Emily Dickinson's Poetic Covenant

Studying Emily Dickinson's poetic oeuvre is a lesson in literary and cultural history. To try and appreciate her poems means to try and understand the cultural roots from which she emerged and to appreciate the cultural milieu in which she lived. Karl Keller's wide-ranging study, The Only Kangaroo Among the Beauty: Emily Dickinson and America, which locates Dickinson's work in its overall American literary context, is as indispensable to the reader of her poems as is Barton Levi St. Armand's admirably detailed research into Dickinson's background of New England popular culture. The same holds true for a number of feminist studies like those by Homans, Mossberg, Pollak and Dobson that all help us understand Dickinson's specific situation as a woman writer in mid-nineteenth-century Victorian America. Nor could the critic do without Richard B. Sewall's magisterial biography of the poet and—more recently—the lively and astute account of Dickinson's life and work by Cynthia Griffin Wolff.

At the same time, the European reader is amazed to discover that Dickinson's work functions like a sounding board of much that is central to his own culture: medieval texts (such as Langland and Dante), Shakespeare, English Metaphysical and pre-Romantic poetry as well as the Romantic and Victorian writers. He is virtually stunned, however, to find out that the symbolist mode was invented in New England, not in France. In a very real sense, Dickinson is a deeply provincial writer, yet her modernist techniques as well as the universality of her themes make this poet a transatlantic, even cosmopolitan, author, ranking with the classics of the British and continental literary tradition.

Thinking in Alternatives

Dickinson's rich heritage makes the study of her poetry an adventure, but it also raises the vexing problem of interpretative indeterminacy. Not only does the reader find it hard to disentangle the cultural layers and decide their relative weight, the literary voices themselves rarely come through clear and unambiguous. In fact, they often seem to compete with each other, as if the author herself had been unwilling to take a final stand. Despite its careful annotation of textual variants, Thomas H. Johnson's standard edition creates a false impression since his editorial decisions—Smith speaks of "mutilations" (16-22)—tend to erase what is a crucial feature of Dickinson's poetry: its processual quality (Hagenbuüchle, "Aesthetik" 245-246, 253).

To some of her poems Dickinson has added alternative endings that flatly contradict each other. Although such cases are relatively rare, her poetry not infrequently invites and even enforces seemingly irreconcilable readings. The interpretative differences between critics like E. Miller Budick and Greg Johnson who both offer attractive but mutually exclusive readings of the poem, "Before I got my eye put out" (327), serve to illustrate their point. What we are confronted with here is a hermeneutic problem that far exceeds the more technical question of semotactic ambivalence. The very possibility for alternative interpretations throws into relief the poet's deep-seated antipathy to thinking in clear-cut oppositions. For Dickinson, faith is not faith because it has overcome doubt; rather, "Faith is Doubt" (L 912). Similarly: "Earth" cannot be opposed to "Heaven;" "Earth" rightly understood is "Heaven" (PF114) and "Reality itself [. . .] a Dream" (PF2). Since we have all been educated in systematic either-or reasoning, it is hardly surprising that Dickinson's poetic language tends to throw us into utter confusion.

Dickinson's title-less verse displays no "what," no overt subject matter, so that our search for a poem's underlying theme, its experiential center, frequently ends in puzzlement. An especially troublesome problem is the lack of a stabilizing frame. Tone and perspective tend to switch abruptly, often within a single poem. In many cases, the rhetorical mode remains irritatingly ambivalent, so that the reader is left wondering whether a poem's ostensible statement can really be trusted in or whether it is covertly ironic, creating what Wayne C. Booth has termed "unstable irony." As a result, it remains frequently doubtful whether the emotional tenor of a given poem...