The Work
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) wrote approximately 1,789 poems, most of which were unpublished during her lifetime. She circulated about 40 poems in letters to friends and correspondents, but only 7 were published anonymously and without her full cooperation in periodicals. The bulk of her work was discovered by her family after her death, bound into small handmade booklets she called 'fascicles.' The first collected edition, edited by Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, was published in 1890; scholarly editions have appeared ever since, with Thomas H. Johnson's variorum edition (1955) establishing the standard text.
Dickinson's poems are uniformly untitled; they are identified by their first lines or by the numbering systems of the major scholarly editions (Franklin numbers are now standard). They employ the common meter and ballad meter of Protestant hymnody - the 8-6-8-6 syllable pattern of Isaac Watts's Hymns and Spiritual Songs - as their primary metrical base, but they rupture this form with slant rhymes, unexpected dashes, capitalized nouns, and compressed syntax that give the poems their distinctive quality of controlled shock.
Dickinson's biblical engagement is impossible to separate from her broader poetic project: the Bible and its associated hymnody were the primary literary language available to her in Amherst, Massachusetts, and she used that language with a combination of reverence, affection, and systematic subversion that has made her one of the most discussed religious poets in American literary history.
Biblical Engagement
Dickinson's relationship to Scripture is fundamentally dialogic and often adversarial. She had memorized large portions of the King James Bible and the hymns of Isaac Watts in childhood, and these texts provide the linguistic and conceptual substrate of virtually all her poetry. But her engagement is consistently interrogative: she poses questions to the text rather than accepting its answers.
Job 13:15 ('Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him: but I will maintain mine own ways before him') resonates throughout Dickinson's poems about faith that persists despite divine silence or cruelty. Poem 376 ('Of Course - I prayed') is perhaps the most direct engagement: 'Of Course - I prayed - / And did God Care? / He cared as much as on the Air / A Bird - had stamped her foot - / And cried Give Me.' The casual cruelty of the image - God as indifferent to prayer as air is indifferent to a bird's foot - is presented with the emotional tone of someone who has genuinely tried and found the promise hollow. This is Job's voice - the voice of someone who trusted and found themselves in darkness - but without Job's final restoration.
Psalm 22:1 ('My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?') is the implicit question behind dozens of Dickinson's poems about divine absence. Poem 465 ('I heard a Fly buzz - when I died - ') presents a death scene in which the expected divine presence ('the King / Be witnessed - in the Room') fails to appear, replaced by a fly's 'uncertain stumbling Buzz.' The poem enacts the ultimate disappointment of the Christian hope of deathbed vision. The King does not come; the windows fail; and the final line ('I could not see to see - ') leaves the speaker in utter darkness - not the Revelation darkness that precedes light, but the final darkness.
Revelation 6:17 ('For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?') hovers behind Dickinson's poems about divine judgment and terror. Poem 315 ('He fumbles at your Soul') presents God as a musician tuning the soul through a process of terrifying disruption that renders the victim helpless: 'Then - when Centuries have passed - / He lays His Hand - upon the Nail - / And your Soul feels / As if it were the Sea - / Stretched upon a Rack.' This is not the gentle Good Shepherd of Psalm 23 but a God of overwhelming, unconsenting power - closer to the God of the whirlwind in Job than to the God of the Sermon on the Mount.
The resurrection promise of 1 Corinthians 15 is the focus of many of Dickinson's most complex poems. Poem 712 ('Because I could not stop for Death - ') presents Death as a courtly gentleman who takes the speaker on a ride through the stages of life and natural process, ending not in resurrection but in a grave - 'A Swelling of the Ground' - that has been there 'longer than the Centuries.' The poem approaches Christian eschatology and then withholds its consolation: the 'Horses Heads' of the final line point 'toward Eternity,' but the poem ends at the boundary, not beyond it.
The Gospels - particularly the parables of Jesus - are the source of Dickinson's most compressed theological arguments. Poem 1263 ('Tell all the truth but tell it slant') is Dickinson's poetics in a nutshell, and it draws on the parabolic method of Jesus (Matthew 13:34: 'All these things spake Jesus unto the multitude in parables; and without a parable spake he not unto them'): truth must come 'slant' because the 'Truth's superb surprise' would blind those who saw it directly (Exodus 33:20: 'Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live'). The dash-laden, slant-rhymed, compressed form of Dickinson's poetry is itself an enactment of this principle: the truth arrives obliquely, in a form the recipient can survive.
Genesis 3 (the fall and expulsion from Eden) underlies Poem 613 ('They shut me up in Prose - ') and numerous other poems about the loss of a primal poetic/spiritual freedom. Dickinson's garden imagery - she was an avid gardener and botanist - consistently draws on the Eden narrative, treating the natural world as both paradise and place of exile.
Author and Context
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts, the second of three children of Edward Dickinson, a successful lawyer and politician, and Emily Norcross Dickinson. She was educated at Amherst Academy and spent one year (1847-1848) at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, where Mary Lyon conducted revival meetings - meetings that Dickinson notably refused to respond to when asked to publicly declare her faith.
Amherst in Dickinson's time was a Calvinist community, dominated by the theology of Jonathan Edwards and the religious culture of New England Congregationalism. The annual revival meetings, the expectation of conversion experience, the emphasis on divine sovereignty and human sinfulness - all these shaped the world in which Dickinson grew up and against which she defined herself. She described herself as 'one of the lingering bad ones' when she could not produce the conversion testimony required.
Dickinson's seclusion - she rarely left her house after the 1860s - has been variously interpreted as agoraphobia, grief over unrequited love (she had intense relationships with both men and women), or strategic withdrawal to enable uninterrupted writing. Whatever its cause, the seclusion shaped a poetic practice of extraordinary intensity and concentration. She had no literary community, no public audience, and no commercial pressure - only the poems themselves and a small circle of correspondents.
Her two most important literary relationships were with Thomas Wentworth Higginson - a progressive Unitarian minister and abolitionist editor whom she asked to be her 'Preceptor' - and with Susan Gilbert Dickinson, her sister-in-law, who lived next door and received more poems than anyone else. The relationship with Susan was the most sustaining literary relationship of her life.
Key Poems
Poem 254 ('I'm Nobody! Who are you?') enacts the Johannine paradox that the last shall be first (Matthew 20:16) with comic deflation: to be 'Somebody' is to be a frog croaking in a bog.
Poem 280 ('I felt a Funeral in my Brain') traces the progressive decomposition of consciousness through the imagery of a Calvinist funeral service, ending in the fragmentation of selfhood - 'And I dropped down, and down - / And hit a World, at every Crash' - that is simultaneously a death experience and an experience of terror at divine judgment.
Poem 320 ('There's a certain Slant of light') presents the winter light as a form of divine judgment - 'Heavenly Hurt, it gives us' - that leaves no scar but a 'Seal Despair - / An imperial affliction / Sent us of the Air.' This is the hidden God of Isaiah 45:15 ('Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself, O God of Israel, the Saviour').
Critical Reception
Dickinson's initial reception was distorted by editorial normalizing of her unconventional punctuation and capitalization. The Johnson variorum edition (1955) restored the authentic texts and transformed scholarly understanding of her work. Feminist critics in the 1970s and 1980s - particularly Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (The Madwoman in the Attic, 1979) - established Dickinson as the central figure in American women's literary tradition. Theological readings by Karl Keller (The Only Kangaroo Among the Beauty, 1979) and Roger Lundin (Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief, 1998) have analyzed her complex relationship to Calvinist theology.
Theological Significance
Dickinson's theological significance lies in her refusal of easy consolation and her insistence on testing religious language against the full severity of human experience. She does not reject the Christian inheritance but she subjects it to relentless interrogation: does the resurrection promise actually survive contact with the fact of death? Does the divine love actually manifest itself in human experience? Does the God of the Bible actually respond to prayer? Her poems refuse to answer these questions too quickly, and that refusal is itself a profound theological act - the act of honest wrestling with God that the tradition from Job through Augustine to Hopkins exemplifies.
Legacy
Dickinson's influence on American poetry has been matched only by Walt Whitman's. Her compressed syntax, slant rhyme, and interrogative theology have been absorbed by virtually every subsequent American poet: Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, and Sharon Olds all write in her tradition. Her theological restlessness - her refusal to be comforted by orthodoxy while unable to leave it behind - has made her a particular resource for poets and theologians who inhabit the space between belief and doubt.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study Job 13-14 (Job's wrestling with God), Psalm 22 (the cry of abandonment), Psalm 88 (the psalm without resolution), 1 Corinthians 15:50-58 (the resurrection hope), Ecclesiastes 12 (the return to dust), Matthew 13:1-52 (the parables, which model Dickinson's oblique truth-telling), and Isaiah 45:15 (the hidden God). The hymns of Isaac Watts - particularly 'Our God, Our Help in Ages Past' and 'Joy to the World' - provide the metrical substrate that Dickinson both uses and disrupts.
Further Reading
- Roger Lundin, Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief (1998) - the best single theological study of Dickinson's poetry. - Cristanne Miller, A Poet's Grammar (1987) - an essential analysis of how Dickinson's grammar enacts her theology. - Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Emily Dickinson (1986) - the most comprehensive literary biography.