The Passion of Emilly Dickinson
by Judith Farr
(Harvard University Press, 390 pp., $29.95)

Because no artwork is produced in isolation from the aesthetic and intellectual currents of its day, critics make repeated efforts to replace artworks in their contemporary setting. Epics, narrative poems, novels, and plays respond fairly well to such contextualization because of their overtly social organization, dealing as they do with people in groups and groups in tension. Lyric poems, by contrast, respond much less well to being reattached to the social (by contrast to the philosophical) web, though they are presumably as much the product of their times as other cultural artifacts. The more metaphysically helium-filled they are, the more fiercely they repudiate tethering -- especially if their metaphysics is the generalized Euro-Christian one that has pervaded many centuries and many countries without much specific differentiation.

Of all the American lyric poets, Emily Dickinson is surely the most resistant to being socially and historically "placed." Her work yields willingly to philosophical and religious (or, as Christina Rossetti wittily said, "irreligious") explication. Her determined individualism would be inexplicable without Emerson, and her theologically sophisticated blasphemy would be meaningless except in its Calvinist frame; and criticism that reinserts her poems into related literary, philosophical, or theological contexts has a good chance of proving its case. But a good deal of recent criticism has tried to place Dickinson in various secular social frames -- feminism, politics (her Civil War poems), class (Amherst family groupings), and sex (was she a virgin? did she have an abortion?). These frames, for the most part, are rendered irrelevant or absurd by the transcendental fierceness of most of Dickinson's mature work. After all, what of social import can be reasonably predicated of texts that so often speak at this level?

Behind Me -- dips Eternity --
Before Me -- Immortality --
Myself -- the Term between --
Death but the Drift of Eastern Gray,

Dissolving into Dawn away,
Before the West begin -- ...

'Tis Miracle before Me -- then --
'Tis Miracle behind -- between --
A Crescent in the Sea --
With Midnight to the North of Her --
And Midnight to the South of Her --
And Maelstrom -- in the Sky --
(#721)

A person who thinks about her self as merely the "Term between" Eternity and Immortality is hard to pin down in time and place.

Judith Farr takes what might seem at first a more promising cultural tack. She traces Dickinson's connections to Victorian literary predecessors (Barrett Browning, the Brontes, etc.), to Victorian photographs, and to paintings by English and American artists (especially the Pre-Raphaelites, the Luminists, and the Hudson River School). Her aim is to reinstate Dickinson in the social world of Victorian taste. She is not the first to do this, but she has used the Dickinson family library to good purpose, and she has made plausible links to sources, both printed and painted, for Dickinson's exotic vocabulary ("Cordillera," "Malay," and so on).

How well does this aesthetic "situating" of Dickinson work, when one stands back from it? Let me give a representative passage of Farr commenting on Dickinson's famous poem "Wild Nights":

Wild Nights -- Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile -- the Winds --
To a Heart in port --
Done with the Compass --
Done with the Chart!

Rowing in Eden --
Ah, the Sea!
Might I but moor -- Tonight --
In Thee!
(#249)

Here is most of the paragraph that follows in Farr:

"Wild Nights," its theatrical opening spondees worthy of turbulence and storm, justifies Dickinson's heritage as an admirer of Emily Bronte and Wuthering Heights. The seas that separate or unite Charlotte Bronte's heroines and their "masters" also come to mind. Here is a scene reminiscent not only of the intensity of the Brontes' world but also of hundreds of dark canvases by the Hudson River and Luminist painters. Cole's Tornado in an American Forest (1835), like his Expulsion from Eden, had made the frenzy of storm synonymous with passio -- distress or love -- while seascapes like Fitz Hugh Lane's Ships and an Approaching Storm off Owl's Head, Maine (1860) or Heade's Approaching Storm: Beach Near Newport (1860) made angry seas expressive of the sea of feeling. Furthermore, Dickinson's image of the rowboat was conceived during the 1860s, when the idea of the lone boat in contest with high seas was particularly popular.... Whistler expressed The Sea (1865) of defeat by picturing a rowboat stranded at the edge of sullen tides.... As a favorite nineteenth-century sport, however, rowing on smooth water was described by Thomas Eakins's Luminist paintings: for example, the famous Max Schmitt in a Single Scull (1871), which has a serene if rather triste formality.

Now, how much of this applies to "Wild Nights"? Does any of it? There were lots of stormy seascapes, literary and painted, before the Luminists (think of the Wordsworth/Beaumont seascape of Peele Castle, in a poem that Dickinson must have known and that Farr quotes). Certainly the resemblance of storm and passion is fully present already in King Lear; and stranded rowboats and single sculls (with "serene if rather triste formality") have nothing to do with this poem. One wants a cultural critic to do more sifting, to point out cultural correspondences that are telling and striking, rather than to heap up a mass of undifferentiated detail.

Many of Farr's contextualizations do not illuminate in any significant way the poems they treat. Farr is on surer ground in her patient analysis of the images that Dickinson used in love poems addressed to a woman (here identified as her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert) and in those addressed to the man whom Dickinson called, in three extant draft letters, "Master" (here reidentified as Samuel Bowles, the worldly editor of the Springfield Republican). Tallying images from the "Master" letters with images in letters to Bowles himself and in other letters putatively intended for him though addressed to his wife, Farr makes a persuasive case for Bowles as the Master, separating the Bowles-images of protector, sun, and divinity from the very different images (the pearl, the gem) used in the love poems to Sue. This is work worth doing, if biographical speculation and separation of poems by their addressees is wanted.

But is it wanted? I suppose it is, though not ardently by me. Each new look at Dickinson, whatever one may think of its originating drive, presents a different subgroup of her almost 2,000 poems for closer inspection. Farr's subgroup is a relatively new one. Many of the verses that she takes up are early ones (where Dickinson is most a creature of her upbringing and her youthful reading), and these do not feature largely in the critical books that center on Dickinson's philosophical and theological poetry (which, together with the late nature poetry, was certainly her greatest achievement).

The love poems that Farr considers are, as she says, really quite horrifying as soon as one imagines oneself as their recipient. The self-abasing devotion that they express, the abjectness of the speaker, the absence of any ironic or philosophical distance in their self-regard, approach the pathological. (At 32 or later, Dickinson was still, as Farr rightly points out, representing herself in infantile ways.) What is it, then, that makes these disturbing psychological documents distinguished poetry? As Farr insists, Dickinson shared her subject matter "in most cases ... with even the worst poets of her time" and used imagery equally easily "read" because of its appearance in contemporary paintings and drawings -- "the quartered tree" riven by storm, the crescent moon, the storm, and so on. How, then, can collocations with other poems and paintings using the same conventions help us with Dickinson's poetry?

Does Dickinson's work, as we read it, seem increasingly "Victorian" to us, more and more like the flower books, the sentimental photographs, and the travel literature that Farr introduces us to? Do we assimilate Dickinson to Cole's gigantic allegories or Gifford's sunsets or Heade's meticulously painted hummingbirds because she writes about things that turn up in their paintings -- the river of life, a sunset, a hummingbird? I think not. On the contrary, the more the Victoriana accumulates in Farr's pages (and in her handsome reproductions), the ever less "Victorian" Dickinson appears. Or, if she is "Victorian," it is not in any broad "cultural" way resembling the grandiosity of the painters or the soft-focus of the photographers, but rather in a specific and angular Emersonian way, trenchant and astringent.

But perhaps the resemblance is more in technique than in content? Farr wants to see the technique of "the receding levels of light in a Luminist seascape" in a poem like "I cross till I am weary":

I cross till I am weary
A Mountain -- in my mind --
More Mountains -- then a Sea --
More Seas -- And then
A Desert -- find --

And My Horizon blocks
With steady -- drifting -- Grains
Of unconjectured quantity --
As Asiatic Rains --
(#550)

"Certainly," Farr comments, " Dickinson could have been encouraged in this verbal technique by her knowledge of Cole and, probably, Church; but it may have been additionally stimulated through responsive awareness of other Hudson River and Luminist paintings like Sanford Gifford's Sunset with Cows." I cannot say how profoundly wrong it seems to me to adduce something called Sunset with Cows to contextualize a poem about a long and weary mental journey ending in a blinding desert of sand grains. A much more likely context, for the "receding levels" of form as well as for the desolate content, would be George Herbert's "The Pilgrimage," where the mental traveler crosses scene after scene only to find, instead of the shady city of palm trees, "a lake of brackish waters." Such spare temporal voyaging is precisely not "painterly." Dickinson is neither Spenser nor Keats.

"Dickinson's preoccupation with light ... was characteristically Luminist," says Farr, adducing "I heard a Fly buzz -- when I died," which she quotes down to the last stanzas:

... -- and then it was
There interposed a Fly --

With Blue -- uncertain stumbling Buzz --
Between the light -- and me --
And then the Windows failed -- and then
I could not see to see --
(#465)

"The ultimate sublime for the Luminist ... was a stillness that suggested peace after death," Farr concludes. But surely the apposite context for this Dickinson poem -- which utterly repudiates, in its wholly material close, any "peace after death" -- is not the Luminists but Tennyson's "Mariana": "The blue fly sung in the pane."

It is clear from Farr's book that she has worked for years (as I have not) on Dickinson's poetry, and that she is convinced that she knows Dickinson better from having seen her in the wider cultural contexts sketched here. It seems to me that she is more likely to be right when she brings up Emerson or articles in the Atlantic Monthly than when she brings up painters; but insofar as that is the case, her book represents only another exploration of literary contexts, and cannot be said to break new ground in its cultural reach.

Does this mean there is nothing more to be said about Dickinson? Hardly. The poems (whose best recent interpreter, in my view, is Jane Donahue Eberwein in her book, Dickinson: Strategies of Limitation) can be reconfigured, together with the letters, in countless new ways (like the able combining of images here in the discussion of the "Master" poems). Surely new configurations will help to clarify Dickinson's aesthetic principles (so far the most mysterious of her attributes). It is tempting for critics to restrict themselves to Dickinson's incandescent successes; but Farr's sieve has interestingly caught many of the "trivial" poems, and these poems, newly attended to, shine bright on the page. My favorite among them is the cat unsuccessfully stalking a bird, a poem for which the Andersen dog with eyes as big as saucers, and Burns's Mousie whose plans go awry, might be the apposite literary contexts:

She sights a bird -- she chuckles --
She flattens -- then she crawls --
She runs without the look of feet --
Her eyes increase to Balls --

Her Jaws stir -- twitching -- hungry --
Her Teeth can hardly stand --
She leaps, but Robin leaped the first --
Ah, Pussy, of the Sand,

The Hopes so juicy ripening --
You almost bathed your Tongue --
When Bliss disclosed a hundred Toes --
And fled with every one --
(#507)

Farr justly remarks that here Dickinson characteristically catches Nature in motion, an insight that explains both the explosiveness and the transiency of Dickinson's dynamic universe, which so charmed and appalled the poet's eye that everything from a crouching cat to the aurora borealis found its moment of elan sketched and preserved in her bureau drawer.

Wallace Stevens once said of his poetic undertaking that its great effort was to free things from their contexts, to "see the thing itself and nothing else,/Burn everything not part of it to ash." Dickinson seems to have thought in the same obliterative terms. For cultural critics, therefore, it is tempting to try to reconstruct what went into that refining fire -- a fire that, in Dickinson's case, left nothing behind but the lexicon, the white dress, the upstairs room, and a neatly folded pile of paper. Dickinson dispatched the Christian God into the fire, along with colored dresses, conventional literary expression, church observance, social visiting, trips to museums and libraries, marriage and childbearing, and even "love," in the ordinary emotional sense in which it was used in the earlier poems.

Her atheist appropriation of the religious word "soul" shows Dickinson as (eventually) a fiery defender of that conception of the self that dispenses with definitions circumscribed by gender and by local culture. To represent her kind of selfhood -- the mainspring of her verse -- she had to resort, of course, to metaphor. One of her metaphors was that moment after the jettisoning of the body and its social subterfuges, when the stripped atomic soul would recognize its fellow elected soul, and when a crucial "isness" of spirit would cast off like mist its clay, its cultural "wasness":

Of all the Souls that stand create --
I have elected -- One --
When Sense from Spirit -- files away --
And Subterfuge -- is done --
When that which is -- and that which was --
Apart -- intrinsic -- stand --
And this brief Tragedy of Flesh --
Is shifted -- like a Sand --
When Figures show their royal Front --
And Mists -- are carved away,
Behold the Atom -- I preferred --
To all the lists of Clay!
(#664)

The current particularism that insists on defining each of us by race, class, and gender is convinced that we are creatures of biological and historical origins alone, and would regard Dickinson's Christian-derived myth of spirit as itself a mystification of reality. Insofar as words of genius are self-authenticating, Dickinson's language speaks for all who share her belief in the developed spirit's ability to de-condition itself, to un-condition itself, in part and even altogether, through the enormously enlarging powers of language and thought. Still, in a poem like "Of all the souls..." Dickinson> is still depending on an apocalyptic afterlife metaphor from her inherited Christianity. Nobody would have been more conscious than Dickinson (performing her atheist transpositions) that this was so. In showing an erotic heaven, rather than a Pauline heaven, she was making accurately blasphemous use of that heritage, rather than being "conditioned" by it in the usual sense.

I have been adducing a "spiritual" poem; but DickinsonB> also wrote a notable materialist version (not mentioned by Farr, since it is not relevant to her purpose) of the consciously and effort-fully de-conditioned, de-gendered, de-historicized, de-nationalized, de-Christianized, and "unanointed" self. (In this poem, incidentally, Dickinson changed her pronoun for the soul from "she" to "it.") This poem is Dickinson's boldest prophecy, one that must authenticate itself all by itself if it is to command a reader's assent. It draws ultimately on the biblical image of the refining fire (though it does not demand that a reader know the biblical allusion). It asks the reader only to imagine a blacksmith's shop in which raw metal, as it is heated in the forge, turns first red, and then an incandescent white. There is no room in that white heat for anything else. The clutter of cultural construction, which we all find in ourselves at adulthood, is wholly consumed. Is this a self-delusion? Is the poem a "mystification" of actuality? If not, what conception of selfhood does it reveal and justify?

Dare you see a Soul at the White Heat?
Then crouch within the door --
Red -- is the Fire's common tint --
But when the vivid Ore
Has vanquished Flame's conditions,
It quivers from the Forge
Without a color, but the light
Of unanointed Blaze.
Least Village has its Blacksmith
Whose Anvil's even ring
Stands symbol for the finer Forge
That soundless tugs -- within --
Refining these impatient Ores
With Hammer, and with Blaze
Until the Designated Light
Repudiate the Forge --
(#365)

This poem represents a soul that has work to do. Oppression, eroticism, gen-der, nationality, and religion are burnt away in a blaze that flares up from the transfiguration of spirit into signed -- "Designated" -- art. Who wrote this poem? A black? A white? A man? A woman? Of the eighteenth century? Of the nineteenth century? An American? A Briton? A Christian? An atheist? A lesbian? A heterosexual? Old? Young?

It is interesting to note that (in addition to Dickinson) Hopkins, Bishop, Heaney, and Milosz have all written about the blacksmith's forge: it seems to be an image that transcends history and biology. Insofar as questions of race, class, creed, gender, nation, and historical moment cannot be answered by inspection of the poem, and insofar as the text speaks to us without answering them, we must acknowledge a plane of selfhood and speech, accessible to everyone, in which the usual social categories are irrelevant. If Dickinson's greatest work validates that plane, as indeed it does, might it not serve our own critical inquiry best to ask whether we are acquainted with that plane of language and thought, and what Dickinson can tell us about what it is like to live there and attempt to become, ourselves, that Designated Light?

But the recontextualizing critics do not believe that we can "repudiate the Forge." Dickinson knew the effort it took to do so, and embedded that knowledge in her poem. The first half of the poem has as end rhymes "Forge" and "Blaze," in the "proper" order of causation: from the Forge comes the Blaze. The second half of the poem uses the same end rhymes, but reverses them; the Blaze of the Designated Light repudiates its origin in the Forge. The Designated Light stands at the end all by itself. Its origins, its conditions of construction, become irrelevant.

As clearly as we could wish, Dickinson is here reciting her aesthetic of the lyric. It is the poem of the private mind. It aims to shed, not to embody, quotidian conditions. It is not unaware of those conditions, but it is aware of them philosophically rather than materially, and its language reflects its type of awareness. To try to reinscribe, in the manner of Judith Farr, the furniture of Victorian taste into a poetry that has done its best to exist on a different plane altogether is, in both senses of the word, an ungrateful undertaking.