A Little Toil of Love: l'Amerique and Quebec's Emily Dickinson

In the 1850s, as Europeans spread across North America, Emily Dickinson retreated to her garden and second story bedroom at the Homestead. She chose to write as if she were "Nobody," from the abyss ("'Nothing' is the force / That renovates the World -" [Fr1611]). She confided to Abiah Root, her childhood friend, that she loved more than anything "the timid soul, the blushing, shrinking soul; it hides, for it is afraid," and she finds it strange to notice that in growing up "we grow still smaller," in order to reach more easily the beyond (L39). She gives us another version of the biblical metaphor of the eye of the needle, the true door to the infinite, an immense life caught sight of by an insect, captured by a tiny soul. But it is Dickinson herself, at once the eye and the one who sews, and it is she that threads her way into the light.

The great irony of her choice, of course, comes from the fact that she was one of the two great American poets of the nineteenth century and that the other was Walt Whitman. In the small world of Amherst, people thought the worst of the author of Leaves of Grass. She was told "that he was disgraceful" she confided to her preferred correspondent and counselor, Thomas Higginson,—and that finished the great American bard, his cosmic self and his libertad (L261). What would she have thought of lines like these if she had read them:

The soul,
Forever and forever — longer than soil is brown and solid — longer than water ebbs and flows.

I will make the poems of materials, for I think they are to be the most spiritual poems,
And I will make the poems of my body and of mortality,
For I think I shall then supply myself with the poems of my soul and of immortality.

"Immortality?" She constantly thought about "Immortality." And the "Soul" was one of her preferred themes, as were all comparable words (Mind, Brain) that speak of the inner life and the activity of thought. But she was too much of a dualist to accept that the "soul" could be immanent in matter, as Whitman proclaimed. Would she have discovered perhaps, as William Carlos Williams did later, that the master had panache and breadth but not form, that his poetry wanted too much "to imitate the sound of the sea," and that to take yourself for nature was a great error on the part of an artist or poet?

Of course, beyond taste or form, it is the very project set in motion by Whitman's poetry that is strange to Emily Dickinson, and the overly grandiose and oratorical word "America" is noticeably absent from her poems. At times, however, "Voyages," "Settlers," and "Prairies," still uninhabited, appear and Peru or Brazil, distant Eldorados. Somewhere she says that to be thirsty from the cradle to the throes of death is the law of our nature, and she adds that this thirst "intimates the finer want - / Whose adequate supply / Is that Great Water in the West - / Termed Immortality -" (Fr750). The verse would be faded, even banal, if not for the insane geographic precision of "in the West." The direction, "West," is related to a long literary and spiritual tradition that puts the "beyond" toward the setting sun, but which finds a new and surprisingly concrete importance in the American context.¹

Dickinson completely internalizes references to the United States of her time, and goes back to the discovery of the New World. She casts on it, however, a spell of devastation. To cut short the heroic quest of the explorers and discoverers, she uses her most fearful poetic weapon: shorthand, which functions by subtraction and reduces to nothing the oldest archetype, already formulated in numerous Greek myths including that of Jason...