Emily Dickinson, Homiletics, and Prophetic Power

From the time that Anne Bradstreet defied each carping tongue to pick up her pen and write poetry, women in America have been struggling to assert their poetic voices. For Emily Dickinson, the oratory of her time provided a rich resource of models and strategies through which she might empower her voice. Surrounded by male and female orators, preachers, and self-proclaimed prophets such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, as well as the didactic religious voices of contemporary female poets, Dickinson responded with her own kind of prophecy, challenging the conventions of faith and expressing her own religious vision through her poetry. In challenging Christian dogma, however, she often draws from the very rhetorical sources whose doctrines she seeks to undermine. In the sermons she heard as she grew up in Amherst—specifically, those of Jonathan Edwards' homiletical tradition—Dickinson finds ways to gain authority for her voice as a religious speaker. The Edwardsian tradition provided her with rhetorical structures and stylistic devices for her poetry, enabling her to communicate a spiritual vision that alternately conforms to and challenges the conventions of faith.

In style, the sermons offered Dickinson a model of colloquial, plain language; vivid imagery appealing to the senses; and an emotionally charged tone with an intensity of feeling. In form, the sermons offered a logical, four-part structure through which Dickinson could appeal to her readers' intellects: presentation of text, introduction of doctrine, elaboration, and application. We can see her drawing on this form, or variations of it, in as many as half of her poems, adopting the sermons' emphasis on reason and evidence. Employing some of the same rhetorical strategies and form as the Edwardsian preachers, Dickinson is able to achieve some of the same effects: she influences both the mind and heart of her audience in expressing her own vision of religious faith.

The Christian sermonic tradition offers a way to understand Dickinson's poetry that both feminist scholarship and traditional religious criticism have missed. Focusing on the traditionally patriarchal elements of nineteenth-century Christianity, feminist scholars have for the most part dismissed Christianity as a tradition unable to make positive contributions to Dickinson's art.¹ Likewise, traditional religious criticism of Dickinson's poetry has generally either seen Christianity as a negative influence on her work or has simply ignored the importance of Dickinson's womanhood to her art.² Neither body of scholarship has addressed the sermonic practice as one tradition within Christianity that empowers Dickinson as a woman poet. Focusing on the elements within her religious heritage that give her a voice, a purpose, and authority as a poet can illuminate her poetry in new ways. Her justification for drawing on the sermonic tradition for the voice of a religious visionary or prophet lay in the Bible's sanctioning of women as prophets both in the Old and New Testaments. In the tradition of Joel 2:28, reiterated in Acts 2:17, "Your sons and daughters shall prophesy," Dickinson finds impetus to speak her spiritual vision. Taking the voice and stance of the prophet-preacher enables Dickinson to speak to her culture with a sense of authority and justification, despite that culture's patriarchal temper.

Certainly, scholars have noted the "spoken" quality of Dickinson's poetry as a distinguishing feature of the verse. Brita Lindberg-Seyersted argues throughout her Voice of the Poet that "the prevailing impression conveyed to a reader" through Dickinson's verse is "of the spokenness of her poetic message" (57). Lindberg-Seyersted attempts in her study "to establish the character of an immediate, 'spoken,' often confessional message, which is one of the essential marks of her poetry" (31). David Porter agrees, calling Dickinson's poetic discourse "flattened speech, a talking that was depoeticizing and an escape from pomposity" (Idiom 223). He continues:

Dickinson interrupted nineteenth-century poetic discourse with a vernacular so direct it seemed crude to her first public. She disarmingly called it in Poem 373 "my simple speech" and "plainword." . . . Into her poems and particularly into those outrageous first lines came a natural breath and diction that created the illusion and...