Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief
Yezzi, David
with his father was a theme in many ess a y s - h e wrote about race: His father was the man that he was because he was a black man in a white society; Baldwin related to his father as he did...
...It was, quite literally, a totalitarian kind of oppression...
...As Lundin points out, "Unlike Nietzsche, she was not gleeful about the possible loss of God but profoundly sad about it, because 'The abdication of Belief/Makes the Behavior small--.'" Also to her credit, there was perhaps something of Dickinson's Puritan inheritance that led her to perceive the limits of Romantic optimism found in the work of _9 Theological and biblical studies in context _9 Located in Jerusalem _9 Excellent facililies in scenic location _9 Inlernationai, ecumenical, interrelioious studies _9 Courses and field trips _9 Worship and daily common prayer Dates for Programs of Continuing Education and Spiritual Renewal: _9 January 12 through April 8, 1999 _9 May 26 through June 24, 1999 _9 June 29 through July 28, 1999 _9 September 7 through December 2, 1999 _9 December 14, 1999 through January 11, 2000 _9 January 18 through April 12, 2000 _9 April 14 through May 12, 2000 _9 June 2 through July 1, 2000 _9 July 4 through August 1, 2000 _9 September 12 through December 7, 2000 _9 December 18, 2000 through January 11, 2001 For information and an application: Rector Tantur Ecumenical institute for Theological Studies P.O...
...she regularly avoided travel and, in the end, almost never left her father's grounds...
...Home was, in fact, where Dickinson preferred to be her whole life...
...It will always be hard for white Americans--and may be now for some African-Americans--to appreciate how overwhelming and oppressive to black people were white people and the structures of segregation they imposed in those preliberation days...
...It shows him wise and insightful, as in his lengthy discussion of the moral and psychological struggle that white Americans had to wage within themselves in order to confront the imperative of black liberation...
...Raised during the period of New England revivalism, Dickinson declined to make the public confession of faith that would admit her to the church (her father made his twice), and by the age of thirty she left off attending services altogether...
...Without question, I believe, "The Fire Next Time" is Baldwin's greatest piece of writing...
...In one poem, dated circa 1864, Dickinson imagines herself as a bride of Christ: Given in Marriage unto Thee Oh thou Celestial Host-Bride of the Father and the Son Bride of the Holy Ghost...
...I never enjoyed such perfect peace and happiness," she wrote to a friend, "as the short time in which I felt I had found my savior . . . . I feel I shall never be happy without I love Christ...
...The matter resists illumination as thoroughly as any aspect of her famously tenebrous career...
...Baldwin ultimately came to appreciate the older man and some of the lessons he had tried to impart about living as a black man in a white society...
...Where one lived, worked, traveled, socialized, was educated, sought entertainment, was treated for illness--all that and more-was determined by white society...
...As Lundin puts it, "God may know why we need to be forgiven, but 'The Crime, from us, is hidden--.'" Such seeming paradoxes as those that clung to Dickinson's spiritual beliefs frustrate uniform understanding...
...Ultimately, what "The Fire Next Time" shows is James Baldwin as preacher...
...For such creatures and their creations a reasonable level of ambiguity must be allowed, if not held as an ideal...
...Her conflicting views of the divine existed simultaneously and unresolved in her long struggle with faith (a "Pugilist and Poet," she termed herself...
...Readers of Dickinson would do well to remember that, whether or not she was as Lundin suggests "one of the major religious thinkers of her age," she was first and foremost a poet...
...And while he later left the church, he remained, at heart, a preacher...
...It shows him at his best and most eloquent, as in the passage above, and at his worst and most foolish ("If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving...
...Box 19556 Jerusalem 91194 ISRAEL Telephone: (972) 2-6760-911 Fax: (972) 2-6760-914 E-mail: tantur@ netvision,net.il her contemporaries Emerson and Whitman, yet, like them, she refused to accept the notion of Original Sin...
...Ah, such rare, sweet moments of freedom...
...In fact, it seems that where Emily Dickinson (1830-86) is concerned, no two critics can agree on much...
...There are those writers, for example, who doubt that Dickinson's religious beliefs bear greatly on her poetry...
...David Yezzi is a Stegner fellow at Stanford University...
...others assert that she rejected religion outright, while still others feel poetry itself "became her religion...
...Yet doubt can be a form of belieL as the poets and ministers John Donne and George Herbert knew...
...So, too, with regard to her spirituality...
...More often the poems suggest a God passively listening ("Of course--I prayed--/And did A, TANTUR ECUMENICAL INSTITUTE FORTHEOLOGICAL STUDIES Founded by the University o f Notre Dame st the request of Pope Paul Yl Ecumenical Program of Continuing Education and Spiritual Renewal for Clergy, Lay Ministers and Teachers God Care...
...How embarrassing that must have been after the disclosure, by Malcolm X and others, of Muhammad's promiscuity and his taking advantage of his female disciples...
...Such effort is hardly a chore, given that Dickinson may well be the finest lyric poet America has yet produced--a fact that Lundin's learned and clear-sighted study gives us further reason to know...
...Such happiness proved elusive...
...In her years of greatest productivity--roughly the period of the Civil War, during which she wrote some thousand poems--God was portrayed as alternately salvific and distant...
...Despite her failure to convert, Dickinson often returned in her writing to ideas of divinity...
...It is in this regard that one wishes Lundin were more adept at bringing singly to life the startling oddity, invention, and complexities of the poems...
...Still, it is the critic J. V. Cunningham's contention that losing the call to salvation was the great disappointment of the poet's life...
...Baldwin related to his father as he did in part because of the influence of white society on him and them...
...If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him...
...hers was "that religion/that doubts as fervently as it believes...
...The critic Dennis Donoghue has aptly observed that "of her religious faith virtually anything may be said, with some show of evidence...
...Don Wycliff is editorial page editor of the Chicago Tribune...
...if so, within these limits we sometimes achieved with each other a freedom that was close to love...
...While ambiguities may prove the biographer's bane, they should not snaffle the efforts of literary critics...
...or altogether absent ("They went to God's Right Hand--/That Hand is amputated now/And God cannot be found...
...She may be represented as an agnostic, a heretic, a sceptic, a Christian...
...It is true that Dickinson's life spanned this drastic shift from a religious to a secular society, but a Nietzschean she was not...
...Commonweal 2 | October9, 1998...
...It was for that reason that one particular passage resonated with me when I first read it thirty-some years ago in "The Fire Next Time," and resonates still: "Perhaps we were, all of us--pimps, whores, racketeers, church members, and children--bound together by the nature of our oppression, the specific and peculiar complex of risks we had to run...
...The joy that Dickinson took in faith at that early age gave way in young adulthood to doubt, which her poems later absorbed as ambiguity and contradiction...
...Yet, given the housebound poet's hymnal meters, her biblical references, clipped Calvinist idiom, and enduring preoccupation with God, Jesus, suffering, death, and (her "Flood subject") immortality, the question persists: To what extent did Dickinson espouse the Congregationalist faith of her family and of her community in Amherst, Massachusetts, in the middle nineteenth century...
...Often difficult, they may open up through careful elucidation and patient reading...
...Of some things, we may be certain...
...If her relationship to God defies easy characterization, it is nonetheless everywhere in evidence...
...He was a preacher's son who became, in his youth, a preacher...
...It shows him gullible and naive, as in his description of Elijah Muhammad, the founder of the Nation of Islam, during a visit by Baldwin to Muhammad's Chicago home in the early 1960s: "He teased the women, like a father, with no hint of that ugly and unctuous flirtatiousness I knew so well from other churches, and they responded like that, with great freedom and yet from a great and loving distance...
...But always, whether in novel or essay, Baldwin was preaching a sermon...
...Both her more than one thousand surviving letters and her 1,775 poems contain wildly disparate views of deity...
...STRAYING CLOSE TO HOME David Yezzi W hat were Emily Dickinson's religious beliefs...
...Her own words at the age of fifteen would seem to refute this...
...Donoghue himself perhaps oversteps, however, when he argues that "Dickinson's Christianity was never a firm conviction...
...In 1847-48, Dickinson underwent a year of religious instruction at the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, but returned to Amherst after suffering an illness that gave the family cause to wish her home...
...I remember, anyway, church suppers and outings, and, later, after I left the church, rent and waistline parties where rage and sorrow sat in the darkness and did not stir, and we ate and drank and talked and laughed and danced and forgot all about 'the man.' We had the liquor, the chicken, the music, and each other, and had no need to pretend to be what we were not...
...Working back from the letters and poems, Lundin's biography attempts to place Dickinson in the context of the religion of her time and place, of which there are four standard views: staunch moral Puritanism, Whiggish cultural Protestantism (with a side of Transcendentalism), Darwinian naturalism, and Nietzschean post-Christianity...
...As Lundin's efforts attest, little in the life provides conclusive answers (and, Commonweal 2 0 October 9, 1998 in this regard, Lundin is justly cautious, dispelling earlier misconceptions rather than fostering them or perpetrating additional ones...
...Other Betrothal shall dissolve-Wedlock of Will, decay-Only the Keeper of this Ring Conquer Mortality-(If, in the end, she was not Christ's bride, she was no man's either: the death in 1884 of Otis Phillips Lord cruelly removed her one prospect for human marriage...
...His subject was America's race problem ("the Negro problem") and his medium was the written word...
...With Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief, Roger Lundin seeks to locate the spiritual concerns underlying a life and art seldom marked by biographical or critical consensus...
Vol. 125 • October 1998 • No. 17
