from monkeys, and then I am quite satisfied to have
had only one for an ancestor . . . I want to know where I am going;
I don’t care where I came from” (qtd. in Kirkby “‘[W]e thought’”
10). Kirkby points to a “sprightly manner” and “a lightness about
 Notes 215

the response to evolutionary issues, a whimsy and humor which

belies the seriousness of what might be regarded as world-shattering
new ideas,” and then adds, “There is a kind of carnavalization of
evolutionary themes” (9).
29. In 1869, The Springfield Daily Republican quoted Thomas Henry
Huxley’s declaration concerning Samuel Wilberforce that he would
prefer being “descended from a respectable monkey” than from a
“bishop of the English church, who can put his brains to no better
use than to ridicule science and misrepresent its cultivation” (qtd. in
Kirkby “‘[W]e thought’”12).
30. Jane Donahue Eberwein thinks of Darwin’s “eye” as “retrospec-
tive” and contrasts it with Dickinson’s “that looks toward heaven”
(“Outgrowing Genesis?” 12). Dickinson’s “prospective eye” may
have as much to do with the driving force of natural selection, how-
ever, as with eschatological concerns.
31. According to Gravil “Locksley,” Tennyson’s monodrama Maud (1855)
forms a major influence on Dickinson’s 40 fascicles, her manuscript
books.
32. Hitchcock began writing to Darwin in 1845, and the third edition
(1861) of The Origin considers bird origins in the light of Hitchcock’s
writings on fossilized bird footprints from the Connecticut Valley (see
Kirkby “‘[W]e thought” 7–8).
33. These words from In Memoriam constitute the chief poetic result of
Tennyson’s perspective on Robert Chambers’s proto-Darwin Vestiges
of the Natural History of Creation (1844).
34. To reference General Benjamin F. Butler’s occupation of New Orleans,
Butler played God there egregiously. He earned himself the nickname
“Beast”; see the discussion in Sandberg Abraham 246–47. In fair-
ness to General Butler, and in contrast to “Mrs Dr Stearns” ’s evident
view of him, the Massachusetts general “grew ever more steadfast”
in defending the one thousand fugitive contraband slaves at Fortress
Monroe. Butler argued that they “were not only contraband: they had
become free” (Goodheart 338).
35. For a less historical and more theoretical view of the poem, and also for
a more theological but no less negative view of it, see Franke’s argument
that “The missing All - prevented Me” “articulates the principle that the
Nothing is the All, the Absolute” (71). “The missing All - prevented
Me” counterbalances an article (1872) by Dr. Hedge in The Springfield
Republican: “[Science] yet refreshes and expands the idea of God by
new revelations of the hights [sic] and depths and infinite riches of the
wondrous All” (qtd. in Kirkby “‘[W]e thought’” 11). The optimistic
element of Dickinson’s poems on evolution can remain if “excitement
and exhilaration” (Kirkby “‘[W]e thought’” 4) arise from “All things
swept sole away,” for “This is immensity” (Fr1548, lines 1–2).
36. A January 1873 Scribner’s essay on “Victorian Poets” laments from the
standpoint of late-nineteenth-century women the post-Darwin plight
216 Notes

of poetry: “The truth is that our school-girls and spinsters who wan-
der down the lanes with Darwin, Huxley, and Youmans under their
arms; or, if they carry Tennyson, Longfellow, and Morris, read them
in the light of spectrum analysis, or test them by the economics of
Mill and Bain” (qtd. in Kirkby “‘[W]e thought’” 14). As a September
1877 Scribner’s essay on “The Poetry of the Future” contends, “[i]f
the extinction of a single individual has been so sung as to be cause
for tears, what pathos must there not lie in the extinction of whole
species, genera, and families?” (qtd. in Kirkby ‘”[W]e thought’” 14).
Thus Darwin’s 1831 voyage on The Beagle did not so much culminate
“Romantic science” (see Holmes) as instigate the scientific worldview
of late Romanticism and of early Modernism. Darwin writes that we
“behold the face of nature bright with gladness” but “do not see
or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly
live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life; or
we forget how largely these songsters, or their eggs, or their nest-
lings, are destroyed by birds and beasts of prey” (Origin 52 qtd. in
Eberwein “Outgrowing Genesis?” 17). Dickinson’s bird that “bit an
Angle Worm in halves / And ate the fellow, raw” (Fr359) and her
“Nature” that “sometimes sears a Sapling - / Sometimes - scalps a
Tree” (Fr457) is poetry, nonetheless, of however new or however
tough-minded a kind (see Eberwein “Outgrowing Genesis?”).
37. Kirkby’s conclusion is apropos: “Dickinson explored both the won-
der and the emotional toll of a darwinized natural world” (‘”[W]e
thought’” 27). For philosopher Thomas Nagel, evolution is not ran-
dom, for Nagel believes in a “cosmic predisposition” to moral value,
meaning, and consciousness (7). Nagel’s idea of a natural teleology,
though, remains difficult to square with the overwhelming reality
of species extinction. Darwin’s truth entails not purpose (for natu-
ral selection finds little point even in the biological power to create)
but “eternal fierce destruction” where “the greater on the less feeds
evermore” (compare Keats, “Epistle to John Hamilton Reynolds”
[1818], lines 95, 97).
38. By contrast, a writer in Harper’s New Monthly for November 1862 is
“appalled” that “the Man as well as the Fly” must “depend” on the
“immensity of individual facts” (emphasis in original) and on “the
incontrovertible laws of Nature” (qtd. in Peel 321–22).
39. Compare, respectively, Matthew Arnold, “The Function of Criticism
at the Present Time” (1864), and Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850)
14:76. Alexandra Socarides suggests that Dickinson’s sense of playful
paradox grows stronger, and somewhat darker, as her career develops.
Socarides describes a roughly chronological movement of Dickinson’s
thought and practice from order (i.e., fascicles, loose sheets) to disor-
der (i.e., late fragments).
40. Compare, e.g., Coleridge’s definition of “poetic faith” as “the willing
suspension of disbelief” in Biographia Literaria (1817), Chapter 14.
 Notes 217

2 Guiding Experiment
1. “The Philosophy of Enthusiasm,” by J. Clifford Hindley, links Moravian
theology to Wesley’s conversion on May 24, 1738, in Aldersgate
Street, London. Hindley emphasizes, however, that Wesley’s “empiri-
cist conditioning” taught him so much respect for experience as the
necessary ground of knowledge that his distinctive quest for “a direct
experience of the divine love” was in the first instance, and ultimately,
quasi-philosophic (107–108; hence the emphasis added to Hindley’s
word philosophy).
2. These three phrases—namely, “the dogged aggregation of phe-
nomena,” “abstract reasoning,” and “complicated mathematics”—
comprise the chief elements in “the story of science and the Royal
Society” (Gleick qtd. in Bryson, ed., 180). According to the per-
spective of part I, Dickinson’s select society of partners in dialogue
perpetuated the “innovation” that “marked the [Royal] Society out
for success,” again to borrow the language of James Gleick (qtd. in
Bryson, ed., 181–82). The Royal Society’s “way of making knowl-
edge was to talk about it,” Gleick concludes (183). The same goes
for Dickinson’s Royal Society-descended select society.
3. As an example of the subtlety, enchantment, or mystery that might
even yet occur as the empirical quintessence of logical positivism, con-
sider what Peter Geach, as reported in Kenny, has called “Ludwig’s
Self-Trap.” Wittgenstein’s early Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus main-
tained that “[t]he right method of philosophy [and, for that matter, of
poetry?] would be to say nothing except what can be said, that is to say
the propositions of natural science.” But that sentence, as Wittgenstein
later recognized, is no such proposition! The verification principle that
“meaningful propositions were either analytic or capable of verification
or falsification by experience” was itself neither analytic nor empirical!
Such exercise of both/and logic, such relish of ambiguity, is not far
from Emily Dickinson’s rich conversation about poetry, philosophy,
science. For subtle discussion of “Ludwig’s Self-Trap,” see Kenny.
4. Compare Shelley, “Mont Blanc” (1817), lines 80–81. By “Large
codes of fraud,” does Shelley mean papal bulls? By “Large codes
of . . . woe,” does Shelley mean ironically to contrast the enlightened
domestic policy of the “Code Napoleon” with Napoleon’s ruinous
foreign wars? For the influence of Napoleon on British Romanticism,
see Bainbridge.
5. See, respectively, Emerson, “Experience” [1844], qtd. in Murphy
1:944; Wordsworth, “Expostulation and Reply” (1798), line 24; and
Emily Dickinson, Fr1433 (1876), line 1.
6. English readers’ favorite Frenchman, accordingly, was Montaigne,
who rejected “the more doctrinaire projections of the essayist’s French
readers” in favor of his own easygoing, pragmatic, antitheoretical, tol-
erant, secular, and joyful “wooliness” (Chester 8).
218 Notes

7. The “logical extreme and consequence of Protestant individualism,”

according to Albert Gelpi, flowed from the “antinomian element” of
Anne Hutchinson’s legacy, which “elevated individual gnosis above
community consensus” (Gelpi “Long Shadow” 109). “As American
Puritanism became tempered and secularized by Unitarianism and
then Transcendentalism,” Gelpi concludes, “the antinomian saint
became the antinomian artist” (109). This insight can apply to “On a
Columnar Self - .”
8. For the pre-1975, prefundamentalist-era “soul-competence” of such
traditional, mainline Southern Baptists as E. Y. Mullins, who coined
the phrase and who inspired old-line Baptists like former president
Jimmy Carter, see Bloom American 131–44. Here is a promising line
of thought: To compare Dickinson’s Congregational heritage with
Baptist tradition would nuance her theological language.
9. To poems such as “On a Columnar Self - ” and “I saw no Way -
the Heavens were stitched - ” (Fr633), Shira Wolosky demonstrates,
on the one hand, the relevance of Emerson’s essay “Circles” (1844),
declaring that “the instinct of man presses eagerly outward to the
impersonal and illimitable” (qtd. in Wolosky “Dickinson’s Emerson”
136). On the other hand, Wolosky emphasizes, in Dickinson’s case,
the more modest halves of her and Emerson’s binary oppositions of
selfhood (e.g., limitation/expansion, extension/intensity, and con-
strictive circles/infinite circumference).
10. Kher’s emphasis on Dickinson’s “multidimensional reality” (2), Greg
Johnson’s on her poetics of inward quest, Benfey’s on her skepticism
concerning intersubjectivity, and Kimpel’s on her prephilosophical
state of bafflement or of perplexity—all emphasize philosophy in gen-
eral, rather than philosophers in particular. The collection of essays
edited by Jed Deppman, Marianne Noble, and Gary Lee Stonum, a
work in progress, will draw parallels between Dickinson’s poetry and
such philosophers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century
as Charles Pierce and Martin Heidegger.
11. For the merits of polytheism over monotheism, see Schwartz.
12. See the discussion and quotation in Leib 40; emphasis added. See also
Hannay.
13. It seems worth noting, though, that as prologue to Marx, Locke’s
Second Treatise assumes that laborers prove worthy of their hire (com-
pare Luke 10:7): “The Ploughman’s Pains [Locke writes], the Reaper’s
and Thresher’s Toil, and the Baker’s Sweat, is to be counted into the
Bread we eat: the labor of those who broke the Oxen, who digged
and wrought the Iron and Stones, who felled and framed the Timber
employed about the Plough, Mill, Oven, or any other Utensils, which
are a vast Number, requisite to this Corn, from its being feed to be
sown to its being made Bread, must all be charged to the account of
Labor” (qtd. in Waldron 174).
 Notes 219

14. Jeremy Waldron’s argument for John Locke as an “equality-radical”

(5) carries implications for Locke’s philosophy. “The members of the
laboring class,” C. B. Macpherson’s reading of Locke asserts, “do
not and cannot live a fully rational life” (qtd. in Waldron 85), but
in Waldron’s words, Locke insists on “the fundamental adequacy of
even the meanest intellect” (87). Waldron, correspondingly, refutes
Macpherson’s narrow understanding of Lockean “property” as tan-
gible possessions (126); Locke’s concept, in Waldron’s highlighting,
features life, liberty, and labor (173–75). Locke, as Waldron under-
stands him, “believed it was possible to use human reason—to sift the
customs of the world and determine at least for some of them whether
or not they were in uniformity with the requirements of natural law”
(168). Thus Waldron shows how “Locke’s opposition to innateism
does not lead him to relativism” (168). Waldron’s eye for all that
Locke says about equality scrutinizes such vivid but neglected views
as Locke’s implication of crossovers, even oneness (a principle of e
pluribus unum), among species (“women have conceived by Drills
[mandrills] . . . [and the Essay continues:] I once saw a Creature that
was the issue of a Cat and a Rat” (qtd. in Waldron 65). No hierarchi-
cal chain of being for Locke!
15. Jeremy Waldron’s argument for John Locke as an “equality-radical”
(5) carries implications for Locke’s political theory in general and
his attitude toward women in particular. The First Treatise thun-
ders “No!” to slavery as though the peculiar institution were the last
abuse on earth ever likely to win the approval of Magna Carta heirs
of whatever class: “Slavery [Locke proclaims] is so vile and miserable
an Estate of Man, and so distinctly opposite to the generous Temper
and Courage of our Nation; that ‘tis hardly to be conceived, that an
Englishman, much less a Gentleman, should plead for ‘t” (qtd. in
Waldron 199). At the outset of his book, and as a persistent motif,
Waldron contests Lorenne Clark’s verdict that Locke’s theory displays
“unequivocally sexist assumptions” (qtd. in Waldron 23). As Waldron
sums up Locke’s view, “If we have sinned, that is true of Eve [and of
Adam] only [and not necessarily of all other women and men]. If Eve
was subordinated to her husband by her greater transgression, that
is true of Eve only [and not necessarily of all other wives]” (27). For
more than six pages in the First Treatise, Locke elaborates on the inclu-
sion of mothers in the fifth commandment (Waldron 39). Waldron’s
ear for Locke’s “logic of contractarianism” hears Locke acknowledg-
ing women’s parental authority, their property, and even their marital
partnership (123); Waldron makes good use of Melissa Butler’s pio-
neering essay, “Early Liberal Roots of Feminism: John Locke and the
Attack on Patriarchy” (1978). As Waldron points out, Locke praised
a 1696 sermon by Rebecca Collier, observing that “women had the
honor first to publish the resurrection of the Lord of Love” (41–42).
220 Notes

16. Padgett Powell’s tour de force, The Interrogative Mood (2009), comes
to mind as an early-twenty-first-century version of an entirely inter-
rogative theodicy, insofar as Powell’s belletristic prose asks why, and
nothing else but why, every which way from Sunday. Each question-
sentence in the novel, and there is no other kind of sentence in it,
amounts to a why addressed to whoever or whatever will or will not
answer.
17. “Like Whitman,” Nancy Mayer writes, “Dickinson uses plant life as
an emblem of all lives, and especially human life, but while Whitman’s
‘single sprout’ is important because of what it has in common with
all living things, Dickinson’s flower, although it may be ‘any happy
Flower,’ is important because of its irreplaceable singularity” (9).
18. As early as the 1790s, though, in his poems on the Salisbury Plain,
Wordsworth’s nature could be “not the picturesque landscape associ-
ated with him from the Lake District, nor is it Nature with any sup-
portive metaphysical principle or god term behind it. On the contrary,
it is more like the grimly competitive nature of Malthus and later of
Charles Darwin” (Johnston 484).
19. For a more admiring though still a clear-eyed assessment of The
Excursion in general and of the Wanderer in particular, see Gravil
“Is . . . ?”
20. After the manner of Darwin’s final book, on earthworms, Dickinson
would rather regard earthworms as “Our little / Kinsmen” (Fr932,
line 1) than agree with “Our Pastor [who] says we are a ‘Worm’”
(L193). Thus “religion,” for Dickinson, “could offend human pride
more sharply than Darwin” (Eberwein “Outgrowing Genesis?” 17).
There is more human dignity in Darwin’s science, Dickinson implies,
than in Calvinist theology (see also Peel 312).
21. Compare another example of Dickinson’s sarcasm: “How many bare-
foot shiver I trust their Father knows who saw not fit to give them
shoes” (L207).
22. Dickinson’s emphasis on the humanity of Christ is not the same as
in Emerson or in Jones Very, for both of whom the common ground
between each man or woman and Jesus is not tragic suffering but
egotistical sublimity, a spark of the divine.
23. Darwin’s argument that “makes the whole world kin,” Asa Gray
writes, “discomposes us” (qtd. in Eberwein “Outgrowing Genesis?”
16). “With Gray providing Dickinson’s introduction to Darwin,”
Jane Eberwein observes, “it is no wonder that she recognized explo-
sive potential in the new scientific thinking” (15). Also like Gray,
though, and perhaps in part because of him, Dickinson was capable
of responding bravely, with pluck. Kirkby “‘[W]e thought’” demon-
strates (18) that Dickinson’s language—“I was thinking, today—as
I noticed, that the ‘Supernatural,’ was only the Natural, disclosed”
(L280)—makes prose poetry out of the prose of evolutionary theo-
logian Asa Gray.
 Notes 221

24. Opening conversation about Emily Dickinson’s theodicy, Barton

Levi St. Armand has described the poet’s association of cats with
the playfully cruel nature of the Calvinist God. Focusing on folk-
art images of vengefully fearsome felines, St. Armand is not meth-
odologically concerned, as a means of scientifically intensifying the
issue, to bring Darwin’s cat-and-mouse metaphor into the picture
of nineteenth-century theodicy. In Shira Wolosky’s view (Emily), the
Civil War caused Dickinson’s questions concerning providential jus-
tice. Dickinson developed not so much a question/response theod-
icy, after the manner of Milton or of Tennyson, and perhaps even of
Job, as a series of challenging questions without ready answers, along
the lines of Blake’s “The Tyger,” yet with less bard-like voice than
Genesis J-writer drollery. Her theodicean’s dialogue emerges from
this big picture as even more tough-minded than Darwin’s, but God
remains as much her desired addressee as Job’s or as Hopkins’s. Thus
the interrogative mood of her quarrel with God draws on both the
nineteenth-century condition of her theodicy-heritage and the histor-
ical sweep of this theological tradition. For conversation about these
matters, thanks are due to Jane Donahue Eberwein.
25. Darwin’s wife, Emma, asked him a poignant question: “[M]ay not the
habit in scientific pursuits of believing nothing till it is proved, influ-
ence your mind too much in other things which cannot be proved in
the same way, & which if true are likely to be above our comprehen-
sion?” (qtd. in Kirkby “‘[W]e thought” 20–21). In the margin of
this letter, Darwin wrote: “When I am dead, know that many times,
I have kissed & cried over this.” Dickinson out-Darwins Darwin,
Kirkby argues, at least in the sense that she took a certain pleasure in
“shocking her constituency” (21), as in the straight-out Darwinism of
Fr747, Fr101, Fr39, and Fr1668.
26. The suggestion here that Dickinson was even more tough-minded
in her understanding of evolutionary biology than Darwin brings
to mind the courageous cases of modern-day evangelicals who, hav-
ing read such neo-atheists as Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard
Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens, are suffering the consequences
of concurring with Darwin. Having often lost their jobs, friends, and
spouses, these converts to nonbelief can seem even more courageous
than the Myth of Amherst, who lost little on account of speaking
out. Such former parishioners, former pastors, and children of pas-
tors as Jerry DeWitt, Nate Phelps, Dan Barker, Darrel Ray, Amanda
Schneider, and Teresa MacBain do not still wrestle with God’s angel.
Instead, they seek natural blessing from one another in such online
networks as the Clergy Project, Recovering from Religion, the United
Coalition of Reason, the Secular Student Alliance, and the Freedom
from Religion Foundation. At “Freethinker” gatherings even in the
Bible Belt, most recently at the “Reason Rally” in Washington DC
(March 2012), DeWitt-like sentiment abounds: “What makes me
222 Notes

different [DeWitt testifies] is that process didn’t stop, and it took

me all the way. In the end, I couldn’t help feeling that all religion,
even the most loving kind, is just a speed bump in the progress of the
human race.” See the discussion in Worth. Is struggling, if not former,
evangelical Dickinson a forerunner of this movement? Perhaps, but
her poetry never comes as close to the movement as, say, Religion
and the Human Prospect (2006), in which Alexander Saxton scruti-
nizes religion through the lens of evolutionary biology, concluding
that creed, perhaps even as this note is being written, is outliving its
usefulness as an adaptive tool.
27. Dickinson’s doubts, according to Virginia H. Oliver, constituted her
“efforts to pile up evidence for belief” (16).
28. Although Blake’s “Tyger” is theodicy, his “A Vision of the Last
Judgment” might cast theodicy out: “The Last Judgment [will be,
Blake warns] when all those are Cast away who trouble Religion with
Questions concerning Good & Evil or Eating of the Tree of those
Knowledges or Reasonings which hinder the Vision of God turning
all into a Consuming fire” (see Blackstock).
29. See, besides Keane Emerson and Carafiol, the further-groundbreaking
recent essay by Samantha Harvey and her forthcoming book.
30. Jeremy Waldron’s argument for John Locke as an “equality-radical”
(5) carries implications for religious and literary history alike. “No
Man,” Locke writes, “is so wholly taken up with the Attendance on
the Means of Living, as to have no spare Time at all to think of his
Soul, and inform himself in Matters of Religion [one thinks in this
regard of Dickinson’s ‘Soul’s’ ‘Society - ’ (Fr409, line 1) and of her
spider-artist’s ruggedly self-reliant, as well as thoroughly cryptic, self-
generation of natural knowledge and spiritual truth (‘himself himself
inform’ appears particularly well Locke-expressed; see Fr1163, line 6)]”
(Locke’s Essay qtd. in Waldron 87). Waldron demonstrates that Locke
gives “serious consideration” to the possibility that “basic equality must
be grounded in a religious connection” (14; Waldron’s emphasis).
The “equality-radical” of Locke’s “Christian Foundations” (Waldron
5), as opposed to the exclusionary strain of Christianity, means for
the early twenty-first century that the phrase liberal Christianity need
prove no mere oxymoron. If Locke’s “equality-radical” Christianity
strengthened the late-Enlightenment to early-Romantic fight against
the slave trade led by liberal-evangelical William Wilberforce, Locke’s
concern for the rights of the poor resurfaces, too, among such now-
prominent, moderate-to-liberal evangelicals as Barry Hankins, Ron
Sider, Rich Cizik, Darren Cushman Wood, and Jim Wallis. These, and
even to a considerably lesser extent such conservative evangelicals as
Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Ralph Reed, and Richard Land (notice
the strange absence of women from such lists), are moving away from
preoccupation with sexual sin and toward concern for practical char-
ity, environmentalism (“creation care”), terrorism, the Gaza Strip,
 Notes 223

HIV/AIDS, the IMF, and the World Bank. The Locke-orientation of

John Wesley’s thought leads not only to Wesley’s quasi-epistemological
doctrine of the spiritual sense but also to the egalitarian basis of his
respect for the poor and of his practice of charity. His encouragement
of women preachers harks back to Locke’s praise for the sermon art
of Rebecca Collier. Ultimately the Christian as well as empirical Locke
and the empirical as well as Christian Wesley inspired the natural to
spiritual autobiography that as this series of arguments has maintained
for 40 years forms a genre of Anglo-American Romanticism.
31. For a sampling of Dickinson’s nonrational witness, see “‘Hope’ is the
thing with feathers - ” (Fr314), “The Soul’s superior instants” (Fr630),
“A Tooth opon our Peace” (Fr694), “The Spirit is the Conscious
Ear - ” (Fr718), “The Admirations - and Contempts - of time - ”
(Fr830), “The Soul’s distinct connection” (Fr901), “Love - is ante-
rior to Life - ” (Fr980), “The Infinite a sudden Guest - ” (Fr1344),
and “Whoever disenchants” (Fr1475). For Locke’s Christianity, see
Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695).
32. See, respectively, Locke Essay 2.7.10 (Nidditch 131) and Blake, There
Is No Natural Religion: Second Series (1788), Plate IV.
33. See, respectively, Wordsworth, “Elegiac Stanzas” (1807), line 15; and
“Tintern Abbey,” line 149. For Dickinson’s allusions to the lines from
“Elegiac Stanzas,” see L315 and L394.
34. For this theme in Wordsworth, see Brantley Wordsworth’s Chapter 1.
35. By contrast, Richard Holmes places Romanticism and Robin Peel
places Dickinson in the immediate context of science alone.

3 Gaining Loss
1. See William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1792), Plate 14.
For a pioneering comparison of Blake and Dickinson, see the recent
essay by Alan Blackstock.
2. Compare Hardy, “The Darkling Thrush” (1900), line 24. See also
premier Australian poet Les Murray’s perhaps too-dismissive diagnosis
of Modernists, who, Murray concludes, wrote out of a “pathological
state [of] depression” (qtd. in Coetzee 6). Murray has a point, though;
see A. N. Wilson 1–18. For a discussion of the paradigmatic Modern
aboulie or lack of will, see Louis Menand’s recent review-essay on
T. S. Eliot (“Practical Cat”). The state of near-depression in which
Eliot wrote “The Waste Land” (1922) can sound like Dickinson’s
most pessimistic poems of aftermath: “I have gone through some ter-
rible agony myself,” Eliot writes, “which I do not understand yet,
and which has left me utterly bewildered and dazed”; or this: “I have
been boiled in a hell-broth” (qtd. in Menand [“Cats” 45]; Menand
puts this depression down to Eliot’s disastrous marriage to Vivienne
Haigh-Wood and also to Eliot’s concern about the state of Europe
and America after World War I). Yeats thought of himself as “among
224 Notes

the last Romantics,” but even as such—as well as in his up-to-date

Modern toughness—he writes a definitive three lines on aftermath
of which Dickinson or of which Wordsworth, for that matter, would
be proud:
Now that my ladder’s gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start,
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
(“The Circus Animals’ Desertion” [1939], lines 38–40)
Perhaps the most optimistically Romantic-sounding of the Moderns
can be Joyce; his ultimately affirming Molly Bloom (“Yes,” she
declares) illustrates near-comic to comic genius. For a discussion of
Dickinson’s poems of aftermath as a harbinger of Modern-era pes-
simism, see Porter 9–24.
3. Joanne Feit Diehl’s study of the Romantics’ influence on Dickinson
downplays Romantic-era toughness and highlights the poet’s rebel-
lion against their tenderness.
4. Compare Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850) 6:606. For the theme of
joy in literary history, see Potkay.
5. For overviews of continuity from Romanticism to Modernism, see
Bornstein; Carlos Baker The Echoing Green.
6. Dickinson, Prose Fragment 71, Johnson, ed., Complete Poems 3:923.
Kenneth R. Johnston similarly finds in such poems by Wordsworth as
“There Was a Boy” (1798) a pattern characteristic of high Romanticism
in general and of Wordsworth’s in particular—namely, “infinite gain
from finite loss” (Johnston 639).
7. See Byron’s journal entry for November 27, 1813. Byron may be
quoting Joseph Miller (1684–1738), who joined the Drury Lane
Company in 1709.
8. Dickinson, Prose Fragment 49, Johnson, ed., Complete Poems 3:919.
Compare Dickinson’s letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, after
the death of his wife: “Dear friend, I think of you so wholly that I can-
not resist to write again, to ask if you are safe? Danger is not at first,
for then we are unconscious, but in the after—slower—Days . . . Love
is it’s own rescue, for we—at our supremest, are but it’s trembling
Emblems” (L522).
9. For a recent survey of Friedrich Nietzsche’s standard ideas, see
Solomon 3–18.
10. Compare Eliot, “The Hollow Men” (1925). See also Wordsworth,
“The Happy Warrior” (1807) and “Prospectus” to The Recluse
(1814), line 87.
11. Shelley, “When the Lamp Is Shattered” (1824), lines 7–8, 29–32.
Compare George Meredith’s cycle of seizains, Modern Love (1862).
Meredith increases the pessimism of Shelley’s view.
12. For a discussion of “soul-competency,” see Bloom American Religion
111–43. The term comes from turn-of-the-twentieth-century Southern
Baptist leader E. Y. Mullins. The term can serve as a good label for
 Notes 225

the religion-leaning, yet grounded, individualism of Romantic Anglo-

America (see Brantley Coordinates and Anglo-American). See also
Wallace Stevens, “Sunday Morning” (1915), line 120.
13. Compare Byron, “Maid of Athens, Ere We Part” (1812), line 17.
See Chapter 2 (“Susan Gilbert”), Chapter 3 (“Master”), Chapter 5
(“Sisterhood”), and Chapter 6 (“The Wife - Without the Sign”), in
Pollak 59–104, 133–89. See also Lundin; Menand Metaphysical.
14. For Dickinson’s eye-trouble, see Guthrie. For Dickinson as a “daugh-
ter of prophecy” (the phrase comes from the Book of Joel), see
Doriani.
15. Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey,” lines 73–74, 87–88; Wordsworth,
“Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” line 188.
16. Wolosky Emily 155–57.
17. See Perry Miller; Edmund Morgan.
18. Regarding Dickinson’s expression of “the psychological pain of
loss,” Robin Peel argues, persuasively, that Dickinson “cannot con-
vince herself, or the listener, that pain is really doing her any good”
(340). Dickinson, Peel concludes, offers a clinical and chilling “rever-
sal of the Pygmalion story” (342). Dickinson’s “Breathing Woman
Yesterday” has become a statue (see Peel’s discussion, 340–42, of
Fr1088, lines 7–8).
19. For Dickinson and Frost, see Keller Kangaroo. For Dickinson and
Stevens, see Dickie.
20. See, respectively, Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1910–
11), line 122; and Wordsworth, “Elegiac Stanzas” (1807), line 58.
21. See, respectively, Mossberg 171–72; Barker 169–70; L807; L776.
22. Dickinson’s “so-called abstract images,” Margaret H. Freeman con-
cludes, “are grounded in her physical and intellectual experience
of . . . the universe around her” (267). “My Life had stood - a Loaded
Gun - ,” in Freeman’s view, is the signature lyric of Dickinson’s “cog-
nitive poetics.” This means that Dickinson’s brain puts the world
together, for her metaphors are products of the embodied mind.
23. “Where I have lost, I softer tread - ,” written in 1860, laments the
loss of Charles Wadsworth, perhaps even more than that of Susan
Dickinson, not through death but through spatial separation or psy-
chological estrangement. Emily Dickinson’s word “dusk” (Fr158,
line 10) recalls her pet name for Wadsworth, “Dusk Gem” (L776).
Given William H. Shurr’s argument for Wadsworth as the inspiration
of Dickinson’s love poems, it is surprising that nowhere does he men-
tion “Where I have lost, I softer tread - .” This exception proves the
rule of Shurr’s thoroughness, if not of his relentlessness, in pursuing
the idea of Wadsworth as “Master.”
24. William Harmon and Hugh C. Holman define aporia, a presiding
idea of Deconstruction, as “a point of undecidability, which locates
the site at which the text most obviously undermines its own rhetori-
cal structure, dismantles, or deconstructs itself” (36).
226 Notes

25. Wordsworth, “Expostulation and Reply” (1798), line 7. For defense

mechanisms in Dickinson’s poetry, see John Cody.
26. Keats to George and Thomas Keats, December 21, 27 [?], 1817.
27. This discussion is indebted to conversations with the late Susan
Manning about Dickinson’s “White - unto the White Creator - ”
and Melvyn New about Voltaire’s Candide (1759) and Johnson’s
Dictionary (1755). The Dictionary calls on John Dryden to illustrate
the meaning of candid (white):
The box receives all black: but, pour’d from thence,
The stones come candid forth, the hue of innocence.
28. T. S. Eliot’s comment on Donne comes to mind: “A thought to
Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility” (qtd. in Menand
“Practical Cat” 46).
29. In Dickinson’s imagery of whiteness, there may be, as Robin Peel
points out, a suggestion of science in the service of Puritanism, and
vice versa. “For it is important to reemphasize the enthusiasm of
Protestants for science,” Peel writes, “as part of their campaign to
discredit the perceived flaws in the reasoning of the Catholic Church.
The Catholic Descartes had argued that the prism changes pure white
light into colors, which are the impure forms. Newton (1642–1727)
is best known in the history of astronomy for his theories of motion
and description of gravity, but his pioneering work on optics allowed
him to demonstrate that white light is impure. He demonstrated that,
although a prism separates white light into colors, a second prism
does not change red, for example, into any other color. Red, there-
fore, is one of the pure colors . . . [Jonathan] Edwards’s early essay on
color, in ‘Notes on Natural Science,’ suggests that he was familiar
with Newton’s Opticks” (253). If whiteness, in philosophical terms,
denotes tabula rasa for Dickinson, then it may also denote, scientifi-
cally speaking, the sense in which the white heat of her poetic vocation
was not so much purity, as a primary truth; not so much an other-
worldly, as a worldly kind of reality.
30. See, respectively, Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1798); and
Dickinson, Fr320, lines 7–8.
31. See, respectively, Wasserman Subtler 236; Eric G. Wilson Coleridge’s
Melancholia; and The Spiritual History of Ice 151–57.
32. See, respectively, Dickinson Fr466, line 1; and Shelley, “Adonais”
(1821), line 463.
33. In 2003, Harold Bloom remarked, “I suspect my central essay
on Romanticism is ‘The Internalization of Quest Romance’ in
Romanticism and Consciousness [1970].” Bloom had argued, therein,
that the Romantics psychologize the love, desire, and enchantment
found in medieval Christian romance. See the discussion of Bloom
in Judith Page 188–94, esp. 192. For parallels between Dickinson as
a paradoxically engaged recluse and her father Edward’s canny with-
drawal/nonwithdrawal from politics, see Hutchison.
 Notes 227

4 Despairing Hope
1. With the first quotation, here, compare Robin Peel’s discussion of
Emily Dickinson’s perspective on “the mysterious hollowness of life”
in “Finding is the first act” (Fr910) (Peel 373). With the second quo-
tation, here, compare Dickinson’s letter to Maria Whitney, written
during the summer of 1883: “You speak of ‘disillusion.’ That is one
of the few subjects on which I am an infidel. Life is so strong a vision,
not one of it shall fail. Not what the stars have done, but what they are
to do, is what detains the sky . . . To have been made alive is so chief a
thing, all else inevitably adds. Were it not riddled by partings, it were
too divine” (L860).
2. If scholars hit the mark in exploring how Dickinson’s point of view
stays stable, even this interpretation need not imply either that any
given lyric of hers or that her canon as a whole is static. For a list
of studies concluding that her oeuvre is constant in outlook, see the
discussion in Barnstone. For her part, Aliki Barnstone emphasizes not
a set of discrete stages in, nor an obvious timeline for, Dickinson’s
development but, instead, recurrent shifts in focus between differ-
ing stances. Barnstone’s argument highlights Dickinson’s fluid but
persistent “self-conversion” from Calvinism to Transcendentalism and
back (9ff.). Similar to such shifts in focus is the notion of oscillation
in this book, except that here, each extreme of the alternating process
includes enough of the other for dialogue to occur at any given time.
3. Compare Wordsworth, “Resolution and Independence” (1807), line
49, and Coleridge, “Dejection: An Ode” (1802).
4. See, respectively, Pollak 202; John Cody; Porter; Fr314, line 1;
Fr1424, line 1; Fr1493, line 1. Dickinson’s persistent but secularized
hope, as expressed in such poems as these, may be contrasted with
Melville’s doubt (registered in his Clarel [1876]) whether any sort
of hope can coexist, in the end, with science: “Shall Science then /
Which solely dealeth with this thing / Named Nature, shall she ever
bring / One solitary hope to men?” (qtd. in Delbanco 280–82).
5. This view parallels Robin Peel’s: Darwin and Dickinson alike “recog-
nized that, in the struggle for life, there is a need to adapt to ensure
survival. Dickinson’s poems are strategies in adaptation. The poetry
teaches a psychological, rather than a biological, process of adapta-
tion, but the poems are part of a conscious survival strategy nonethe-
less. Dickinson’s work contains a rhetoric quite in accord with the
scientific recognition that forces operate in human life in a way that
often overrides careful human planning” (293; Peel’s emphasis).
6. Compare Ephesians 5:6; Colossians 4:5; Romans 5:3.
7. Compare Shelley’s simultaneously personal and cultural injunction
“to hope, till Hope creates / From its own wreck the thing it con-
templates” (Prometheus Unbound [1820], act 4, lines 573–74).
8. This observation is indebted to Sewall “Teaching.”
228 Notes

9. Compare Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plates 7–10.

10. See, respectively, Shelley, “Mont Blanc” (1817), lines 80–1; and Dylan
Thomas, “In My Craft, or Sullen Art” (1946), line 1.
11. For the all but permanent afterlife of Byron’s “Prisoner,” its influ-
ence on literature as late as the works of William Ernest Henley, see
Buckley.
12. In a recent book for the informed general reader, Sam Harris builds on
the scientific work of Daniel Wegner and Benjamin Libet to argue that
“[f]ree will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making.
Thoughts and intuitions emerge from background causes of which
we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control” (8).
There is consciousness, though, which allows us what even Wegner
calls “perceived control” (qtd. in Menaker 20). Consciousness, con-
cludes Daniel Menaker concerning all these issues, “may not tell us
what to do, but it does tell us what we do means—oh, and what
beauty is” (20). Thus consciousness, if not free will—and indeed con-
sciousness as the practical equivalent of free will—remains useful in
areas where belief in free will has always held sway—namely, religion,
law, and morality. Dickinson would have included philosophy and sci-
ence among those very areas.
13. See the quotation and discussion of Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present
(1843) in Ikeler 6–7.
14. John Wesley’s central doctrine of responsible grace, according to
Randy L. Maddox, reconciles divining grace (Eastern Christianity),
free grace (Lutheran tradition), sovereign grace (Reformed tradition),
co-operant grace (Arminian tradition), sanctifying grace (radical
Reformed tradition), and mediated grace (Catholic tradition).
15. The empirical/evangelical dialectic of Romantic Anglo-America
consistently describes the Calvinist/Arminian controversy and the
Arminian ascendancy as glosses on eighteenth- to nineteenth-century
literary development (Brantley Coordinates; Anglo-American). For
Dickinson’s Calvinist strain, see Eberwein “‘Where - Omnipresence -
fly?.’” The life of Henry Ward Beecher, whose “gospel of love” resists
father Lyman’s doctrine of depravity, illustrates the triumph, for bet-
ter or worse, of Arminianism (Applegate). For political implications
of the Arminian ascendancy during the increasingly democratic nine-
teenth century, see Hatch.
16. Meanwhile, see Brantley Experience 15, 90–93, 139, 198, 237 n.25.
17. See, respectively, Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802) and
Keats, “Ode on Melancholy” (1819), lines 23, 28.
18. Compare Wordsworth, “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” (1798), line
7; Shelley, Prometheus Unbound (1819), act 3, scene 1, line 204;
and Shelley, “Adonais” (1821), line 463. ”Science will not trust us
with another world,” Dickinson writes (L395). No Thomas Henry
Huxley could have had a stronger sense of the transience, change,
variation, and adaptation specified by Darwinian thought than the
 Notes 229

manifest set of perceptions on offer in an 1856 letter from Dickinson

to her cousin John Graves: “Much that is gay—have I to show, if
you were with me, John, upon this April grass—then there are sad-
der features—here and there, wings half gone to dust, that fluttered
so, last year—a mouldering plume, an empty house, in which a bird
resided. Where last year’s flies, their errand ran, and last year’s crickets
fell! We, too, are flying—fading, John—and the song ‘here lies,’ soon
upon lips that love us now—will have hummed and ended . . . It is a
jolly thought to think that we can be Eternal—when air and earth
are full of lives that are gone—and done—and a conceited thing
indeed, this promised Resurrection!” (L184; Dickinson’s emphasis).
Thus empirically based doubts about the Christian afterlife, evident
in her thinking as early as her twenty-sixth year, led to Dickinson’s
quasi-Arminian idea of willing, of choosing, heaven in the here and
now—“Paradise is of the Option,” she writes (Fr1125, line 1; see the
discussion in Gilliland; McCullough). Dickinson’s concept of natu-
ralized immortality can mean, as well, a mind not so much still living
after the death of the body as, while yet part of it, uncircumscribed
by time and space (see Fr373, Fr630, Fr653, Fr725, Fr817, Fr1166,
Fr1486, and Fr1662).
19. Cynthia MacKenzie’s concordance to the letters is an invaluable
resource, which, together with Jack L. Capps’s demonstration of
Dickinson’s wide range of reading, points well beyond the necessar-
ily limited range of evidence in this, or in any other, book on her
poetry.
20. That more tender singing is emphasized in Brantley Experience.

Conclusion
1. Compare, respectively, Stevens, “Of Modern Poetry” (1940), line 2,
and Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–1793), Plate 10,
line 7.
2. See Keats’s letter to Benjamin Bailey, November 22, 1817. Bailey was
an Anglican minister. For Keats’s relation to Dissent, see Roe.
3. For Darwin’s sympathy for religion, despite the nonreligious direc-
tion of his thought, see Frank Burch Brown; Janet Browne.
4. Such examples of nineteenth-century Higher Criticism as David
Friedrich Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu (1835–1836) and Ernest Renan’s Vie
de Jésus (1863) employed scientific standards of evidence and brought
methods of linguistics, anthropology, and literary criticism to bear on
biblical analysis. “Its practitioners set biblical stories in perspective as
records compiled by unidentified and sometimes contradictory authors
over vast time-spans, responding to different historical conditions, and
inflected by myths of neighboring peoples” (Eberwein “Outgrowing
Genesis?” 20). In this regard, Jane Eberwein’s most recent synthesis—
the subtitle of “Outgrowing Genesis?” is “Dickinson, Darwin, and the
230 Notes

Higher Criticism”—examines such poems as “It always felt to me - a

wrong” (Fr521) and “Better than Music!” (Fr378). The former flatly
states, “No Moses there can be” (line 6). The latter limns “Eden” as
“a legend - dimly told - ” (line 15).
5. For the view that evolutionary biology and Judaeo-Christian faith are
“non-overlapping magisteria,” see Gould. The ability to compart-
mentalize experience and faith is close to the literary temperament,
as in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s declaration that “[t]he test of a first-rate
intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the
same time, and still retain the ability to function” (69). The fact that
Emily Dickinson possessed this ability did not prevent her from favor-
ing the philosophical and the scientific.
6. For cognitive science as a cooperative undertaking, see Schacter. For
cognitive science as an approach to reading the Romantics as a scien-
tific group, see Richardson.
7. See, respectively, Richard Wilbur, “Love Calls Us to the Things of
This World” (1955), and Abrams, ed., 2:60. M. H. Abrams has refer-
ence here to what he thinks Blake means by “the marriage of heaven
and hell.”
8. The word pathetic is not necessarily pejorative. It relates to pathos.
But fallacy is pejorative. See the discussion in Harmon and Holman,
under pathetic fallacy. See also John Ruskin, “Of the Pathetic
Fallacy” (1856), volume 3, part 4, chapter 12. Ruskin’s example is
from Coleridge’s “Christabel” (1800): “The one red leaf, the last of
the clan, / That dances as often as dance it can.” From pejorative
implication Ruskin exempts personification. Compare Dickinson’s
Experiment.
9. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “How Do I Love Thee?” (1850), lines
11–12, and T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land” (1922), line 430, apply to
Dickinson’s case.
10. Pinch 531–33. See also Eric G. Wilson Coleridge’s and Potkay.
11. Compare, respectively, Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey,” line 48, and
Hopkins, “No Worst, There Is None” (1918), line 6.
12. Compare, respectively, Fr1404, line 7, and Keats, “Ode on Melancholy”
(1819), line 15.
13. Menand, for historical reasons of philosophy and science, emphasizes
late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century pessimism, and Carlos
Baker Echoing Green, Bornstein, Favret, Fussell, and Howells do, too,
but these five also acknowledge, in Modernism, a hopeful remnant of
philosophy, science, religion, and Romanticism.
14. Beethoven, song cycle, opus 98. The lyrics are by Aloys Jeitteles. In
1849, Franz Liszt transcribed “An Die Ferne Geliebte” for piano,
and Estela Kersenbaum Olevsky, musical advisor for the television
documentary “Angles of a Landscape: The Poet in Her Bedroom,”
produced for the Emily Dickinson Museum, played the piece as
an accompaniment. Dickinson played some of Beethoven’s works
 Notes 231

for piano (Cooley). For musical settings of Dickinson’s verse, see

Lowenberg.
15. George Steiner’s views can appear to be commensurate with the argu-
ments of Bryan Boyd, Denis Dutton, Eric R. Kandel, and Mark Pagel
for a Darwinian aesthetic. All of these, Steiner included (though Steiner
only alludes to Darwin), attempt a Darwinian vindication of art by
emphasizing the utilitarian power of art to enhance human fitness of
various kinds. Thus all of these thinkers might inflect Kant’s definition
of art as follows: “purposiveness without purpose,” not “purposive-
ness without purpose.” But Steiner’s views are more art-appropriate,
more nonutilitarian, than those of Boyd, Dutton, Kandel, and Pagel.
Thanks go to Professor Emeritus Michael Cass for his rich conversa-
tion about the works of George Steiner.
16. Compare Kershner’s phrasing, in his study of Joyce (15–21).
17. Compare Michael Holquist’s paraphrase of the almost exclusively fic-
tion-oriented “dialogism” of M. M. Bakhtin: “I can mean what I say,
but only indirectly, at a second remove, in words I take and give back
to the community according to the protocols it establishes. My voice
can mean, but only with others: at times in chorus, but at the best of
times in a dialogue” (qtd. in Greenblatt, ed., Allegory 165).
18. See Martin Buber qtd. in Breuggemann 2.
19. For a discussion of Locke’s “double conformity” thesis that things
may conform to ideas and that ideas may conform to words (Essay,
Book 3), see Aarsleff. For a lucid historical survey of such issues of
linguistic theory as the perennial question of, the ongoing status of,
aesthetic representation, see Beale.
20. One can easily imagine the negative reaction of the poet of “Experiment
escorts us last - ” to the various post-Modern US foreign policy depar-
tures from the Anglo-American birthright of empiricism. “In the
summer of 2002,” Ron Suskind writes, “a senior advisor to [president
George W.] Bush . . . told me something” that “I now believe gets to
the very heart of the Bush presidency”: “The aide [Suskind continues]
said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based commu-
nity,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge
from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and mur-
mured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He
cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he
continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our
own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as
you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can
study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors,
and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do” (21).
21. Dickinson’s loved ones and friends basked in, inspired, her 1,049
extant letters (she wrote myriads more) and also benefited from,
also affected, the lyric mastery of her 1,789 poems (she incorporated
many lyrics in the texts of her letters and enclosed many more in the
232 Notes

envelopes). Dickinson’s leading role in her wide correspondence “fills

spaces” for “controlled acts of self-representation” and appropriates
“a multiplicity of discursively constructed voices in an inter-generic
dialogic exchange” (Messmer 77). The Dickinson Editing Collective
is in the process of publishing the many “books” Dickinson wrote
to all these various correspondents. “Sister Sue,” Wadsworth, and
Higginson proved especially prominent among her fellow-aficionados
of reading and writing and of literature and criticism. Hitchcock and
Wadsworth ranked equally high among those beloveds of hers who,
in the select society of her imagination and of her mind, are arrayed
among her philosophical and scientific (as well as religious) partners
in discussion.
22. At the August 2010 Emily Dickinson International Society Conference
held in Oxford, England, 29 sessions celebrated her works. The fol-
lowing poem serves as Dickinson’s signature lyric of encouragement
to all who would understand her challenging but parsable canon:
Good to hide, and hear ‘em hunt!
Better, to be found,
If one care to, that is,
The Fox fits the Hound -
Good to know, and not tell -
Best, to know and tell.
Can one find the rare Ear
Not too dull -
(Fr945)
In these lines is summed up the pragmatic/democratic outreach of
Emily Dickinson’s art of knowledge.

Appendix A Empiricism and

Evangelicalism
1. See, respectively, Wordsworth, “Lines Written a Few Miles above
Tintern Abbey” (1798), line 108, and Coleridge, Biographia Literaria
(1817), Chapter 14.
2. The empirical/evangelical dialectic of Romantic Anglo-America can
appear to foresee, though scarcely to preempt, the psychologically
anthropological findings of T. M. Luhrmann. In her study of John
Wimber’s Vineyard Movement of evangelical churches, Luhrmann
cultivates an almost more than William James-like sympathy for how
these congregations school their members “to experience the super-
natural with their senses,” and hence to encounter or, in the vile ver-
nacular, “friend” God personally (Luhrmann 36).
3. Perhaps no better way exists to describe how Emily Dickinson’s
yearning for transcendence is a universal human trait than in the lan-
guage of Oliver Sacks: “To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient
 Notes 233

for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need

meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all pat-
terns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need
freedom (or, at least, the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves,
whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning
technology, or in states of mind that allow us to travel to other
worlds, to rise above our immediate surroundings” (40). The first
of Sacks’s three additional sentences in this vein proves equally appli-
cable to Dickinson: “Many of us find Worthsworthian ‘intimations of
immortality’ in nature, art, creative thinking, or religion; some people
can reach transcendent states through meditation or similar trance-
inducing techniques, or through prayer and spiritual exercises. But
drugs offer a shortcut; they promise transcendence on demand. These
shortcuts are possible because certain chemicals can directly stimulate
many complex brain functions” (40).

Appendix B Locke and Wesley

1. One thinks here of Mark Noll’s discussion of “power evangelism,”
“a phrase originating with Lonnie Frisbee and the title of one of
[John] Wimber’s best-known books, which stresses tangible signs
from the Holy Spirit as the key to Christian conversion” (Noll 25).
2. For a portrait of the Friday Masowe Apostolic Church of Zimbabwe,
which has discarded the Bible in favor of direct experience of the Holy
Spirit, see Engelke.

Appendix C Wadsworth and

Dickinson
1. As Georgiana Strickland kindly points out in correspondence, biog-
raphers favoring Wadsworth include Whicher (1928), Thomas H.
Johnson (1965), Gelpi (1965), Sewall (1974), Shurr (1983), Lease
(1990), Habegger (2001), and Longsworth (2001). Other candidates
and their sponsors, as Strickland also observes in correspondence, are:
Edward Hunt, first husband of Helen Hunt Jackson (Pollitt, 1930);
George Gould (Taggard, 1930); Kate Scott Anthon (Patterson,
1951 Riddle); Bowles (Ward, 1961; Farr, 1992; Lambert, 1996; and
Arnold, 1998); Susan Dickinson (Hart and Smith, 1998); Richard
Dickinson, a cousin, said to be a minister in Philadelphia at the same
time as Wadsworth (Waugh, 1990); and William Smith Clark (Ruth
Owen Jones, 2002). Wolff and Keller, Strickland emphasizes, say the
whole love affair is imaginary on Dickinson’s part, perhaps a con-
scious fiction. Franklin, ed., The Master Letters, “rejects the fictional
aspect but takes no stand on who the recipient was or whether copies
of the letters were actually mailed” (Strickland in correspondence).
234 Notes

“So if popularity is evidence,” she reasons, “Wadsworth wins over

Bowles and all the rest.” “This is of course a ridiculous way to look
at this question,” Strickland concludes, “but it says something about
Dickinson scholarship—that despite frequent statements that it doesn’t
really matter, many scholars have strong feelings about this question.
The story certainly feeds a strong public desire for a romance.”
2. The evidence that Wadsworth sent his sermons to Dickinson as part of
his dialogue with her is here based on text/poem comparison. For an
overview of the Wadsworth/Dickinson friendship, including the facil-
itating importance of Dickinson’s friends Elizabeth and Josiah Gilbert
Holland (who appear to have mediated the correspondence by receiv-
ing and transmitting letters), see Sewall Life 2:444–46, 2:729–41. See
also Reynolds 31 and Lease 4, 6.
3. To describe the relationship between Wadsworth and Dickinson, the
word connection might seem inappropriate, harsh, blunt, and even
salacious. In eighteenth-century Britain, however, as in Selina, the
Countess of Huntington’s Connection, the term carried the connota-
tion of intellectual-salon-like circles of male/female evangelical con-
versation (see Brantley Locke 103–28).
4. As Georgiana Strickland carefully argues in print, “The church’s early
membership records have apparently been lost; neither the present
minister of the Arch Street (formerly West Arch Street) Church, the
Reverend George Clayton Ames (visit of June 28, 2003) nor Kenneth
Ross at the Presbyterian Historical Society (phone conversation of
March 9, 2004) has knowledge of their location. Longsworth . . . notes
that Mrs. Coleman’s letter of transfer from the Amherst College
Church, dated 1856, is now at South Church in Middletown,
Connecticut, suggesting that she did not establish church member-
ship in either Princeton or Philadelphia” (Strickland endnote 22).
5. For all quotations from Bianchi’s biography, see Bianchi Life 46–49.
6. What Bianchi calls “the inward drama” of Dickinson’s “romance”
with Wadsworth gives “befitting dignity” to “the true inspiration
of the love poems.” Bianchi’s memoir adds that her mother, father,
Lavinia, and Mattie Gilbert “told me specifically” that the romance
“left a permanent effect upon my aunt’s life and vision.” In support of
Wadsworth as Master, Bianchi quotes letters to her from “the wife of a
first cousin of Aunt Emily” and from a great-granddaughter of Samuel
Fowler Dickinson. She cites an early reviewer: “There are poems here
printed in respect to love that never could have been written without
experience.” She sums up with Louis Untermeyer: “Emily tells the
whole story of her love, her first rebellious desire, her inner negation,
her resignation, her waiting for reunion in Eternity. There is nothing
more to add except irrelevant names and unimportant street num-
bers.” See Bianchi Face to Face 51–53. Strickland closes: “Whatever
the reason for Bianchi’s choice of Wadsworth as the lover, and what-
ever its truth or fictionality, it has remained a fixture—and a lightning
 Notes 235

rod—in Dickinson biography and criticism ever since” (Strickland

endnote 29).
7. Compare Jane Austen, Emma (1816). For Dickinson and Newton—he
worked in Edward Dickinson’s law office and introduced Dickinson
to Emerson’s poetry—see Sewall Life 2:400–04. For Dickinson and
Bowles, see Farr. For Dickinson and Higginson, see Wineapple. For
Dickinson and Lord, see Guthrie; Walsh.
8. One may borrow a phrase from what one should hereby acknowledge
as a primarily religious poem.
9. See Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850) 12:216. For discussion of the
nineteenth-century commonplaces enumerated earlier, see Langbaum
Word; Losey.
10. Lundin makes good use of Martha Dickinson Bianchi’s biography.
11. See the account of Dickinson’s correspondence with James Dickson
Clark and Charles H. Clark, concerning their mutual friend, Charles
Wadsworth, in Habegger 416–21.
12. For an example of how Dickinson uses the word fathomed in its sexual
sense, see Fr1742, line 7.
13. Discussing a series of poems that William H. Shurr calls “The
Pregnancy Sequence,” Shurr concludes:
The solution [to Dickinson’s pregnancy by Charles Wadsworth,
namely abortion] seems unthinkable . . . until we recall that 1861
and 1862 were the years of her greatest emotional and mental
crisis, that Dickinson was sick and bedridden for a whole sum-
mer at this time, that there was something profoundly shatter-
ing in her experience of “marriage,” that she nevertheless had
compelling reasons to assert repeatedly that she was married,
that the family doctors and the family medical histories for all
the Dickinsons are recorded except for these years, and that
Dickinson’s sister-in-law next door, Susan, was routinely pro-
curing abortions from the year of her marriage in 1856 until the
birth of her first child in 1861. Nor should we exclude from this
sequence the fact that in 1862 Wadsworth abruptly and unac-
countably (considering his professional success in Philadelphia)
put a whole continent between himself and Dickinson—surely
a prudent move for a professional man, to remove himself from
possible scandal. (149, 170–88, esp. 179–80)
For serious scholarly reservations about Shurr’s approach, see Tanter;
Habegger 715. Farr and Shoobridge deeply reconsider the “master let-
ters,” yet they make no mention of Shurr’s work, which has been not
only snubbed but ridiculed when it was not ignored. Perhaps enough
time has passed and enough biographers have found Wadsworth the
likely “Master” so that students of Dickinson’s poetry may reconsider
the possibility of a Wadsworth/Dickinson attachment. They would
be well advised to do so warily, however, for feelings in the Dickinson
world run high.
236 Notes

14. In an understatement, Alfred Habegger comments, “Shurr gives

the fullest and most attentive treatment [of a series of poems he
calls ‘The Pregnancy Sequence’] but tends to override historical
reality and take Emily Dickinson’s imaginative transformations lit-
erally” (715).
15. Judith Farr identifies 132 “Poems for Master,” as distinct from 94
“Poems for Sue.”
16. With regard to Thomas Mann and his social circle, Anthony Heilbut
develops Mann criticism from Heilbut’s hypothesis that whenever
love germinates the creative imagination flowers, though erotic love
for Mann’s characters often ends in death. Shurr draws an analogy
between his argument for Wadsworth as Dickinson’s muse and that of
James E. Miller for Vivienne Eliot, T. S. Eliot’s wife, as a constant pres-
ence in Eliot’s supposedly “impersonal” poetry (see Marriage 71).
17. The case for Wadsworth as Dickinson’s muse boasts more evidence
than, say, Kenneth R. Johnston’s theory of Wordsworth as a spy
against the French. Yet Johnston’s reviewers rightly praise his bio-
graphical approach to Wordsworth’s art. Speculation can be directly
proportional to good critical results as in the cases of the biblical
J-writer, Homer, many medieval authors, and Shakespeare. See James
Butler; Bloom The Book of J; Hartog; Wood.
18. A foretaste of Polly Longsworth’s argument for Wadsworth as “Master”
appears in Longsworth’s “‘Latitude.’” Habegger announces: “There
are enough clues pointing to the minister [as the choice for Master]
that he is the one we will consider as occasion offers” (421). For over-
views of the case for Sue, see Dobson; Hart; Hart and Smith; Smith.
Both/and logic is in order as where Pollak gives equal attention to
Wadsworth and Susan in Anxiety 59–104.
19. Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey,” line 42.
20. Tynan “Scholars.” Thanks to W. B. Gerard for his information about
this source. Young woman Dickinson understandably misidentified
the aphorism of clergyman, sportsman, gambler, suicide, and author
of the collection of aphorisms Lacon (1820–2; 2 volumes)—Charles
Caleb Colton—as belonging to Robert Browning.
21. Rochefoucauld: “True love, however rare, is still more common than
true friendship.” Sterne: “Love is nothing without sentiment, / And
sentiment is still less without love” (Sterne’s emphasis). Byron: “A mis-
tress never is nor can be a friend. While you agree, you are lovers; and
when it is over, anything but friends.” See the quotation and discus-
sion of François de la Rochefoucauld, Maxims (1665), in The World
Book Encyclopedia (1975), s. v. “La Rochefoucauld, Duc de.” See also
Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey, Melvyn New, ed., 63, where
he uses the French: “l’amour n’est rien sans sentiment, / Et le senti-
ment est encore moins sans amour.” See, finally, George Gordon, Lord
Byron, Letters and Journals, journal entry for November 24, 1813.
 Notes 237

22. Carlos Baker’s group biography, Emerson among the Eccentrics (1996),
emphasizes the compatibility between friendship and love. See also
Sharp; Crain; Leverenz Manhood; Robert K. Martin Hero.
23. For the centrality of A Treatise concerning Religious Affections to
Jonathan Edwards’s works and in the history of ideas, see Marsden
Edwards 284–90. John Wesley’s abridgment provides shorthand per-
spective on the emotional, intellectual, and spiritual background to
Anglo-American belles lettres of the nineteenth century: see Brantley
Coordinates 7–42.
24. See, e.g., Judith Page’s recent study of Romantic-era sympathy
(esp. 1–20).
25. Emerson, “Fate” (1852), in Whicher, ed., 349. The social grace of such
a passage contrasts with the egotistical sublime in the “Transparent
Eye-ball” section of Emerson’s “Nature” (1836) and throughout his
“Self-Reliance” (1841); even these essays, however, can well appear
more other-directed than they have often seemed to be (see Brantley
Anglo-American 177–92).
26. Abrams, ed., The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Fifth Edition
2:60. M. H. Abrams interprets what Blake must have meant by his
phrase “the marriage of heaven and hell.”
27. Habegger xv, 268, 368, 372, 418, 598, 715, esp. xv.
28. Benfey 64. Christopher Benfey’s reading of Dickinson’s “Split the
Lark - and you’ll find the Music - ” is particularly persuasive (93).
29. Mark 12:33. Compare body, emotion, reason, and imagination in
Blake’s cosmology (Ault). Wesley’s quadrilateral—scripture, reason,
tradition, and experience (Maddox 36–40)—parallels Blake’s and
foreshadows, like his, Dickinson’s discovery of mind, soul, and heart
in friendship and in love alike.
30. Habegger 471. “My Wars are laid away in Books - ” (Fr1579) pro-
vides Habegger with the title of his critical biography and serves him,
in effect, as Emily Dickinson’s signature poem.
31. See Lundin 4, 34, 78, 134, 149. See also Brantley Experience 144,
154, 155.
32. The pessimism of “Those - dying then” (Fr1581) also contrasts
somewhat with Melville’s imagery of ignis fatuus. Dickinson’s second
stanza is not as tough-minded as Melville even as early as his first
story, “Fragments of a Writing Desk” (1839), in which the narrator,
perhaps repeating Melville’s chagrin over his father’s futile dream-
quests, curses the “absurd conceits” that “inflated his brain,” “the
ignis fatuus, that danced so provokingly before me” (see the quota-
tion and discussion in Delbanco 27). In the first stanza, however,
Dickinson outdoes Melville himself in truth-acknowledgment of an
unflinching kind. Dickinson’s near-blasphemous imagery of God’s
amputated hand epitomizes the literary boldness that her refusal to
publish freed her to develop. Compare Melville’s imagination of Ahab
238 Notes

“with a crucifixion in his face”: a pious editor changed this to: “an
apparently eternal anguish in his face” (qtd. in Delbanco 178).
33. See D. W. Robertson, Jr.,’s discussion of “The Miller’s Tale” (1400)
by Geoffrey Chaucer (Robertson 382–86, 468–69).
34. See the quotation and discussion in Sewall “Teaching” 31, of the first
review of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, by Arlo Bates.
35. The Wadsworth/Dickinson romance approaches the philosophical
concept of friendship to be found in the discourse of Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattieri: “The friend who appears in philosophy no longer
stands for an extrinsic persona, an example or empirical circumstance,
but rather for a presence that is intrinsic to thought, a condi-
tion of possibility of thought itself” (Deleuze and Guattieri 2–3).
Dickinson’s concept of friendship is as conversational, philosophical,
and scientific as that of Emerson in his essay on “Friendship” (1841),
which, as Frank M. Meola paraphrases it, means that “[i]n a nation
of individuals, . . . ideas would be tested and reworked in perpetual
dialogues, and as proper citizens we would all be on lifelong journeys
of self-reinvention, encountering the other in ourselves, ourselves in
others” (123).
36. Compare I Corinthians 12:31. Galatians 3:28 is also apropos.
37. Eberwein; Guthrie; Habegger 311–3; Sewall Life.
38. Inspired by his decision not to accept a larger pastorate in London, the
Reverend Dr. John Fawcett (1740–1817) stayed at his small church in
Wainsgate and wrote
Blest be the Tie that Binds
Our hearts in Christian love;
The fellowship of kindred minds
Is like to that above.
See Fawcett (1772). As a farewell or, rather, antifarewell hymn, “Blest
be the Tie that Binds” parallels Emily Dickinson’s lifelong interest in
the theme of parting as an existential, as well as spiritual, problem.
Recall her lines:
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.
(Fr1773, lines 7–8)
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 I n d e x of Poe ms Cited

A bird came down the walk, 216n36 Good to hide and hear ‘em hunt,
A doubt if it be us, 115–16 232n22
A prison gets to be a friend, 137 Great streets of silence led away,
A Science - so the Savans say, 62–64 229n18
A tooth upon our peace, 223n21
A wounded deer leaps highest, 103, He is alive this morning, 65
104 “Heavenly Father” - take to thee,
After great pain a formal feeling 87–92
comes, 103–13, 128, 147 Hope is a strange invention, 166,
All things swept sole away, 215n35 227n4
Apparently with no surprise, 73, Hope is a subtle glutton, 227n4
84–87, 221n25 Hope is the thing with feathers,
‘Arcturus’ is his other name, 170 223n31
As by the dead we love to sit, 79 How happy is the little stone, 206n33
At leisure is the soul, 137–38 How the old mountains drip with
sunset, 168
Banish air from air, 47
Before I got my eye put out, 141–42 I breathed enough to take the trick,
Better than music! for I who heard 130–31
it, 230n4 I can wade grief, 104, 134, 139
By a departing light, 135 I died for beauty but was scarce, 18
I dwell in possibility, 45–46, 122,
Civilization spurns the leopard, 117 190
I felt a funeral in my brain, 147
Dare you see a would at the ‘white I had some things that I called mine,
heat,’ 122 221n25
I held a jewel in my fingers, 118–19
Experience is the angled road, 9, 13 I like a look of agony, 146
Experiment escorts us last, 25, 34, I like to see it lap the miles, 47–49
73–79, 154, 156, 172, 231n20 I never lost as much but twice,
221n25
“Faith” is a fine invention, 77–79 I never saw a moor, 170
Finding is the first act, 227n1 I reason earth is short, 92
From blank to blank, 133 I saw no way, the heavens were
Further in summer than the birds, stitched, 25, 45, 78
145 I started early, 190
260 Index of Poems Cited

I tie my hat - I crease my shawl, Split the lark and you’ll find the
114, 116–17, 190 music, 237n28
If I could tell how glad I was, 79 Superiority to fate, 140
In many and reportless places,
127–28 Tell all the truth but tell it slant, 27,
In winter in my room, 235n12 74–75
It always felt to me a wrong, 230n4 The admirations and contempts of
It would never be common more I time, 223n31
said, 109–13, 116 The bobolink is gone, 192
It’s easy to invent a life, 221n25 The brain is wider than the sky, 40
I’ve dropped my brain, my soul is The day that I was crowned,
numb, 225n18 50–51, 65
The difference between despair,
Like some old fashioned miracle, 134 108–9
Lo at my problem bending, 79 The fact that earth is heaven, 3, 94
Love is anterior to life, 79, 223n31 The going from a world we know,
229n18
Many cross the Rhine, 18 The infinite a sudden guest, 223n31
My life closed twice before its close, The lilac is an ancient shrub, 23, 69
119, 238n38 The missing all prevented me, 13,
My life had stood a loaded gun, 64–66, 215n35
119–20, 225n22 The only news I know, 207n33
My wars are laid away in books, The rat is the concisest tenant, 66
195–96 The robin’s my criterion for tune,
61, 71, 76
Nature and God, I neither knew, The soul has bandaged moments,
214n24 135–36
Nature sometimes sears a sapling, The soul selects her own society,
216n36 5–6, 149–50, 167–68, 212n5,
No crowd that has occurred, 229n18 217n2
None can experience stint, 135 The soul’s distinct connections,
223n31
Of all the sounds despatched abroad, The soul’s superior instants, 149,
27, 72 223n31, 229n18
Of bronze and blaze, 52–54, 156 The spirit is the conscious ear,
On a columnar self, 73, 79–83, 129, 223n31
154, 218n7–8 The whole of it came not at once, 89
One crucifixion is recorded only, 79 The worthlessness of earthly things,
192
Paradise is of the option, 229n18 Their height in heaven comforts
Perception of an object costs, 10, 13 not, 26, 229n18
Publication is the auction, 122, 139 There is a languor of the life, 114
There is a pain so utter, 114–15
Severer service of myself, 144, 146 There’s a certain slant of light, 86,
She went as quiet as the dew, 55–57 122, 168, 226n30
Soto! Explore thyself, 170 They say that “time assuages,” 132
 Index of Poems Cited 261

This consciousness that is aware, We learn it in retreating, 134

229n18 What mystery pervades a well, 78
This is my letter to the world, 6, 99 When we stand on the tops of
This was in the white of the year, things, 67
100, 105, 146–48, 156, 159 Where I have lost, I softer tread,
This world is not conclusion, 26, 118–20, 225n23
94, 229n18 White - unto the white creator, 122,
Those cattle smaller than a bee, 67 226n27
Those dying then, 91, 196 Whoever disenchants, 223n31
Those not live yet, 229n18 Wild nights - wild nights!, 18, 190,
Tis so appalling it exhilarates, 91 206n30
To whom the mornings stand for Wonder is not precisely knowing, 18
night, 109
Too happy time dissolves itself, 131–32 Zeros taught us phosphorus, 141
 Ind e x

Aarsleff, Hans, 231n19 Beckett, Samuel, 4, 169

Abbott, Andrea, 80 Beer, Gillian, 92, 206n28
Abrams, M.H., 211 Bennett, Paula, 42
Anatomy of Influence, The Bentham, Jeremy, 79
(Bloom), 8 Berkeley, George, 42
Anatomy of the World, An Bianchi, Martha Dickinson, 145,
(Donne), 23 188–92, 234n6
Anderson, Charles R., 196 biology, 14, 37, 46, 61–66, 70, 72,
Anderson, Douglas, 142 83, 89–91, 94, 97, 153, 162,
Applegate, Debby, 187, 207n37, 164, 172, 216n37, 221n26,
228n15 227n5, 230n5
Arminian evangelicalism, 21, 53, 55, Bishop, Elizabeth, 161
65, 70, 87, 95, 140, 208n40, Blake, William
228n15, 229n18 Dickinson’s style and, 5, 8, 85,
Arminius, Jacobus, 208n40 153, 162
Arnold, Matthew, 27, 94, 129, 138, “Enthusiastic Admiration” and, 23
151, 169 lack of mentions in Dickinson’s
Asolando (Browning), 72 letters, 150
Astell, Mary, 20 love and, 194–95
astronomy, 26, 28, 38, 46, 52–57, Marriage of Heaven and Hell,
72, 96–97, 147, 169, 172 The, 127, 176
atheism, 13, 89, 91, 136, 171, perception and, 104–5, 175
221n26 “Poetic Genius” and, 9
Ault, Donald, 237n29 “Proverbs of Hell” and, 132
science and, 153, 155, 175
Bachelard, Gaston, 148 Tennyson and, 84
Baker, Carlos, 230n13, 237n22 theodicy and, 83–84, 91, 222n28
Baker, Nicholson, 129 There Is No Natural Religion, 105
Bakhtin, M.M., 210n52, 231n17 transcendentalism and, 10
Barnstone, Aliki, 113, 227n2 “Tyger, The,” 83, 221n24, 222n28
Barrett, Paul, 92 Bloom, Harold, 8, 17, 45, 91, 138,
Barrett Browning, Elizabeth, 34 156, 192
Barthes, Roland, 157, 165 Body, Alfred H., 212n4
Bate, Jonathan, 168 Bowles, Camilla Parker, 107
Bates, Arlo, 198, 209n46 Bowles, Samuel, 59, 190, 198, 234n1
Beale, Walter H., 231n19 Boyd, Bryan, 231
264 Index

Breuggemann, Walter, 210n50 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

Brooks, David, 209n44 “Aeolian Harp, The,” 97
Brown, Frank Burch, 63 “Conversation Poems,” 2
Browne, Peter, 180 Dickinson’s style and, 8, 125,
Browne, Thomas, 113 155, 162
Browning, Robert, 19, 72, 189, lack of mentions in Dickinson’s
206n32 letters, 150
Budick, Emily Miller, 111, 136 love and, 194
Bunyan, John, 74 melancholy and, 158
Bushell, Sally, 165 reason and, 79, 81, 93
Butler, Benjamin F., 64–65, 215n34 science and, 79, 175
Butler, Jon, 16 theodicy and, 91
Butler, Melissa, 219n15 transcendentalism and, 68
Bynum, W.F., 57 Wordsworth and, 93, 196
Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 65, “Work without Hope,” 86
105, 125–27, 137, 150, 192 Collier, Frank Wilbur, 61
Collier, Rebecca, 219n15, 223n30
Calvinism, 21, 53, 55, 65, 67, 70, Cooper, James Fenimore, 201, 202
84, 86–88, 95, 140 Cragg, Gerald R., 181–83
Cameron, Sharon, 9, 64, 75, 116 Crashaw, Richard, 23
Capps, Jack, 202n6, 205n25, 229n19 Crews, Harry, 119
Carlyle, Thomas Crisp, Oliver, 208n40
Dickinson’s style and, 8, 77–79, Crumbley, Paul, 2, 202n5
121, 155, 162 Culler, Jonathan, 79
doing and, 138 Curnock, Nehemiah, 57
Emerson and, 77–78 Curran, Stuart, 204n20
empiricism and, 77–78, 93,
162, 175 Darwin, Charles
lack of mentions in Dickinson’s Dickinson’s style and, 14–17, 20,
letters, 150 22–23, 28, 72, 81, 99, 129,
postexperience and, 121–22 153, 156, 161–62, 164, 172
science and, 77–79 empiricism and, 16–17, 37
transcendentalism and, 68 mentions in Dickinson’s letters,
Wesley and, 186 150
Cazamian, Louis, 78 religion and, 61–68, 89–92, 172
Celan, Paul, 169–70 science and, 4, 46, 61–68, 74,
Chalmers, Thomas, 213n19 96–99, 108
Chambers, Robert, 215n33 theodicy and, 83–86
Chester, Timothy, 217n6 Wadsworth and, 15
Civil War, 72, 108, 164, 221 see also natural selection
Clark, James D., 191 Davies, Hugh Sykes, 205n23
Cody, David, 210n51 Dawkins, Richard, 221n26
Cody, John, 27, 114, 139 Delbanco, Andrew, 65, 214n26,
Coghill, Sheila, 169 237n32
Coleman, Eliza, 39, 43, 188, 212n11, Deleuze, Gilles, 238n35
234n4 Deppman, Jed, 145–46, 218n10
 Index 265

Descartes, Rene, 40, 69, 78, 183, empiricism and, 48, 53–55, 63,
210n50, 226n29 68, 164
Dewey, John, 93, 206n29 experience and, 138–40, 145,
Dickie, Margaret, 117 166, 172
Dickinson, Austin, 1, 3, 39, 59, 64, Keane on, 93
188, 198 love and, 193–94
Dickinson, Edward, 11, 13, 22, mentions in Dickinson’s letters,
26, 48, 97, 170, 203n15, 150
207n36 Meola on, 171
Dickinson, Susan Huntington “Nature,” 48, 55
Gilbert postexperience and, 106–7,
daughter, 188 121–22
fantasies about, 18 reality and, 81–82, 85–86
hopelessness and, 126 science and, 72, 76
letters to, 106–7 self-reliance and, 140
loss and, 109 son’s death and, 85, 112–13
love and, 126, 191–92, 194–95 theodicy and, 85–86
physical absence and, 144, 159 transcendentalism and, 10, 21,
Diehl, Joanne Feit, 60, 85, 110, 153, 186
204n20, 224n3 Wesley and, 186
Doddridge, Philip, 183 Wordsworth and, 175
Dolan, Elizabeth, 71 empiricism
Donne, John, 23 Carlyle and, 77–78, 93, 162, 175
Donoghue, Denis, 103, 148, 163, Darwin and, 16–17, 37
205n26 Emerson and, 48, 53–55, 63, 68,
Doriani, Beth Maclay, 16 164
Douglas, Ann, 202n6, 207n37 Keats and, 34–35, 46, 53, 57, 60,
Downey, Charlotte, 49 175–76
Dreyer, Frederick, 211n54, 212n5 Locke and, 11–12, 37–46, 51, 54,
Drummond, William, 72 57–58, 60, 67–70, 175
Dutton, Denis, 231n15 Shelley and, 72, 76, 175
Tennyson and, 59, 63, 66, 175
Eberwein, Jane Donahue, 15, 21, transcendentalism and, 78
137, 140, 205n24, 208n41, Wadsworth and, 37–39, 42–51,
209n42, 215n30, 220n23 55–63, 67, 69–70, 78, 172
Edwards, Jonathan, 175, 193–94, Wesley and, 33, 37–46, 49,
205n23, 208n40, 226n29 52–54, 57–61, 63, 65–67,
Edwards, Sarah Pierpont, 21 69–70, 163–64, 166, 172
Eliot, T.S., 105, 112, 121, 161 Wordsworth and, 3–4, 33–38, 45,
Emerson, Ralph Waldo 48, 53, 56–57, 69–70, 175–76
Carlyle and, 77–78 experience
conversation and, 22 Emerson and, 138–40, 145, 166,
Dickinson’s style and, 8, 10, 172
16–17, 22, 28, 45–46, 76, Locke and, 122, 129
106, 121, 153, 155, 161–62, Tennyson and, 83–84, 93
168, 198 Wadsworth and, 95–96, 166
266 Index

experience—Continued Gravil, Richard, 2, 84–85, 201n4,

Wesley and, 72, 77, 82–83, 90, 210n50
95–96, 98–99 Gray, Asa, 89, 220n23
Wordsworth and, 72, 93–94, Gray, John, 74
96–98, 172 Great Awakenings, 12, 68, 70, 98,
see also postexperience 208n40
Greenblatt, Stephen J., 14, 209n44
Farr, Judith, 126, 235n13, 236n15 Gubar, Susan, 142
Fathi, Fanoosh, 171 Guthrie, James, 61, 63, 225n14
Fawcett, John, 238n38
Felstiner, John, 169–70 Habegger, Alfred, 21, 187, 192,
feminism, 21, 42, 83, 149, 185 195–96, 208n40, 213n11,
Finch, Annie, 171, 204 n20 236n14
Finch, A.R.C., 112 Habermas, Jurgen, 204n19
Fish, Stanley, 36 Hankins, Barry, 21, 222n30
Fitzgerald, Edward, 113–14 Hardy, Thomas, 4, 85, 104, 151,
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 230n5 157, 161, 202n8
Foucault, Michel, 204 Harmon, William, 225n24, 230n8
Franke, William, 215n35 Harris, Sam, 221n26, 228n12
Franklin, Benjamin, 158 Harrison, Frederick, 79
Franklin, Ralph, 54, 74 Harrison, Kathryn, 127
Freedman, William, 49 Hatch, Nathan O., 228n15
Freeman, Margaret H., 119–20, Heilbut, Anthony, 236n16
225n22 Herbert, George, 23
Frost, Robert, 2, 45, 69, 112, 129, Herbert, T. Walter, 211n54
143, 157, 161 Herbert, T. Walter, Jr., 90
“Birches,” 45 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 13,
Fuller, Margaret, 21 18, 43, 80, 190, 198, 212n10,
Fulton, Alice, 110, 171 232n21
Hindley, J. Clifford, 217n1
Garbowsky, Maryanne, 110, 112, Hindmarsh, D. Bruce, 208n42
115, 117, 131 Hirsch, E.D., 1–2, 161
Gardner, Thomas, 169 Hitchcock, Edward, 44, 49, 63,
Gaull, Marilyn, 70 213n19, 232n21
Gay, Peter, 207n37 Holland, Elizabeth and Josiah
Geertz, Clifford, 71–72 Gilbert, 42, 60, 234n2
Gelpi, Albert, 118, 218n7 Holland, Theodore, 42
geology, 38, 46, 49–51, 57, 63, 72, Holman, Hugh C., 225n24, 230n8
83, 96, 172 Holmes, Richard, 176, 214n26,
Gilbert, Sandra, 142 216n36, 223n35
Giles, Paul, 204n18 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 19, 22, 91,
Gilliland, Don, 229n18 115, 132, 138, 158, 206n31,
Godwin, William, 71, 120 221n34
Goodheart, Adam, 215n34 Howard, Richard, 206n32
Gordon, Lyndall, 203n15 Howe, Susan, 171
Gould, Stephen Jay, 66, 176, 230n5 Howells, Richard, 47, 230n13
 Index 267

Huffer, Mary Lee Stephenson, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 53,

207n38 66, 95
Hulme, T.E., 23 “Ode to a Nightingale,” 35, 57,
Hurst, J.F., 41, 65 107, 176
Hutchinson, Anne, 218n7 “On First Looking into
Chapman’s Homer,” 46,
idealism, 17, 40, 45–46, 54, 69, 214n26
73–82, 93, 96, 156, 162, 175 “On Sitting Down to Read
Ikeler, A., 228n13 King Lear Again,” 66
Industrial Revolution, 48–49, 96 “Poetry of Earth Is Never Dead,
The,” 12, 34, 162, 172
Jackson, Helen Hunt, 40, 49, 52, postexperience and, 104, 120,
57, 67, 77, 171, 181, 185 122
Jackson, Virginia, 210n50 Stillinger and, 162
Jager, Colin, 205n23 “This Living Hand,” 60,
James, Henry, 54 204n16
James, William, 12, 212n3, 232n2 Keller, Karl, 51, 63
Jefferson, Thomas, 78, 87, 103–4 Kenny, Anthony, 217n3
Jeffrey, Francis, 37 Kershner, R.B., 210n51, 211n52,
Johnson, Greg, 142, 218n10 231n16
Johnson, Thomas H., 196–97 Kher, Indra Nath, 218n10
Jones, Rowena Revis, 51 Kierkegaard, Soren, 81–82
Jones, Ruth Owen, 143 Kimpel, Ben, 110, 218n10
Joyce, James, 191, 224n2 Kincaid, James, 114
Juhasz, Suzanne, 46, 81, 108, 139 Kipling, Rudyard, 156
Kirchwey, Karl, 206n32
Kandel, Eric R., 231n15 Kirkby, Joan, 15, 91, 168, 198
Kant, Immanuel, 80–81 Kirkland, John, 198
Keane, Patrick J., 15, 84–90, 93
Kearns, Michael, 203n14 Lamb, Charles, 33, 35–37, 68–70,
Keats, John 83, 153, 197, 211n1
despair and, 138, 143 Lambert, Robert Graham, 197
Dickinson’s style and, 6, 8, 34–35, Langbaum, Robert, 104, 148,
59, 69, 138, 154–55, 159 203n11
empiricism and, 34–35, 46, 53, “Lapis Lazuli” (Yeats), 90
57, 60, 175–76 Lease, Benjamin, 17, 201n4
Endymion: A Poetic Romance, 193 Leder, Sharon, 80
“Epistle to John Hamilton Leib, Erin, 82, 90
Reynolds,” 203n12, 216n37 Leiter, Sharon, 5, 206n30
“Eve of Saint Agnes, The,” 10 Leonard, Douglas Novich, 133–34,
“How Many Bards,” 10 140, 168–69
Hyperion: A Fragment, 97 Lethem, Jonathan, 168
Lamia, 19 Leverenz, David, 208n40
letters, 113, 229n2 Levine, George, 206n28
“naturalized imagination” and, Leyda, Jay, 6, 125
162, 209n43 Lincoln, Abraham, 48, 69
268 Index

Locke, John Melville, Herman, 5, 65, 90,

Astell and, 20 203n14, 227n4, 237n32
Dickinson’s style and, 12–17, Menaker, Daniel, 228n12
20–23, 28, 51, 153, 156, Menand, Louis, 223n2, 230n13
161, 163–65, 172 Meola, Frank M., 171, 203n14,
empiricism and, 11–12, 37–46, 238n35
51, 54, 57–58, 60, 67–70, 175 Messmer, Marietta, 232n21
experience and, 122, 129 Methodism, 33, 36–37, 40, 61,
language and, 167 70, 77, 92, 96, 99, 210n51,
religion and, 20–21 211n2
science and, 14–17, 72, 76, 78, Meyer, Howard N., 212n10
81, 83, 93, 95–99 Miller, Cristanne, 110
society and, 150 Miller, Joseph, 224n7
transcendentalism and, 40 Milosz, Czeslaw, 86
Wadsworth and, 12–13, 42 Milton, John, 27, 84, 90–92, 108,
Wesley and, 11–12, 163, 179–86 143, 149, 211n54, 221n24
Longsworth, Polly, 205n21, 207n37, Montaigne, Michel de, 217n6
234n4, 236n18 Morey, Frederick L., 80, 162
Lord, Otis P., 63, 143, 191, 194, Morgan, Victoria, 210n51
198 Mossberg, Barbara, 115
Lowenberg, Carlton, 231n14 Motion, Andrew, 59
Luhrmann, T.M., 212n3, 232n2 Mudge, Jean McClure, 128
Lundin, Roger, 5, 36, 72, 196–97 Murphy, Francis, 22, 48, 54–55, 78,
Lyman, Joseph, 24, 198, 228n15 82, 93, 106–7, 112, 121, 139,
145, 193
Mack, Phyllis, 207n36
MacKenzie, Cynthia, 209n49, Nagel, Thomas, 216n37
229n19 Nardini, Nicholas, 202n4
MacLean, Kenneth, 76 natural methodism, 33–37, 68–70,
Maddox, Randy, 228n14, 237n39 96, 98, 153, 156, 164, 172,
Manning, Susan, 205n25, 226n27 211n1–2
Marsden, George, 21 natural selection, 14–15, 23, 38,
Marsh, James, 93, 206n29 61–63, 66, 83–84, 90, 155,
Marshall, Megan, 198 172, 215n30, 216n37
Marston, Jane, 111 see also Darwin, Charles
Martin, Robert Bernard, 59 Natural Supernaturalism, 68–69,
Martin, Wendy, 49, 136, 138 211n2
Marx, Karl, 82, 175, 218n13 see also supernatural
materialism, 20, 34, 79, 82, 91, 171 naturalized imagination, 22, 26, 98,
mathematics, 55, 73–75, 78–79, 160, 145, 162, 209n43
213n18, 214n23, 217n2 negative capability, 120, 154, 166
Mayer, Nancy, 220n17 New, Elisa, 207n39
McClave, Heather, 64 New, Melvyn, 207n34, 226n27,
McCormack, Jerusha Hall, 213n17 236n21
McGann, Jerome, 165 Newton, Benjamin Franklin, 170,
meliorism, 4, 203n8 190, 198, 208n39
 Index 269

Newton, Isaac, 9, 52–53, 213n21, Meredith and, 224n11

226n29 Modernism and, 157, 224n2
Nidditch, Peter, 40, 42 “poetic faith” and, 90
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 71, 88, 105, post-Modernism and, 104
139, 175, 197 postexperience and, 104, 106–9,
Noll, Mark, 233n1 118, 128, 133, 137, 164
Norcross, Frances and Louise, 147 Romanticism and, 112, 120–21,
Norris, John, 20, 207n35 159, 172
Notopoulos, James A., 26, 205n23 Tennyson and, 121
Novy, Marianne, 201n2 Wadsworth and, 196
Nussbaum, Martha, 90, 192 Yeats and, 90
see also meliorism
O’Hara, Daniel T., 142 Peters, Sally, 144
Olmsted, Denison, 214n22 Pfau, Thomas, 157
O’Neill, Michael, 9 Philip, Jim, 49
Osgood, Frances, 171 Pickering, Samuel, 41
“Outgrowing Genesis?” (Eberwein), Poe, Edgar Allan, 46, 171, 214n22
15, 205n24, 213n19, 215n30, “poetry of earth,” 12, 34, 69, 162,
216n36, 220n20, 229n4 172, 209n43
see also Keats, John
Packer, Barbara, 112–13 Pollak, Vivian, 103, 112, 115, 117,
Pagel, Mark, 231n15 126, 144–45, 187
Paradise Lost (Milton), 27, 84, 90 Porter, David, 224n2
Pater, Walter, 122, 161, 198–99 postexperience
Patterson, Rebecca, 117, 142, Carlyle and, 121–22
206n30 Emerson and, 106–7, 121–22
Peabody, Elizabeth, 198, 202n4 pessimism and, 104, 106–9, 118,
Peacock, Molly, 207n35 128, 133, 137, 164
Peacock, Thomas Love, 39 Tennyson and, 121–22
Peel, Robin, 15, 38, 170–71, see also experience
208n39, 209n47, 213n18, Potter, Lois, 203n13
214n22, 223n35, 225n18, Powell, Padgett, 220n16
226n29, 227n1 Prescott, Harriet E., 210
Peltason, Timothy, 131, 143 Prince Charles, 107
Pendarves, Mary Granville, 21, Pulos, C. E., 9, 26, 72
207n45 Putnam, Hilary, 71
pessimism
aftermath and, 106, 108, 112–14, rationalism, 17, 40, 45–46, 69, 71,
116, 223n2, 224n2 74–75, 78–79, 99, 156, 175
Dickinson and, 4, 9, 72, 108–9, Reynolds, Joshua, 209n45
111–14, 125, 147, 230n13, Ricca, Brad, 214n22
237n32 Rich, Adrienne, 161
Eliot and, 223n2 Richardson, Alan, 209n44, 230n6
Hardy and, 203n8 Ricks, Christopher, 113
hope and, 137, 147, 159–60 Ricoeur, Paul, 95
Keats and, 172 Rigney, Ann, 202n8
270 Index

Rilke, Rainer Maria, 155 “World’s Great Age Begins Anew,

Robinson, John, 46, 112, 117, 140, The,” 111
142, 171 Shoobridge, Helen, 235n13
Rochefoucauld, Francois de la, 192, Showalter, Elaine, 83
195 Shurr, William H., 19, 187, 192,
Root, Abiah, 39, 41 197, 225n23, 235n13, 236n14
Roszak, Theodore, 166 Sigourney, Lydia, 171
Rousseau, G.S., 57 Steiner, George, 14, 160–61,
Ruef, Martin, 6 231n15
Stevens, Wallace, 5, 85, 112, 153,
Sacks, Oliver, 232–33n3 161
Salska, Agnieszka, 206–7n33 Stillinger, Jack, 98, 104, 162
Sartor Resartus (Carlyle), 8, 77–79, Stocks, Kenneth, 133
211n2 Strickland, Georgiana, 187, 208n42,
Scott, Walter, 58, 202 233n1, 234n4
Scottish Common Sense School, 11, Subtler Language, The
97, 205 (Wasserman), 98
Secker, Thomas, 183 supernatural, 69, 153, 220n23,
Sewall, Richard B., 24, 49, 51, 62, 74, 232n2
79, 81, 161, 204n17, 207n38, see also Natural Supernaturalism
209n46 Sussman, Henry, 201n3
Shakespeare, William Swingle, L.J., 39, 72, 106
Dickinson and, 1, 5, 28, 66, 84,
201n2, 204n18 Tallis, Raymond, 72
language and, 19 Tanter, Marci, 235n13
Shelley, Mary, 71 Taylor, Charles, 87
Shelley, Percy Bysshe Taylor, E. Derek, 207n34
“Adonais,” 26 Taylor, Linda J., 112
despair and, 130, 132, 147 technology, 38, 46, 57, 72, 164,
Dickinson’s style and, 8–9, 130, 166, 172
132, 155, 162, 194 Tennyson, Alfred Lord
Emerson and, 106 afterlife and, 159
empiricism and, 72, 76, 175 Blake and, 84
“Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” Bushell and, 165
157 Dickinson’s style and, 8, 162
“intense inane,” 78 empiricism and, 59, 63, 66, 175
lack of mention in Dickinson’s experience and, 83–84, 93
letters, 150 “Flower in the Crannied Wall,”
Locke and, 44–45 145–46
love and, 106 In Memoriam, 107, 113–14, 121,
Lyman and, 24 131, 138, 143–44, 190
“Mont Blanc,” 9, 25, 81, 122 love and, 143–45
Prometheus Unbound, 26 mentions in Dickinson’s letters,
realism and, 162, 172 150
theodicy and, 87 postexperience, 121–22
transcendentalism and, 26 Romanticism and, 138
 Index 271

science and, 89 Van Leer, David, 68

theodicy and, 83–84, 91, 155 Vendler, Helen, 5
Wesley and, 186
theodicy Wadsworth, Charles
Blake and, 83–84, 91, 222n28 astronomy and, 55–57
Bloom and, 91 correspondence with Dickinson,
Coleridge and, 91 187–99
Darwin and, 83–86 Darwin and, 15–17, 61–63
Dickinson and, 73, 83–92, Dickinson’s style and, 11–17,
221n24 28, 72, 82, 126–27, 140, 144,
Emerson and, 85–86 147–48, 153, 156, 159, 161
natural selection and, 155 empiricism and, 37–39, 42–51,
Powell and, 220n16 55–63, 67, 69–70, 78, 172
Shelley and, 87 experience and, 95–96, 166
St. Paul and, 87 friendship with Dickinson, 108,
Tennyson and, 83–84, 91, 155 118, 120, 137, 163–64, 167
Wordsworth and, 85–86 geology and, 49–51
Thomas, Dylan, 64, 132, 156 Locke and, 12–13, 42
Thoreau, Henry David, 197–98 medicine and, 57–60
Tilton, Elizabeth, 21 Romanticism and, 42, 98–99
Todd, John Emerson, 23 scholarship and, 42–43
Todd, Mabel Loomis, 6, 204n17, transcendentalism and, 20–21
207n37 views on technological
Transcendentalism development, 45–47
Blake and, 10 Wesley and, 11–15, 20–23, 153,
Carlyle and, 68, 186 163–64
Coleridge and, 68 Waldron, Jeremy, 58, 218n13,
Dickinson and, 10–11, 25–26, 219n14–15, 222n30
68, 70, 111, 162–63, 166, Walker, Julia, 46
186 Walsh, John Evangelist, 143,
Emerson and, 10, 21, 153, 203n15
162–63, 186 Wasserman, Earl, 98
empiricism and, 78 Waverly, Edward, 202n8
experiment and, 25, 34 Weinberg, Steven, 213n21
Locke and, 40 Werner, Marta, 19, 209n49
natural methodism and, 3, 164 Wesley, John
religion and, 21 despair and, 129, 139, 150
Shelley and, 26 Dickinson’s style and, 14–16, 20,
Tennyson and, 186 28, 153, 156, 161
Wadsworth and, 20–21 Edwards and, 194
Wordsworth and, 70 empiricism and, 33, 37–46, 49,
Tynan, Trudy, 236n20 52–54, 57–61, 63, 65–67,
69–70, 163–64, 166, 172
Uno, Hiroko, 117 evangelicalism, 166, 172, 175
Untermeyer, Louis, 234n6 experience and, 72, 77, 82–83,
Updike, John, 129, 149 90, 95–96, 98–99
272 Index

Wesley, John—Continued Excursion, 86

Locke and, 11, 179–86 experience and, 72, 93–94,
medicine and, 57–60 96–98, 172
Methodism and, 11 experiment and, 25
natural methodism and, 35 “Happy Warrior,” 105
Romanticism and, 15–16 “language of the sense,” 98
Wadsworth and, 11–15, 20–23, “Lines Written a Few Miles above
153, 163–64 Tintern Abbey,” 98, 155–56,
Whicher, Stephen, 63, 194 158, 176
White, Ronald C., 69 Locke and, 78
Whitman, Walt, 20, 23, 38, 201n4, love and, 191, 196
206n33, 220n17 “master light,” 93
Wilbur, Richard, 161 “My Heart Leaps Up,” 22, 143
Wilson, A.N., 151 natural methodism and, 153,
Wilson, Eric G., 158 156, 172
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 217n3 “Ode: Intimations of
Wolff, Cynthia Griffin, 63, 110, Immortality,” 83, 93, 107–8,
112, 129, 133, 139 132, 145, 148, 150
Wolosky, Shira, 110, 133–35, 201n4, postexperience, 104–5, 107–8,
209n47, 218n9, 221n24 113, 120, 122
Woolf, Virginia, 113, 161 Recluse, The, 25, 69
Wordsworth, William “Resolution and Independence,”
Bushell and, 165 127
“Characteristics of a Child Three Romanticism and, 3
Years Old,” 167 science and, 4
despair and, 125, 127, 132, 135, Steiner and, 160
137, 143–50, 158 theodicy and, 85–86
Dickinson’s style and, 3–4, 6, transcendentalism and, 25
8–9, 16–17, 22–23, 28, 125, Worth, Robert, 222n26
155–56, 161–62, 164–67
“Elegiac Stanzas,” 85 Yeats, William Butler, 4, 6, 90,
empiricism and, 3–4, 33–38, 45, 112, 139, 161, 197,
48, 53, 56–57, 69–70, 175–76 223n2