Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation: Poetry, Philosophy, Science by Richard E. Brantley (review)

Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation: Poetry, Philosophy, Science presents the next installment of Richard E. Brantley’s ongoing dialogue regarding empiricism, evangelicalism, and Anglo-American letters. Brantley himself styles this text as the sixth volume in a series he began with Wordsworth’s Natural Methodism (1974), yet a considerable portion of this book constitutes a “tactical recantation of the faith-favoring emphasis” (34) present in all five of Brantley’s previous works. While Experience and Faith: The Late-Romantic Imagination of Emily Dickinson (2004) assumed the primacy of religion over philosophy and science in Dickinson’s poetry, Brantley’s own “rich conversation” chooses to explore the “practically critical results” (35) of the exact opposite. Without completely dismissing his previous conclusion that Dickinson’s poetry presents a synthesis of the natural and the spiritual, Brantley homes in on Dickinson’s empirical bent, arguing that “[e]ven when she enjoyed faith, as she did on occasion, she gave the last word to experience” (33). This, coupled with Brantley’s engaging consideration of Emily Dickinson’s “Society” of partners in dialogue (derived from her lyric “The Soul selects her own Society—”), foregrounds his fascinating intellectual biography of “The Myth of Amherst.”

The progression of Emily Dickinson’s Rich Conversation follows Brantley’s intended trajectory for the work, moving through phases of empiricism, experience, loss, and hope. While he makes occasional note of the bibliographic elements of Dickinson’s opus, his chief focus is that of cultural poetics; his history of ideas approach is complemented by a close reading of her poetry. His introduction not only situates Dickinson within the context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophy, science, and poetry, but demonstrates the essentially collaborative nature of her work. Brantley argues that Dickinson “presided... over her own community of dead or living poets, philosophers, and scientists” (4). Her interaction with this company prevented “unrelieved isolation” (2) and enriched the dialogue of her various poetic personae. Her “Society” demonstrates her interdisciplinary engagements: late Romantics such as William Wordsworth, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats speak alongside John Wesley, John Locke, and Charles Darwin. Just as Brantley identifies Wordsworth as her chief “literary dialogist” (2), he presents Charles Wadsworth as her conversational partner in discussing Locke and Darwin. Her considerations of Locke, in part, demonstrate her readings of Wesley, and her interactions with the thought of Darwin typify her scientific incursions. By framing Dickinson’s poetry as “rich conversation,” Brantley successfully demonstrates the primary dialectics of her art: philosophical, scientific, and lyrical.

The remainder of the text is divided into two sections—Gathering Experience and Extending Experience—each composed of two chapters. Chapter One, “Proclaiming Empiricism,” treats Dickinson’s emphasis on sense-based reason as the primary feature of her “poetic faith,” a faith modeled on, but not dependent on, religious experience (35). Brantley argues that by grounding the mind and imagination in sense data rather than spiritual sources (e.g. intuition or the Holy Ghost), Dickinson “muted the voice and secularized the message of heart religion in the name and to the benefit of art” (37). Following a discussion of the attitudes of Locke, Wesley, Wadsworth, and Dickinson regarding the philosophical and theological merits of experience, Brantley turns his attention to poetic examples of Dickinson’s empirical imagination (45). His explications of these poems are especially rewarding. In Dickinson’s paean to the steam locomotive, “I like to see it lap the Miles—,” the train is presented as a “preacher of rumbling progress” (48) that defamiliarizes the landscape through which it moves. Brantley also notes the complicating political and sexual undertones of the piece. His reading of a poem with geological interests, “The Day that I was Crowned,” presents an occasion of attachment over which “[g]eological science hovers as a secular seal” (51). Dickinson’s “Of Bronze and Blaze—” hums with awe, even veneration, of the Northern Lights and the...