Emily Dickinson's Rich Conversation

Poetry, Philosophy, Science

R. Brantley

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137107916
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Emily Dickinson's Rich Conversation is a comprehensive account of Emily Dickinson's aesthetic and intellectual life. Contrary to the image of the isolated poet, this ambitious study reveals Dickinson's agile mind developing through conversation with a community of contemporaries.

P A R T I

GATHERING EXPERIENCE

C H A P T E R 1

PROCLAIMING EMPIRICISM

Why did Charles Lamb label Wordsworth’s poetry “natural methodism”?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 methodism” 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 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, reality 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 thoroughgoing “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 recantation 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 dependent on the evangelical antithesis of Romantic Anglo-America’s stab at synthesizing experience and faith, not so much through the magical powers as through the sleight-of-hand of the creative imagination. 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 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 volume, 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” reconsidered 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 contraries 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 justify, a judicious, selective, and subtle interpretation of Wordsworth’s poetry as religiously transcendental-izing in impulse, if not in tendency. 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 unbridgeable 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 preclude a future go of the series to the exclusively religious aspect of Dickinson’s Romanticism, for, after all, the series was “doing religion” long before the post-9/11 turn-to-religion-in-academe proclaimed by Stanley Fish. This book, in fact, anticipates just such an installment. Perhaps Volume 7 will ask less how Dickinson’s evangelical 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 immediate theological context.

That having been said, it is proper to emphasize Lamb’s e. e. cummings-like lowercasing, Lamb’s Rudolph Bultmann-like demythologizing, of the Methodist Movement. Like all other previous volumes 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 methodism” appears to signal his admiration for Wordsworth’s philosophical and scientific acumen, as distinct from his religious yearning, so any lingering religious implication of Wordsworth’s “natural methodism” 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 lowercasing with a vengeance, natural methodism can seem too oxymoronic, 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, considering, 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 perspective 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 interconnections 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 protoscientific language of Locke, his view of experience as the best means of knowing what is naturally and spiritually true, resonates with, and 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 scientific 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 maintaining 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 pione...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I   Gathering Experience
• Part II   Extending Experience
• Conclusion
• Appendix A   Empiricism and Evangelicalism: A Combination of Romanticism
• Appendix B   Locke and Wesley: An Essence of Influence
• Appendix C   Wadsworth and Dickinson: A Marriage of Minds
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index of Poems Cited
• Index