"This World is not Conclusion": Dickinson, Amherst, and "the local conditions of the soul"

Blessed are they that play, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Emily Dickinson, Letter 690

. . . as the great florist says, "The flower that never will in other climate grow."

Emily Dickinson, Letter 1038

. . . whereas in poetry the words themselves lift the poem, in part at least, out of pure play into the sphere of ideation and judgement, music never leaves the play-sphere. The reason why poetry has such a prominently liturgical and social function in archaic cultures lies precisely in its close connection, or rather indissoluble union, with musical recitation. All true ritual is sung, danced and played. We moderns have lost the sense for ritual and sacred play.

Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens¹

My title draws on the opening line of a famous poem by Emily Dickinson —and on a statement by William Carlos Williams about the urgent need for the American writer (as exemplified by Poe) "to originate a style that does spring from the local conditions, not of trees and mountains, but of the 'soul'" (227). Williams is referring not to a religious concept but to the need of a writer to find a voice true to his or her inner self. But it is useful here to use his phrase to examine Emily Dickinson's discovery of an authentic voice —a voice shaped in part by the music she heard in the First Congregational Church, Amherst; by the definitions (charged with religious meaning and feeling) offered up to her by her treasured lexicon; and by the revelations about nature offered up to her by Amherst's teachers and divines (many of whom were challenging inauthenticity).

I want, in what follows, to touch on what was innovative and liberating in what seems to many to be the unrelievedly stern and constricting religious life of Amherst. The world of Emily Dickinson, I suggest, centered on a personal religious experience of music, of language, of nature —an intensely personal experience guided by such highly unconventional and controversial personages as Isaac Watts, Noah Webster, Edward Hitchcock. The enormous popularity of his hymns made Watts a pervasive presence in the Connecticut Valley; Webster and Hitchcock made their towering presences known personally in Amherst. The adventurous innovations of these spiritual leaders help explain the pervasive presence in Emily Dickinson's poems of what Huizinga calls "the sense for ritual and sacred play" (158).

1

Judy Jo Small has made the claim that music was central to Dickinson's practice as a poet —that her business was, in the poet's own words (and emphasis) "to sing" (29-30). Small cites a Mount Holyoke Female Seminary classmate's reminiscence of an open-air spontaneous song session with Emily Dickinson -a session that included hymn tunes in "long metres, short metres, hallelujah metres, et id omne genus . . ." (49).² I would urge that Dickinson's experience of singing hymns and listening to singing choirs at weekly church services, from early childhood to about the age of thirty, was of crucial importance to her emergence and development as a poet.³

The hymns of Isaac Watts were a rewriting of Holy Scripture into song. Watts did not hesitate to sacrifice accuracy and elegance so that scripture could be sung aloud during a Christian service and experienced emotionally by each member of the congregation. A great favorite among the several hymn books used at the First Church, Amherst, was Samuel Worcester's editions of The Psalms and Spiritual Songs (familiarly known as Watts and Select Hymns). Dozens of editions appeared from the 1830s to the 1860s when Worcester's son, a professor of rhetoric at Amherst College, expanded his father's earlier compilation —a compilation set apart from others by its elaborate directions for musical expression provided for the guidance of choir leaders and congregants (Watts 4-5). Both in England and New England, Isaac Watts was a highly controversial figure because his free adaptations of scripture into musical verse seemed to some to verge on blasphemy. In New Brunswick, Maine, William Allen (President of Bowdoin College and a former Congregational...