“If the World Be Looking On”: Emily Dickinson Beyond Amherst

by Woody Brown

This article is informed in part by research I conducted in 2018 at Amherst College as the recipient of a riverrun Research Fellowship through the University at Buffalo. First published in A Companion to World Literature (Wiley-Blackwell, 2019) (https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118635193.ctwl0319).

Abstract

Though only ten of her poems were published during her lifetime, none of which she authorized, Emily Dickinson is now widely recognized as one of the most important and quintessentially American poets of the nineteenth century. Dickinson’s reclusive nature, especially after 1865, has given rise to a misreading of the poet and her poetry as solitary, isolated, and unconcerned with the world beyond the Homestead. Scholarship for the last several decades has done much to contradict this narrative, however. In fact, though Dickinson wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “I do not cross my Father’s ground to any House or Town” (L 330), she wrote almost 1,800 poems, many of which she sent to friends and correspondents, and probably far more letters, though only around 1,000 have been published. [Note: in 2024, Harvard University Press published The Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell, the first collected edition of the poet's correspondence.] Taken together, Dickinson’s poems and letters represent a sustained, though idiosyncratic, engagement with nineteenth-century literature and culture and a studied disengagement from aspects of public life which were anathema to her, including notoriety, repute, and fame, which she described as “a fickle food / Upon a shifting plate” (M666). Since her death in 1886, Dickinson’s corpus has acquired a global readership that would have been unimaginable to the poet who sat in her room in the Homestead carefully binding sheets of her poems into fascicles. Though her sister Lavinia had promised to burn her correspondence at her request, Dickinson left no instructions regarding the trove of manuscripts she left in her room. If she had, the history of poetry would be without what William Dean Howells called “a distinctive addition to the literature of the world” that “could not be left out of any record of it.”

The only authenticated portrait of Emily Dickinson, a daguerreotype, at Amherst College in 2018.

The following abbreviations are used to refer to the writings of Emily Dickinson:

• L Johnson, Thomas and Ward, Theodora, eds. 1958. The Letters of Emily Dickinson. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Citation by letter number.

• M Miller, Cristanne, ed. 2016. Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Citation by page number.

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was, to put it lightly, no great fan of publication. Many readers point to one of her better-known poems as evidence: “Publication – is the Auction / Of the Mind of Man – ,” which ends, “Be the Merchant / Of the Heavenly Grace – / But reduce no Human Spirit – / To Disgrace of Price –” (M386). Elsewhere, Dickinson comments more elliptically on the burden of publicity and publication, as in “Best Things dwell out of Sight” (M481) and “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” (M128), which includes the lines, “How dreary – to be – Somebody! / How public – like a Frog – .” Scholars and readers turn to these and other poems for clues as to why such an accomplished and prolific poet—Dickinson wrote more than 900 poems from 1861-1865—would voluntarily shirk the laurels of the literary world.

It would take roughly thirty years for Emily Dickinson to become a prominent literary name outside of the networks of which she was a member during her lifetime. Just as soon as it happened in the United States, however, Dickinson was mentioned in 小说月报 (Fiction Monthly), a prominent literary journal in China. As Baihua Wang (2012) notes, the author of “Outline of American Literature,” the article in which Dickinson’s name appears, describes her in 1926 as “well-known for her meditative poems on life which are full of imagination and wonders, such as ‘the forbidden fruit,’ ‘I died for beauty.’” If Dickinson’s poems are meditations, they meditate on subjects that extend across national and linguistic boundaries. Though Dickinson was from the first understood as an inherently American poet, her poetry is clearly not exclusively American. The sustained questions that Dickinson’s life and work present to the reader, the questions that the poet herself pursued indefatigably throughout her life, and, importantly, the method of questioning she employed, all resonate far beyond the Homestead, beyond New England, and beyond the United States.

The truth of Dickinson’s relationship with her literary peers and idols is, of course, significantly more complex. For one, though Dickinson never accepted the invitation she received to speak to a literary club and rarely traveled for any other purpose, she was a passionate writer of letters. According to Cristanne Miller (2016), Dickinson “circulated more than a quarter of her known compositions” along with these letters, and certain of her correspondents responded with feedback. People knew of her and her poetry, though as Judith Farr (2005) notes, Dickinson “was known more widely as a gardener, perhaps, than as a poet.” In 1862, in response to Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s gnomic article “Letter to a Young Contributor” in Atlantic Monthly, Dickinson sent Higginson four poems, “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers – ,” “The nearest Dream recedes – unrealized – ,” “We play at Paste – ,” and “I’ll tell you how the Sun rose – ,” along with a letter famously asking, “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?” (L260). The next line of her letter, if read closely, is a summary contradiction of more than a century of speculation on Dickinson’s supposed status as a sui generis genius: “The Mind is so near itself – it cannot see, distinctly – and I have none to ask – .” So began a correspondence and friendship that would last for the remainder of Dickinson’s life. After her death, Higginson collaborated with Mabel Loomis Todd, who had had a protracted affair with Dickinson’s brother Austin, in editing and publishing the first two volumes of Dickinson’s poetry, Poems by Emily Dickinson (1890) and Poems: Second Series (1891).

The fact that Dickinson never oversaw the publication of her poetry has given rise to a particularly robust focus in scholarship on Dickinson’s manuscripts. If, after all, Dickinson never produced a single, final, typed and standardized version of any poem, it would stand to reason that critics should focus on what she did produce: roughly 1,800 handwritten poems, more than 1,100 of which she copied in fair hand onto folded sheets of paper which she then bound into fascicles, or small booklets. These manuscripts contain certain notable idiosyncrasies. Chief among them is the dash ( – ), which is often for new readers the most immediately noticeable characteristic of Dickinson’s poetry. Contrary to the impression given by the typographical consistency of the – , no two of Dickinson’s dashes ever look quite the same, and most are more like stretched, slightly misplaced commas or periods than anything else. Among the many manuscript critics who have offered readings of the role Dickinson’s unique punctuation plays in her poetry, Susan Howe has written extensively on what she considers the undeniable presence of meaning and intention in Dickinson’s script. In an effort to show the reader how these dashes actually look on the manuscript page, Howe painstakingly reproduced each dash or mark by hand in her typed transcriptions of Dickinson’s manuscripts. Even Howe’s efforts, however, can only approximate any singular, original dash, which is partly why noted Dickinson editor R.W. Franklin published The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson: A Facsimile Edition (1981). 

Perhaps more interesting than Dickinson’s dash is her unique use of what Cristanne Miller calls “alternatives”—words written next to small marks either in the margins, between lines, or at the bottom of a sheet. These marks correspond to marks next to words in the body of the poem, suggesting that the alternative might be substituted, thereby destabilizing the notion of a given poem as final and unchangeable. Though more than half of Dickinson’s poems contain no alternatives, those that do offer intriguing possibilities for interpretation. “Even primarily resolved poems,” Miller (2016) writes, “can present the reader (or the poet) with a dizzying range of choices: the twenty-six line poem ‘Those fair – fictitious People – ’ contains twenty-one alternatives, making for a possible 7,680 distinct ways of resolving the poem.” The following poem (M541) is a representative example.

The smouldering embers blush –

Oh Cheek within the Coal [Oh] Heart

Hast thou survived so many nights? [many] years

The smouldering embers smile –

Soft stirs the news of Light [Soft] stir the Flakes

The stolid Rafters glow [stolid] Hours • instants • centres • seconds

One requisite has Fire that lasts

Prometheus never knew –

Lines 7-8: [One requisite has] earthly • mortal • thorough Fire / [Prometheus] did not know

    This requisite has Fire that lasts / It must at first be true –

Beyond a certain point, the arguments over how to read Dickinson’s manuscripts sometimes distract from the profoundly obscure, elliptical nature of Dickinson’s poetic style. The debate over which alternative word is the “right” one or whether a given dash is more of a hyphen than a tilde does not seem so pressing when one considers that Dickinson often left verbs and nouns entirely unconjugated, used indeterminate or seemingly incorrect pronouns, and took no pains to make the meaning of her poetry clear. These aspects of her poems, of which “Rehearsal to Ourselves” (M315) is a relatively good example, give many of them a challenging, almost alien quality, as if they stand completely outside the contexts of their production.

Rehearsal to Ourselves

Of a Withdrawn Delight –

Affords a Bliss like Murder –

Omnipotent – Acute –

We will not drop the Dirk –

Because We love the Wound

The Dirk Commemorate – Itself

Remind Us that We died –

The poem is legible—it seems to and in fact does make sense—but the sense it makes is, to use a Dickinsonian word, slant. The relative clarity of the first two lines is disrupted by the striking simile of the third, “a Bliss like Murder – ,” which “Bliss” is subsequently qualified as “Omnipotent” and “Acute.” The second stanza further complicates things: desirous of a reminder, of a “Rehearsal to Ourselves / Of a Withdrawn Delight – ,” “We,” whoever we are, cling to the instrument of its perpetration. That is not all it does, however. “Itself,” presumably “the Dirk,” “Remind Us that We died – .” The combination of the unconjugated “Remind” with the obvious temporal paradox of the final verb—the plural speaker is dead—radically alters the sentence that would seem to be formed by the final six words of the poem. Though there is substantial precedent in Dickinson’s poetry for posthumous speakers, as in “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died – ” (M270) and “’Twas just this time, last year, I died.” (M181), each instance provides a unique challenge to the reader who may be inclined to rely on linear time, causality, or plausibility.

As one might expect, Dickinson’s unique poetic grammar also presents a challenge to the translator. The fundamentally indeterminate nature of many of the manuscripts and of the poems—with indeterminacy here understood not as a problem to be resolved but as the positive content of the manuscript poem itself—is hard enough to translate into typed English, let alone another language. Yet in 1945 Manuel Bandeira published Poemas Traduzidos, which translated Dickinson into Portuguese, and the first book-length translation into Swedish came in 1950 with Ellen Löfmarck’s Emily Dickinson: En introduktion med lyriska tolkningar. Both of these translations were published before Thomas H. Johnson’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1955), the first comprehensive edition of her poetry. Domhnall Mitchell and Maria Stuart (2009) speculate that the proliferation of book-length translations after the Second World War could have been due to the fact that “some countries sought to revive a sense of linguistic and cultural autonomy or to rebuild international cultural exchange in part by reclaiming the works of foreign authors in their own vernacular.” Whatever the reason, after the publication of Johnson’s edition, the number of translations increased substantially.

The poetry itself was not the sole driver of Dickinson’s growing popularity around the world, including the United States. The story of her life as it was told in William Luce’s play The Belle of Amherst (1976) was “of tremendous and almost immediate importance in countries as diverse as Brazil and Norway,” Mitchell and Stuart write (2009), despite its pointed omission of many aspects of Dickinson’s personality that are more widely known today. Among these, the profoundly erotic nature of certain of Dickinson’s letters and poems stands out as notably absent, though Luce is hardly the first to scrub sexuality from the Dickinsonian record. 

At the risk of addressing one of the richest areas of criticism reductively, it will perhaps suffice to say that Dickinson’s life and work are rife with contradictions that have a troublesome tendency to disrupt most any tidy narrative a scholar or critic might impose retroactively. The complex erotics of Dickinson’s letters to her sister-in-law Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson, who married her brother Austin in 1856, and the so-called Master Letters, which are addressed to a man referred to only as “Master,” do much to unsettle an account of Dickinson as a chaste, progressive woman who only desired a room of her own. At the same time, feminist readings of these letters as evidence of a radical sexual politics committed to the disruption of the patriarchal, repressive norms of nineteenth-century America are themselves contradicted both by other texts Dickinson wrote and by little-known historical context. For one, as Carroll Smith-Rosenberg (1975) argues in her groundbreaking article, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” friendships between women ran the gamut “from the supportive love of sisters, through the enthusiasms of adolescent girls, to sensual avowals of love by mature women,” and could and did include sharing a bed and displaying physical affection in public. Whereas sexual behavior between men was classified in the nineteenth century as homosexual and perverse, women who engaged in the same were not diagnosed and pathologized in the same manner. This aspect of life as a woman in nineteenth-century America would seem to complicate the many attempts made in the last forty years to claim Dickinson as a lesbian who lived and wrote at the sexual avant garde.

In short, it is difficult to pin Dickinson down to a single, unequivocal stance on many of the social and political issues that dominate popular discourse today. The importance of black studies, critical race theory, and intersectionality in twenty-first-century academia has led scholars of Dickinson to mine her work for signs of a position on, for instance, slavery, but none is forthcoming. The single poem she wrote that contains what Benjamin Friedlander (1998) calls the “oblique use of the language of abolition” is “Publication – is the Auction” (M386):

Publication – is the Auction

Of the Mind of Man –

Poverty – be justifying

For so foul a thing

Possibly – but We – would rather

From Our Garret go

White – unto the White Creator –

Than invest – Our Snow –

Thought belong to Him who gave it –

Then – to Him Who bear

Its Corporeal illustration – sell

The Royal Air –

In the Parcel – Be the Merchant

Of the Heavenly Grace –

But reduce no Human Spirit

To Disgrace of Price –

The poem is not a commentary on slavery, however. It uses the slave auction as a metaphor for the actual subject of the poem—publication. In fact, Dickinson seems to use uncritically the figure of whiteness (as opposed to the blackness of the slave at auction) as a symbol of unsullied purity. On the other hand, the final two lines of the poem would seem to decry the amorality of reducing human beings to commodities. That these two seemingly contradictory sentiments exist in the same poem does not necessarily mean Dickinson’s feelings about slavery can never be known, but it does mean we will not find them here.

The search for answers to questions about Dickinson’s personal feelings regarding subjects and images that abound in her poetry has expanded to include the myriad texts, teachers, and acquaintances who shaped her life and work. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was a member of the Whig party who served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives and the United States Congress. He was by contemporary accounts a conservative, severe man who commanded final authority in his household, and he was certainly not an abolitionist. On the other hand, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, one of the most important figures in Dickinson’s life, was deeply committed to the causes of abolitionism, women’s rights, and religious freedom. A member of the so-called Secret Six who supported John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, Higginson served during the Civil War as colonel of the first regiment of black soldiers, the 1^st South Carolina Volunteers. Both of these men—and many other people besides—influenced Dickinson’s thought and poetry, and the critic today must take a holistic view of their presence in her life.

The same is true of Dickinson’s schooling, the lessons and vocabulary of which appeared in her poetry for the remainder of her life. The nineteenth century in America was a time of vigorous scientific advancement during which students like Dickinson were exposed to increasingly formalized curricula. The story of the sea change that occurred in the discourses of science and epistemology begins with the positivism of William Paley’s Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity (1802), in which Paley, as the title of his text suggests, was concerned solely with elucidating the material evidence in nature of intelligent design. By the end of the century, however, after the publication of such monumental texts as Lyell’s Principles of Geology, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), Cesare Lombroso’s L’uomo delinquente [Criminal Man] (1876), and Karl Pearson’s The Grammar of Science (1892), and after the Civil War and Reconstruction, seismic changes had been wrought in fields as diverse as medicine, the natural sciences, mathematics, manufacturing, and jurisprudence. When Pearson (1892), whose work was essential for an entire generation of scientists including Albert Einstein, wrote, “The field of science is unlimited; its material is endless, every group of natural phenomena, every phase of social life, every stage of past or present development is material for science,” he gave voice to an understanding of science as a totalizing and incontrovertible discourse, an understanding that had already permeated portions of the American intelligentsia for decades.

Though Dickinson never wrote explicitly about evolution or phrenology or eugenics, she was uncommonly committed to an interrogation of the discourse that produced the new theories and technologies that were actively shaping the world during her lifetime. She was aware and intuitively skeptical of the construction of science as a discourse that could and, given enough time, would encompass lived experience, subjectivity, and the universe. Many of Dickinson’s poems show that she was unusually preoccupied with questions of epistemology and the capabilities and limits of science in a world that seemed during and after the Civil War (which coincided roughly with Dickinson’s most productive years as a poet) to grow both more traumatized and more technologized by the day. This was the product both of Dickinson’s proclivities for skepticism and piercing analysis and of her robust education in the sciences. Her proximity to Amherst Academy and its science cabinets informed the yearning empiricism of the scientific philosophy she explored and deconstructed in verse. Again, however, Dickinson does not take a single, consistent position regarding the accelerating scientism of the nineteenth century; her poems are, in the words of Jed Deppman (2008), “open, dialogical, differential, and deferential—each in an extreme way.” She is, however, both astute and incisive in her criticisms of science, which she understood as a discourse predicated on the violence of categorizing those things that naturally eschew valuation.

A photograph taken in 1876 of one of the science cabinets in the Octagon at Amherst College.

One of those things is, of course, God. Thousands of pages have been written on the subject of Dickinson and faith, a brief consideration of which gives insight into Dickinson’s famous skepticism. After attending Amherst Academy from 1840 to 1847, Dickinson spent a year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. As her brother Austin describes, Dickinson excelled at Amherst Academy: “Her compositions were unlike anything ever heard – and always produced a sensation – both with the scholars and Teachers – her imagination sparkled – and she gave it free rein" (Sewall 1994). Mount Holyoke officially claimed to have no religious affiliation, though all students were required to attend regular services, prayer meetings, and private devotions. This is perhaps part of the reason Dickinson withdrew after only a year despite her natural curiosity and talent in the academic sphere. Something certainly changed during the period between two letters she wrote to her friend Abiah Root, one in 1847 and the other in 1848. “Everything is pleasant & happy here,” she writes in the first, “& I think I could be no more happier at any other school away from home” (L18); in the second, however, she writes, “I am not happy and I regret that last term, when that golden opportunity was mine, that I did not give up and become a Christian” (L23). Here Dickinson is not claiming that she is an atheist – Christianity was taken for granted in the Amherst of Dickinson’s time. Instead, she is expressing what would be a short-lived regret that she did not experience what was then called a conversion: a powerful, epiphanic experience not unlike being “born again.” As Jane Donahue Eberwein (2004) explains, this would have required of her a public declaration of a deeply personal experience, which was probably one aspect Dickinson found particularly objectionable. L23 is the only letter we have of Dickinson’s in which she expresses distress about being unable or unwilling to convert. Even then, Dickinson prefaces her complaint with a frank admission of her less-than-secret apathy: “Abiah, you may be surprised to hear me speak as I do, knowing that I express no interest in the all-important subject” (L23). As her poetry would later show, however, Dickinson was to become interested in a different “all-important subject”; namely, the question of where, exactly, God resided in a world whose faith had been shaken by Charles Lyell’s use of “Baconian induction and empiricist theories of perception” (Lyell 1997), the Lyellian gradualism and rationality of Charles Darwin, and the unparalleled violence of the Civil War. 

Writing again to Root at the age of 14 from Amherst Academy, Dickinson describes the education she was enjoying: “We have a very fine school. I have four studies. They are Mental Philosophy, Geology, Latin, and Botany. How large they sound, don’t they?” (L6). Botany, in particular, was understood to be an appropriate science for women, and the introduction to the edition of Mrs. Almira H. Lincoln’s Familiar Lectures on Botany, the textbook Dickinson used, reports happily that “since the publication of this elementary work, the science of which it treats has been introduced as a study into many of our principal female schools” (Peel 2010). Mathematics, which Dickinson also studied, was mainly understood to be a subject for boys. The field had grown dramatically in popularity since the burst of interest in statistics during the 1830s, due in part to an interest among statisticians such as Adolphe Quetelet and Sir Francis Galton in applying statistical methods of measurement to the study (and, eventually, eugenic manipulation) of human populations (Davis 1995). The assumption that mathematics was proper to male students was at the same time being disrupted by Emma Willard, Almira Lincoln’s sister, however. Willard taught high mathematics education to teachers at the Troy Seminary in New York, which she founded in 1821, and which dispersed qualified educators to seminaries across the northeast. Tolley finds compelling evidence that by the late antebellum period female students had reached parity with their male counterparts “in the level of mathematics achievement” (Peel 2010). As Tolley’s historical investigation reveals, science was increasingly seen as a subject for girls’ study as the 19^th century progressed. One reason for this was the emphasis placed on the study of classics in boys’ education from the turn of the century onward. Additionally, girls often spent more of their lives in school than boys, who tended to leave school early to seize employment opportunities, the vast majority of which were closed off to women (Tolley 2003). 

Meanwhile, the great scientific developments that occurred during the middle of the 19^th century were celebrated and widely reported on. In 1846 in what is now known as the Ether Dome in Boston, William T. G. Morton, a dentist, gave the first public demonstration of ether as a surgical anesthetic. Though Morton had painlessly removed his patient’s tooth, Dickinson offered a critical commentary on the event sixteen years later in “This World is not conclusion” (M198), which ends:

Much Gesture, from the Pulpit – 

Strong Hallelujahs roll –  

Narcotics cannot still the Tooth 

That nibbles at the soul – 20

Ether might address the literal tooth, but a more troublesome “nibble” could not be solved by new technologies and inventions. Dickinson makes this note frankly and in plain, unequivocal language—she is aware that her criticism of the understanding of medicine as omnipotent is in danger of being drowned out by the “Strong Hallelujahs” issuing from the pulpit. 

This is not to say that Dickinson always viewed empiricist endeavor negatively. In “The Lightning playeth – all the while – ” (M272), she places face to face religious superstition and a contemporary understanding of electricity:

The Lightning playeth – all the while – 

But when He singeth – then – 

Ourselves are conscious He exist – 

And we approach Him – stern – 

With Insulators – and a Glove – 

Whose short – sepulchral Bass

Alarms us – tho’ His Yellow feet

May pass – and counterpass – 

Upon the Ropes – above our Head – 

Continual – with the News – 

Nor We so much as check our speech – 

Nor stop to cross Ourselves – 

The use of the word “insulator” contrasts starkly with the memory in the final stanza of obsequious religious observance, as if the extraordinary power of electricity, formerly a tool only God was able to wield, was now reduced by science to the level of the quotidian. The poem was written in 1863, two years after telegraph lines first connected the east and west coasts, and the same year as the Battle of Gettysburg. It is probable, then, that the “News” dominating telegraph communication would have consisted of information about battles and lists of war casualties that would populate the pages of the next day’s issue of the Springfield Republican (Cervetti 2012). All the more reason to cross oneself. But Dickinson stops short of aspiring to be, in Wordsworth’s words, a “Pagan suckled in a creed outworn.” Though scientific advancement is rarely unequivocally good for Dickinson, and though Dickinson shared Wordsworth’s deep reservations about “getting and spending” (consider, e.g., “Some – Work for Immortality – ” (M294)), Romantic harmony is out of the question. In “‘Faith’ is a fine invention” (M119, M137), Dickinson states explicitly that faith is secondary to the capacity to actually “see.” Faith here becomes a luxury, an almost irresponsible tool to use “in an Emergency,” for which “Microscopes are prudent.” 

“The Lightning playeth – all the while – ” is in Fascicle 26, which contains, along with Fascicle 27, a significant number of poems that speculate on the limits of science and the relation between scientific naming and the sublime. “When Bells stop ringing – Church – begins – ” (M274) is the most succinct example in these two fascicles of Dickinson’s poetics of definition, in which she performs a sort of satire of scientific naming.

When Bells stop ringing – Church – begins – 

The Positive – of Bells – 

When Cogs – stop – that’s Circumference – 

The Ultimate – of Wheels – 

The poem considers two material objects—bells and wheels—and takes them to the point of mathematical abstraction. The wheel’s correspondence to circumference seems straightforward enough. The first half is more characteristic of Dickinson, however: she applies analytical, empirical reasoning inflected by scientific discourse in order to approach something that is not material but ethereal—Church, “The Positive – of Bells – .” Dickinson’s mark on the manuscript’s second line indicates “Transitive” as an alternative for “Positive.” At the time the poem was written, the word “transitive” was used both in its grammatical sense and its mathematical sense, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, and the 1844 edition of Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language lists another definition: “Having the power of passing. Bacon”—that is, Francis Bacon, whose influence permeated scientific and cultural production through the nineteenth century.

In “There is a Languor of the Life” (M282), bound in Fascicle 27, Dickinson revisits the tooth that medicine cannot still. Here Dickinson is more openly suspicious of the usefulness of the microscope and the technician who operates it. While it may grant us the ability to see in greater detail the complexity of God’s construction, as the Baconian method of natural philosophy dictates, it cannot peer beyond a certain point into the brain and the human experience the organ subtends. The poem elaborates a sentiment Dickinson expressed with more wit and fewer words in Fascicle 7 (M92):

Surgeons must be very careful

When they take the knife!

Underneath their fine incisions

Stirs the Culprit – Life!

Though the surgeon comes to the operating table equipped with extensive knowledge of the body before him, there exists within embodiment something that does not correspond to a specific organ, but which paradoxically exists only in those organs. This is a question Dickinson traverses time and time again, one which she never resolves. 

Dickinson’s lifelong ruminations on the place and limits of science are not only relevant to the nineteenth-century American reader; in fact, Dickinson’s poetry poses questions that remain as immediate today as they were 150 years ago independent of the national context in which they were first posed. In 1980 and 1988, respectively, the founding of the Emily Dickinson Society in Japan and of the Emily Dickinson International Society ensured that readers half a world away from Amherst would have access to a global community of scholars, translators, and ardent fans (Mitchell and Stuart 2009). These developments would surely have surprised the poet who never once departed the continental United States and who wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “I do not cross my Father’s ground to any House or Town” (L330). 

Dickinson’s explorations of the world abroad were, like her consideration of slavery in “Publication – is the Auction,” entirely metaphorical. When she wrote “Our lives are Swiss – ” and imagined “The solemn Alps – / The siren Alps,” she was less interested in the mountains of Switzerland than she was in “Our lives,” the lives we lead and which inevitably end, “neglect their Curtains,” and reveal a land beyond: “Italy stands the other side!” (M85). Dickinson knew the limits of her experience as a traveler and sometimes commented on them frankly, as in the following poem (M532):

I never saw a Moor.

I never saw the Sea –

Yet know I how the Heather looks

And what a Billow be –

I never spoke with God

Nor visited in Heaven –

Yet certain am I of the spot

As if the Checks were given –

The actual appearance of the Alps, or of a “Moor,” or of an Italian piazza, was essentially beside the point for Dickinson. To the extent that she uses foreign locations and place names in her poems and letters, she employs them as devices for her explorations of the more profound alienations and dislocations that are inherent in human subjectivity.

In Trying to Think with Emily Dickinson, Jed Deppman (2008) reads Dickinson as a “serious thinker” who was actively engaged with philosophical questions and whose poems used “careful sequences of ideas and images” to approach them. Deppman focuses on what he calls Dickinson’s “try-to-think” poems, poems like “Of Death I try to think like this” (M640) and “I think To Live – may be a Bliss” (M350) which seek “to satisfy reason’s insatiable demand for a complete image, narrative, or understanding of a difficult idea or experience.” To be sure, poems like “When Bells stop ringing – Church – begins – ” (M274) are certainly “tries” in Deppman’s sense, but what sets the “try-to-think” poems apart is that they narrativize both the thought experiment and the experience of the puzzled thinker—they are about both the elusive subject and the challenging and poetic journey of thinking it. The best example of this is “I tried to think a lonelier Thing” (M260), a harrowing poem in which Dickinson reaches far beyond the confines of the Homestead and indeed “Beyond the Dip of Bell – .”

I tried to think a lonelier Thing

Than any I had seen –

Some Polar Expiation – An Omen in the Bone

Of Death’s tremendous nearness –

I probed Retrieveless things

My Duplicate – to borrow –

A Haggard comfort springs

From the belief that Somewhere –

Within the Clutch of Thought –

There dwells one other Creature

Of Heavenly Love – forgot –

I plucked at our Partition –

As One should pry the Walls –

Between Himself – and Horror’s Twin –

Within Opposing Cells –

I almost strove to clasp his Hand,

Such Luxury – it grew –

That as Myself – could pity Him –

Perhaps he – pitied me –

This “try-to-think” is a distressing expedition (Dickinson cleverly includes the word without writing it in the phrase “Polar Expiation”), not unlike Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated quest in 1845 to find a northwest passage and the three successive searches for his ships that were much in the news during the middle of the nineteenth century (Miller 2016). The poem’s use of what Deppman calls “a glossary of nervous vocabulary”—words of approximation like “borrow,” “pry,” “Retrieveless,” “nearness,” and “almost”—performs the same desperate grasping that the poem itself describes. In the end, the only solace the speaker can discover in this scenario of existential anxiety is the “Haggard comfort” of the idea that there might possibly be someone else as radically alienated and abandoned by God as she is. The companionship that this unfortunate wretch offers is not physical touch, not communication of any kind, but just the idea that he might pity her. A grim friend indeed. 

And yet, the reader finds in this poem a clue to the decidedly happier, more productive roles that diverse communities of passionate scholars, translators, and Dickinson devotees around the world play for each other. Dickinson’s unflappable fidelity to the reality—uncomfortable or otherwise—of lived experience speaks to people independent of language, geographical location, or nationality. Dickinson, a meditative, reflective reader and writer of immeasurable passion, tries to think. And that, in the end, is universal.

References

• Cervetti, Nancy. 2012. S. Weir Mitchell. 1829-1914: Philadelphia’s Literary Physician. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.

• Davis, Lennard. 1995. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. New York, NY: Verso.

• Deppman, Jed. 2008. Trying to Think with Emily Dickinson. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.

• Eberwein, Jane Donahue. 2004. “‘Is Immortality True?’: Salvaging Faith in an Age of Upheavals.” In A Historical Guide to Emily Dickinson, edited by Vivian R. Pollak. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

• Farr, Judith. 2005. The Gardens of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

• Friedlander, Benjamin. 1998. “Auctions of the Mind: Emily Dickinson and Abolition.” Arizona Quarterly, 54 (1), 1-26. DOI: 10.1353/arq.1998.0018.

• Howe, Susan. 1993. The Birth-mark: unsettling the wilderness in American literary history. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press.

• Johnson, Thomas and Ward, Theodora, eds. 1958. The Letters of Emily Dickinson. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Citation by letter number.

• Lyell, Charles. 1997. Principles of Geology. New York, NY: Penguin.

• Miller, Cristanne, ed. 2016. Emily Dickinson’s Poems As She Preserved Them. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Citation by page number.

• Mitchell, Domhnall and Stuart, Maria, eds. 2009. The International Reception of Emily Dickinson. New York, NY: Continuum.

• Peel, Robin. 2010. Emily Dickinson and the Hill of Science. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

• Sewall, Richard B. 1994. The Life of Emily Dickinson. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univerity Press.

• Tolley, Kim. 2003. The Science Education of American Girls: A Historical Perspective. New York, NY: Routledge Falmer.

• Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. 1975. “ The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America.” Signs, 1 (1), 1-29. 

• Wang, Baihua. 2012. “Emily Dickinson’s Reception in China: A Brief Overview, Part I.” The Emily Dickinson Journal, 21 (1), 110-124.

Further Reading

• Bingham, Millicent Todd. 1955. Emily Dickinson’s Home: Letters of Edward Dickinson and His Family. New York, NY: Harper & Brothers.

• Cameron, Sharon. 1993. Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson’s Fascicles. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.

• Crumbley, Paul and Heginbotham, Eleanor, eds. 2014. Dickinson’s Fascicles: A Spectrum of Possibilities. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press.

• Deppman, Jed, Noble, Marianne, and Stonum, Gary Lee, eds. 2013. Emily Dickinson and Philosophy. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

• Franklin, R.W. 1982. 1981. The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

• Guthrie, James. 2015. A Kiss from Thermopylae: Emily Dickinson and Law. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.

• Habegger, Alfred. 2001. My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson. New York, NY: Random house.

• Howe, Susan. 1985. My Emily Dickinson. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.

• Jackson, Virginia. 2005. Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

• Messmer, Marietta. 2001. A Vice for Voices: Reading Emily Dickinson’s Correspondence. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.

• Miller, Cristanne. 1987. Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

• – – –. 2012. Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.

• Mitchell, Domhnall. 2005. Measures of Possibility: Emily Dickinson’s Manuscripts. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.

• Richards, Eliza, ed. 2013. Emily Dickinson in Context. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Contributor Bio

Woody Brown is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University at Buffalo

and the Graduate Assistant for the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture. His

research interests include nineteenth-century American literature, science studies, disability

studies, and Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. His dissertation is tentatively titled,

“‘Finding is the first Act’: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Discourse of

Science.”