Emily Dickinson as Poet and Mystic

Emily Dickinson as Poet and Mystic T. WALTER HERBERT, JR. Robert B. Sewall. The Life of Emily Dickinson, 2 vols. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974. 821 pp. Inder Nath Kher. The Landscapeof Absence: Emily Dickinson 's Poetry. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974. 354 pp. Professor Sewall's biography of Dickinson succeeds beautifully in the basic task it sets for itself, which is to occupy the great central ground where established facts of the poet's life are laid before us in the light of common sense. Writing about Dickinson has suffered from various kinds of aberration that have tended to make a tricky subject even trickier, though our understanding of Dickinson would be greatly poorer if scholars as well as mythmakers had not run their theoretical risks in order to express what they have glimpsed of the strange and marvelous personality that produced the strange and marvelous poems. Sewall keeps his eye steadily upon his subject, resisting the temptation to lose himself in the "fiery mist" that Dickinson drew about her expressions of self both in action and words. What he finds behind the mist is supremely a poet, a conscious artist who gains increasing powers of conscious control over the turbulent materials that her existence afforded her. What is truly marvelous in Dickinson, he affirms, was a feat of expression not a freak of nature. She has dazzled and puzzled the curious, because she achieved a mastery of expression which challenges comparison with Shakespeare, not because an obscure personal affliction compelled her to adopt a secluded life in which she wrote poems for psychic relief. Sewall's purpose is not to discourage investigations of what was mysterious in Dickinson's character, but to place such investigations in a stable context of fact. Sewall offers his materials in two substantial volumes, with appendixes and pictures to supplement the narrative. At every point his presentations are straightforward and clear, with a flexible searching prose which serves nicely to explore the myriad possibilities of meaning that his information evokes. Sewall does not pretend that the facts can speak for themselves without being structured by theoryi yet he manages his argumentative pursuits with notable discretion. The central thesis of his over-all argument, as well as the tact with which he maintains alternative possibilities, is indicated by his promise to "keep everything in lively suspension. And most of all, of course, the one unfailing constant in her life, from beginning to end, her poetry" (2,643). Placing Dickinson's poetry at the center of her existence, Professor Sewall commits himself to a definition of the poet that brings with it certain liabilities. Yet he does not permit this definition to narrow the range of his interests. There THE CANADIAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES VOL. VII, NO. 2, FALL 1976 are excellent discussions here on a wide variety of questions, any one of which might have been permitted to get astride the work and run it one way or another into the ground. Sewall's analysis of "the Dickinson rhetoric," his discussion of Emily's response to her religious heritage, his notations of the way in which her relationships to persons became creative acts in which the person was transformed into a world (much like the world of a poem): all of these have interpretive power that might have been overplayed. Yet they are kept "in lively suspension ," by Sewall's graceful deliberations. Additional interpretive possibilities are raised by the information that Sewall brings forward, setting the slender figure of the poet in a context of immediate social relationships which shed light directly and indirectly on her character and the character of her work. There is no direct evidence that Emily knew about the gruesome inwardness of her brother Austin's marriage to Susan Gilbert Dickinsoni yet it is instructive to learn what was being enacted and to learn that Emily had greeted Sue's friendship with hyperbolic enthusiasm, and had encouraged Austin to pursue the relation. Similarly, in discussing Emily's early life and schooling Sewall provides information that speaks to the formation of her character even where he refrains from speculating how it may have done so. Professor Sewall...