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org/9781107029415
 EMILY DICKINSON AND PHILOSOPHY

Emily Dickinson’s poetry is deeply philosophical. Recognizing that

conventional language limited her thought and writing, Dickinson
created new poetic forms to pursue the moral and intellectual issues
that mattered most to her. This collection situates Dickinson within
the rapidly evolving intellectual culture of her time and explores
the degree to which her groundbreaking poetry anticipated trends
in twentieth-century thought. Essays aim to clarify the ideas at
stake in Dickinson’s poems by reading them in the context of one
or more relevant philosophers, including near-contemporaries such
as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Hegel, and later philosophers whose
methods are implied in her poetry, including Levinas, Sartre, and
Heidegger. The Dickinson who emerges is a curious, open-minded
interpreter of how human beings make sense of the world – one for
whom poetry is a component of a lifelong philosophical project.

jed deppman is the Irvin E. Houck Associate Professor in the

Humanities at Oberlin College.
marianne noble is Associate Professor of Literature at American
University.
gary lee stonum is the Oviatt Professor in the English Department
of Case Western Reserve University.
EMILY DICKINSON AND
PHILOSOPHY

edited by
JED DEPPMAN
Oberlin College

MARIANNE NOBLE
American University

GARY LEE STONUM

Case Western Reserve University
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© Cambridge University Press 2013
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2013
Printed in the United States of America
A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Emily Dickinson and philosophy / [edited by]
Jed Deppman, Oberlin College, Marianne Noble, American University, Gary Lee Stonum,
Case Western Reserve University.
pages cm
isbn 978-1-107-02941-5 (hardback)
1. Dickinson, Emily, 1830–1886 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Philosophy in
literature. I. Noble, Marianne, 1968 – editor of compilation. II. Deppman, Jed, editor
of compilation. III. Stonum, Gary Lee, editor of compilation.
ps1541.z5e3945 2013
8110 .4–dc23 2012041991
isbn 978-1-107-02941-5 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
urls for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
I thank the publishers and the trustees of Amherst College for permission to reprint from
The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Ralph W. Franklin, Cambridge, Massachusetts:
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1998, 1999 by the President
and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President
and Fellows of Harvard College.
I thank the publishers for permission to reprint from The Letters of Emily Dickinson,
edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, Copyright © 1958, 1986, The President and Fellows of Harvard College;
1914, 1924, 1932, 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi; 1952 by Alfred Leete Hampson; 1960
by Mary L. Hampson.
 Contents

Introduction page 1
Jed Deppman, Marianne Noble, and Gary Lee Stonum

i. dickinson and the philosophy of her time

1. Emily Dickinson: Anatomist of the Mind 13
Michael Kearns
2. Dickinson, Hume, and the Common Sense Legacy 30
Melanie Hubbard
3. Outgrowing Genesis? Dickinson, Darwin, and the Higher
Criticism 47
Jane Donahue Eberwein
4. Touching the Wounds: Dickinson and Christology 68
Linda Freedman
5. Against Mastery: Dickinson Contra Hegel and Schlegel 85
Daniel Fineman
6. “Perfect from the Pod”: Instant Learning in Dickinson and
Kierkegaard 105
Jim von der Heydt

ii. dickinson and modern philosophy

7. Truth and Lie in Emily Dickinson and Friedrich Nietzsche 131
Shira Wolosky
8. Emily Dickinson, Pragmatism, and the Conquests of Mind 151
Renée Tursi

v
vi Contents
9. Dickinson and Sartre on Facing the Brutality of Brute Existence 175
Farhang Erfani
10. Dickinson on Perception and Consciousness: A Dialogue with
Maurice Merleau-Ponty 188
Marianne Noble
11. The Infinite in Person: Levinas and Dickinson 207
Megan Craig
12. Astonished Thinking: Dickinson and Heidegger 227
Jed Deppman

Bibliography 249
Citation Index 259
Subject Index 262
 Introduction

dickinson, poetry, and philosophy

[Emily] had to think – she was the only one of us who had that to do.
Father believed; and mother loved; and Austin had Amherst; and I had the
family to take care of.
Lavinia Dickinson, Emily Dickinson’s Home
Lavinia Dickinson understood an important fact about her sister Emily:
that she was a serious thinker. Her life’s work, the passion that kept her at
her desk late at night, involved thinking about large questions: What are the
chances for immortality given that the body seems essential to conscious-
ness? What makes a poem or anything else “beautiful”? How does being
aware of death shape how we choose how to live? Why are we exhilarated or
appalled by nature? Dickinson used poetry to think such problems through.
To understand her poetry as a philosophical practice challenges a
bifurcation that may seem elemental, it is of such long standing in our
culture. Accounts differ, but perhaps the most common grand narrative is
that philosophy took an early lead. In Act One, the story goes, Plato
banished poets from his republic and Socrates called them “light and
winged and holy” things, arguing that the poet “has no ability to create
until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and reason is no longer in
him” (Ion, Dialogues, 11). Like the “Corybantic revelers when they dance,”
poets “are not in their right mind when they compose . . . ” (11). Act Two
recounts spirited defenses of poets and poetry by Philip Sydney and others
who point up the value to human life of poetic specialties: moods, emo-
tions, creativity, inspiration, fiction, world-creation, and entertainment.
Showcasing attempts to decide the winner, Act Three often emphasizes
fence-sitters and synthesizers. The Christian Platonist Marsilio Ficino
explains to his Renaissance companions that since the “rational soul”
often falls “into the body” and to sleep, the “poetic frenzy” is necessary to
awaken it. Socrates was right, but so was Sidney: poetry is frenzy but it is

1
2 Introduction
also necessary, even primary, because it enables the soul to move from
“the body’s sleep to the mind’s vigilance” (197, 201). In the end, if we are still
in the grand mode we can say that this dialectical metanarrative has always
accompanied Western culture, even helped defined it, right down to our
everyday distinctions between thought and feeling, reason and emotion.
If we extract a comparison between philosophy and poetry from Emily
Dickinson’s letters and poems then we must conclude that she preferred
poetry. In various ways she celebrated poets as magicians or divinities who
distill “amazing sense” from “ordinary meanings” and denigrated philosophy
as ineffective or irrelevant before the real problems of existence. Simple natural
experiences were usually enough for her to make the point: the Moon is
upheld “in rolling Air” by “finer Gravitations − / Than bind Philosopher –”
and although the “rainbow never tells me / That gust and storm are by,” it is
nonetheless “more convincing / Than Philosophy” (Fr593B, Fr76). By con-
trast the high status of poets was for Dickinson never in doubt: “I reckon −
When I count at all − / First − Poets − Then the Sun − / Then Summer − Then
the Heaven of God − / And then − the List is done – ” (Fr533).
But while Dickinson ranked poetry above prose, the opposition between
poetry and philosophy was not important to her. She habitually referred to
writing, her own and others’, as “thought,” − she never used the word “lyric”
at all − and was an early, enthusiastic, and ultimately lifelong reader of both
poetry and philosophy. In school, philosophy and poetry were often pre-
sented as making common cause, and she and her contemporaries carefully
parsed such texts as Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, a philosophical poem
introduced by the author as “moral reflections.” This poem of “thoughts”
invokes Socrates (“he who woo’d from heaven / Philosophy the fair, to dwell
with men”) and ultimately inspired both Goethe’s Sturm und Drang
literature and Edmund Burke’s philosophical writings on the sublime.
When philosophy was presented as a formal discipline, she enjoyed it.
“I have four studies,” she effused at fifteen to her friend Abiah Root about
her “fine school,” the Amherst Academy: “They are Mental Philosophy,
Geology, Latin, and Botany” (L6). Throughout high school and her year at
Mary Lyons’s seminary at Mt. Holyoke, where Isaac Watts’s On the
Improvement of the Mind was a requirement for matriculation, she was
constantly exposed to, and tested on, philosophical texts and ideas. Long
after her school days, she remained a voracious reader and, thanks to her
proximity to Amherst College, remained in regular contact with the phi-
losophy faculty and their families, as well as with her brother and other
friends who attended the college. In short, she acquired a solid education in
both poetry and philosophy and used it throughout her life.
 Introduction 3
It was an interesting time to get that education. Dickinson lived from
1830 to 1886, a time when German idealists and their English and American
disciples presented new and explosive challenges to orthodox ideas. Feeling
their spirituality stifled by Locke’s materialism, some ambitious young
American thinkers began reading German speculative philosophy, mostly
in a few key works by De Staël, Coleridge, James Marsh, and Carlyle. These
core texts and translations seemed to open a bold new intellectual basis for
combining rational inquiry into nature and life with deep spiritual experi-
ence. To the establishment, however, the German idealist thought was so
much moonshine. The clash between the two systems was decisive and
loudly debated in periodicals such as The North American Review (orthodox)
and The Dial (speculative) and in the philosophy and religion departments
of institutions of higher learning, such as Amherst (orthodox) and Harvard
(speculative.)
Because Dickinson’s poetry engages with the vocabularies, arguments,
assumptions, and clashing paradigms that appeared in the philosophical
debates in her college town, it is not surprising to find tantalizing similarities
in concern and even idiom between her poetry and the writings of contem-
porary philosophers. Yet many questions remain: did her early exposure to
the Platonist Transcendentalists – their so-called Annus Mirabilis occurred in
1836 when she was but six – prepare her to receive her Common Sense and
Baconian textbooks with spiritualized, speculative, transparent eyeballs? Or if,
as seems likely, Dickinson zigzagged on and off the roads connecting the
Scottish Enlightenment, European Enlightenment, Romanticism, and
German Idealism, then how, if at all, did she adapt specific philosophical
issues, controversies, distinctions, or terminology in her poetry?
These questions lie at the heart of many of Dickinson’s nearly 2,000
poems. Why is it, then, that this thinking poet from such an exciting
philosophical period is so rarely the guest of honor at symposia linking
philosophy and poetry? The neglect cannot be ascribed solely to literary
critics and philosophers hunkering down in their disciplines. Literary
criticism does not take up a Charles Bernstein without some notice of
Wittgenstein, or a Wordsworth without Hartley; likewise, philosophy is
obliged to take seriously Heidegger’s interest in Hölderlin, Cavell’s in
Emerson, and Derrida’s in Mallarmé and Ponge. Yet even when literary
and philosophical concerns most recently overcame their mutual suspicion
of one another, during the Theory Boom of the 1980s, Dickinson was,
outside the writings of American feminists like Mary Loeffelholz, nowhere
to be seen. As Marjorie Perloff has noted, although continental philosophy
and European and American literary study had much to say about Hegel,
4 Introduction
Schiller, Nietzsche, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Shelley, Mallarmé, Yeats, and
Proust, Dickinson’s contributions to Romantic and post-Romantic think-
ing went largely unnoticed.
One reason is that Thomas Wentworth Higginson played an influential
Socrates to Dickinson’s Ion: “You enshroud yourself in this fiery mist,” he
wrote to her, and “I cannot reach you.” When he added the next comment −
that he rejoiced in her “rare sparkles of light” − he helped install a critical
view that, for well over a century, has seen her as an “enigmatical being” and
her poetry as intriguing and attractive but impenetrable (L330a, Higginson
1891). “Often,” concluded Higginson in an influential article in The Atlantic
Monthly, “she was obscure and sometimes inscrutable; and though obscur-
ity is sometimes, in Coleridge’s phrase, a compliment to the reader, yet it is
never safe to press this compliment too hard” (Letters 451). Scholars have
since reified the idea by arguing that her poetry − with its strange syntax,
slant rhymes, abstract nouns, portraits of mental and emotional trauma and
so much else − dismantled, transcended, or disregarded conventional mean-
ings. The end result has been a persistent image of Dickinson as a sibylline
or mystic poet who intuited rather than thought, who wrote on, and in,
extraordinary and maybe incomprehensible terms.
Another reason, endemic to the academy, is that scholars have simply
been occupied with other topics. Good work continues to be written on the
questions of Dickinson’s material poetics (her manuscripts, fascicles, and
editing) as well as on historical and cultural contexts for her life and writing,
such as the Civil War, class, gender, race, science, medicine, and religion.
Other reasons could be adduced, but the fact is that despite the work of
some authors represented here (Deppman, von der Heydt, Stonum) and
some not (Gelpi, Kimpel, Juhasz, Vendler), the scholarly community has
never seriously embraced Dickinson as a thinker or studied her relationship
to philosophy. What Dickinson’s critics “almost always underestimate,”
says Harold Bloom, “is her startling intellectual complexity” (291).
This volume engages Dickinson’s intellectual complexity by reading
Dickinson in the company of comparably bold and important thinkers and
demonstrating that her thoughts, while complex, are often quite comprehen-
sible, and that she invented an array of linguistic forms and practices to
articulate them. Dickinson used the lyric form to pursue the problems and
questions that mattered most to her, and by comparing her poems to
systematic philosophical authors and movements, both those she knew and
those she anticipated, the essayists demonstrate that her aesthetic practices
were of a piece with her philosophical inquiries, that specifically philosophical
vocabularies and methods can both explain and reframe her artistic choices.
 Introduction 5
A few commonalities emerged as contributors, working independently of
one another, singled out the same, arguably underappreciated poems or called
new attention to regularly anthologized ones. “Perception of an Object costs”
(Fr1103B) and “To hear an Oriole sing” (Fr402) fall in the first category; “Tell all
the truth but tell it slant −” (Fr1263), “This was a Poet −” (Fr446), and “A word
made Flesh is seldom” (Fr1715) into the second. Several essays also examine what
might be called Dickinson’s skepticism, her attention to gaps between conscious
mind and external world. The Dickinson we see in this book tends to be an anti-
Platonist, a poet of consciousness, a curious, open-minded interpreter both of
how human beings make sense of the world and of what happens when they do.
The essays roughly divide into those placing Dickinson within the intel-
lectual culture of her time and those asserting that her poems anticipate later
philosophers. The essays in the first category trace lines of influence, both
direct (the thinkers Dickinson knew firsthand) and indirect (the ideas she
absorbed through personal connections or second-hand accounts in books or
magazines). The prominent topics and authors in this section are mental
philosophy, Common Sense, Humean skepticism, Christology, Darwin and
the Higher Criticism, Kierkegaard, Hegel, and Schlegel. As they explore such
key nineteenth-century events as the collapse of theocentrism and the rise of
science, the essays also uncover the philosophical lineage of many of the terms
and ideas central to Dickinson’s thinking on time and eternity, the role of
others, language, the construction of the self, the relation of the created world
to eternity, and the status of the body in identity and consciousness.
The essays in the second category set Dickinson’s writings in and against
philosophic arguments and discourses that have arisen since her death. It can
be no surprise that, like many great writers, Dickinson anticipates concepts
and perspectives barely visible or entirely absent during her lifetime. The
more important question is how she directly or indirectly engages ideas more
fully promulgated in subsequent decades. It has been argued that Dickinson
holds her own against postmodernist, postmetaphysical, and antifoundation-
ist claims advanced a century or more after her writings, and the essays in this
section on Nietzsche, American pragmatism, Levinas, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty,
and Heidegger extend, critique, and complicate the claim that Dickinson was
not only aware of her philosophical epoch but ahead of it (Deppman).

chapter summaries
This book roughly follows the chronology of the history of philosophy. To
help guide readers through the array of topics, authors, and approaches that
are covered, we include here a brief summary of each contribution.
6 Introduction
In “Emily Dickinson: Anatomist of the Mind,” Michael Kearns argues
that Dickinson’s many references to mind, heart, thinking, nerves, soul, and
brain, are traceable to the texts of “mental science” and “mental philosophy”
that were widely taught throughout the United States for much of the
nineteenth century. Generally explicating the way Dickinson adapted the
terminology and the arguments of locally popular authors such as Joseph
Haven and Thomas Upham, Kearns isolates two main philosophical
problems: (1) the difficulty of showing how immaterial concepts might
arise from our presumably material, or at least embodied, faculties, and
(2) the challenge of integrating perception, association, judgment, and other
mental processes into a unified understanding that was itself obliged to be
compatible with the revealed truths of Christianity.
In “Dickinson, Hume, and the Common Sense Legacy,” Melanie
Hubbard examines Dickinson’s responses to Humean skepticism,
specifically his hard-edged separation of belief from experience and of
ideas from sensations. The Common Sense thinkers of the Scottish
Enlightenment had answers to skepticism like Hume’s, and their writings
became the basis of orthodoxy in the Amherst of Dickinson’s early life. As
Hubbard demonstrates, however, Common Sense philosophy insists that
mental connections are rapid, habitual, and consequently reliable, whereas
Dickinson does the opposite, slowing down or interfering with associations
so as to make visible their strangeness. As she drove Common Sense semi-
otics against Common Sense dogmatism, Dickinson went further than
Hume, ultimately seizing new powers for poetry, an activity that could
create both meanings and experiences.
The Common Sense responses to Locke, Hume, and Kant have generally
been neglected in Dickinson scholarship, but this is less true of the question
of Dickinson’s challenges to religious orthodoxy. In “Outgrowing Genesis?
Dickinson, Darwin, and the Higher Criticism,” Jane Eberwein reframes and
complicates the common view of Dickinson as “unorthodox” by document-
ing and combining the poet’s awareness of two major assaults on Christian
doctrines: Darwinian ideas and the philological investigations of scripture in
the so-called Higher Criticism. The Connecticut Valley was an important
site of geological discovery in the mid-nineteenth century, and Dickinson
was prepared to embrace new scientific discoveries. Less straightforward,
however, were the spiritual issues raised by Darwin’s theories. Eberwein
emphasizes both the playfulness and the earnestness with which
Dickinson’s poems deal with the challenges of Darwinian theory, concluding
that while Darwin’s theories were retrospective, Dickinson’s primary inter-
ests were “prospective.”
 Introduction 7
In “Touching the Wounds: Dickinson and Christology,” Linda Freedman
reviews the complicated place that the crucified Jesus as both God and man
plays in Dickinson’s thinking and aesthetics. According to Freedman,
Dickinson was motivated to write both by the notion of a “human” God
who engaged her sympathy and poetic identity, but also by the sense of the
vitally other, inhuman divinity. Her lifelong response to God’s absence
became an aesthetic of absence − visible in her regular use of the dash, for
example − and this poetic presence of absence enables readers both to
experience the unknown and to be changed by the encounter. In order to
ground her discussion of how Dickinson’s theology and aesthetics intertwine,
Freedman cites the “incarnation aesthetic” of twentieth-century theologian
Jürgen Moltmann, ultimately concluding that faith demands not a “rational”
virtualization of the material world but a poetic immersion into it.
Like Hubbard in noticing the cautious pace with which Dickinson
scrutinizes thought, Jim von der Heydt’s “‘Perfect – from the Pod’:
Instant Learning in Dickinson and Kierkegaard” compares her scrupulous
epistemology to the equally hesitant, doubtful, and inconclusive maneuvers
of Kierkegaard. The Dane pokes fun at Hegel’s teleological system; the
American seeks to learn from the experiential trajectory she repeatedly
undergoes from initial ignorance to nervous conclusion. Von der Heydt
shows that the question of how we can learn from experience was a pressing
problem for Dickinson, governing the mini-anthology she sent to Thomas
Wentworth Higginson in her first letter to him. This teacher proved
unsatisfying, however, and she repeatedly imagined a more reciprocal,
keenly felt learning encounter, involving a teacher more mysterious than
he was. Like Kierkegaard, Dickinson ultimately took melancholy recourse
in an idiosyncratic epistemology of Christ.
Agreeing with others about Dickinson’s skepticism, Daniel Fineman
argues in “Against Mastery: Dickinson Contra Hegel and Schlegel” that
she challenged dominant institutionalized approaches to philosophy in her
day. Whereas Hegel optimistically saw the partial, incomplete, fragmentary
nature of the world as a stage on the way to the absolute, Schlegel ironically
emphasized the irreducible value of the fragmentary as an indication that
totality was an inherently elusive goal. In Fineman’s view, Dickinson’s
material poetics kicks sand on both: like a nineteenth-century Derrida she
explores the possibility of wonderful meaning without the finality of system,
a view Fineman contrasts to masculinist assumptions of philosophy as a
discipline.
In scandalously suggesting that “truth” might be “a woman,” Friedrich
Nietzsche allowed for a gender divide in philosophy, but Shira Wolosky’s
8 Introduction
“Truth and Lie in Emily Dickinson and Friedrich Nietzsche” emphasizes
how alike were the American woman and German man. After noting several
biographical similarities between this otherwise odd couple, Wolosky
argues that Dickinson anticipates several of Nietzsche’s philosophical inno-
vations. Both thinkers, she claims, represent a new confrontation with the
world as continual flux, change, and multiplicity. Transition, transforma-
tion, instability, and rupture are the fundamental conditions in which
human beings find themselves. Thus, Dickinson sets the contingencies of
Becoming over the certainties of Being; she wonders if heaven is merely a
compensatory fantasy; and most of all she understands a perceptual and
epistemological perspectivism as more linguistic and rhetorical than visual.
In emphasizing these aspects of Nietzsche and Dickinson, Wolosky
foregrounds the view of Nietzsche promulgated in poststructuralist and
deconstructive interpretations.
In “Emily Dickinson, Pragmatism, and the Conquests of Mind,” Renée
Tursi similarly emphasizes epistemological skepticism and ontological
contingency but places it in an American context running from Emerson
to Richard Rorty and centered on William James. To read Dickinson as a
pragmatist, Tursi stresses the experimental, tentative aspects of her poetic
assertions as well as the way they observe and appreciate the minute trans-
formations involved in all perception and cognition. According to Tursi,
Dickinson’s form of skeptical inquiry links to a way of being in the world
that fits with James’s pragmatism – namely, retaining systems of metaphys-
ical and social interconnectivity within epistemological uncertainty. The
result is optimistic, at least insofar as the absence of fixed knowledge
undergirds Dickinson’s hope for immortality.
Drawing especially on Being and Nothingness but attentive to the broad
range of existentialist thinking, Farhang Erfani’s essay, “Dickinson and
Sartre on Facing the Brutality of Brute Existence,” argues that both Sartre
and Dickinson underscore the uncanny and sometimes terrifying oddity of
our being in the world. The world is without prior meaning, and both Sartre
and Dickinson find in this the possibility for freedom, authenticity, and
(new) meaning. Erfani contrasts Dickinson’s sense of this oddity with
Sartre’s post-Hegelian contrast of the en-soi and the pour-soi, ultimately
proposing that Dickinson seeks a specific kind of authenticity, one that is a
corollary of intimacy.
Like Sartre’s in drawing out Heidegger’s existential analytics, Emmanuel
Levinas’s philosophy is different in the way it is dominated by attention to
the Other. In “The Infinite in Person: Levinas and Dickinson,” Megan
Craig uses Levinas’s emphasis on the infinite yet antinomian responsibility
 Introduction 9
we owe to other persons to draw forth a Dickinson whose comparative
seclusion and obvious interest in exploring her own subjectivity are crucially
shaped by encounters with the other. To be in the presence of others is to be
subject to the ethical demands they impose upon the self, and the result is an
ethics of fragmentation and resistance to closure. It is not so much that
Dickinson finds herself called to ethical behavior in the world as that she
finds an ethical value in resisting closure of selves as such, both her own and
those of others around her.
Marianne Noble and Jed Deppman also stress phenomenological vulner-
ability. Focusing upon the problem of perceptual discrimination, Noble’s
“Dickinson on Perception and Consciousness: A Dialogue with Maurice
Merleau-Ponty” emphasizes the embodied, context-dependent nature of
epistemology and ontology for both the poet and the philosopher.
Anticipating Merleau-Ponty’s conviction that embodiment determines
the sense we make of the world, and also the “we” who make that sense,
Dickinson thinks through the inconsistencies between such notions and the
dualist convictions promulgated in her Calvinist culture. The result for her
is neither a secure Calvinist conviction nor a confident phenomenology but
a poetics of “invigorated perception.”
“Wonder” in Dickinson or Merleau-Ponty translates in Heidegger better
as the astonishment (Thaumazein) before all Being that the early Greeks
understood. In “Astonished Thinking: Dickinson and Heidegger,”
Deppman makes a virtue out of what other critics have lamented as
Dickinson’s frequent bafflement and incomprehension before the Being
of beings. Noting that the poet and the philosopher share existential themes
(being-towards-death, the corrosive influence of the They, the consequen-
ces of living in a post-Christian world), Deppman argues that while hardly
abandoning “philosophical” modes of thinking, both Dickinson and
Heidegger expect the poet to be the one who discloses aletheic truth,
which is to say the unconcealment of all that is.
In an August 1862 letter to Higginson, Dickinson responded to his
comment that he was at a loss to understand her. “You say, ‘Beyond your
knowledge.’ You would not jest with me, because I believe you – but
Preceptor − you cannot mean it? All men say ‘What’ to me, but I thought
it a fashion – ” (L271). She had previously conceded that her writing had
“wayward” and “uncontrolled” qualities, but did that put it beyond her
readers’ philosophical grasp? She did not believe that and neither do the
authors of this collection.
 part i
Dickinson and the Philosophy of Her Time
 chapter 1

Emily Dickinson: Anatomist of the Mind

Michael Kearns

“‘We thank thee Oh Father’ for these strange Minds, that enamor
us against thee.”
Emily Dickinson to Mrs. T. W. Higginson, L472

Mrs. Higginson is not the recipient one might have expected for Dickinson’s
thanks to God “for these strange Minds, that enamor us against” Him. But
the statement does reflect Dickinson’s abiding sense that the human mind is
not only “strange” but may work against a sanative state, undermining
happiness and belief. The mind, as Dickinson portrayed it, can operate
independently of the executive self, or “I.” Contrary to the established
psychology of her time – which was based on Scottish Common Sense
philosophy as developed by Thomas Reid and held that the human mind
was so designed as to develop naturally toward rule by reason and toward a
spiritual awareness of God’s divine plan – she focused on how the will, reason,
and emotion, independently or in concert, could become “enamored” of
ideas, beliefs, and passions that were conventionally regarded as unhealthy.
Nor did she regard such a condition as immoral; instead, she portrayed it as
the result of natural processes. At a time when the study of the mind was
generally considered a branch of philosophy (termed “mental science” or
“mental philosophy”) and had the goal of fostering the culture’s beliefs and
values, Dickinson in her poems (but oddly, not in her letters) seems to have
taken seriously Reid’s 1764 call for an anatomy of the mind. She thus may be
seen as having more in common with the developing interest in physiology
than with the established mental science of the first half of the nineteenth
century. She applied her anatomical focus to the dramatizing of questions
central to mental philosophy, especially whether the mind had a material
component, how the faculties of mind were related to each other and to
the external world, and where the “I” or self was located with respect to the
intellect, the will, and the emotions, but she gave to these questions a
decidedly materialist twist.

13
14 KEARNS

The online Emily Dickinson Lexicon provides a snapshot quantification of

Dickinson’s fascination with mental phenomena. Words such as “the
mind,” “the heart,” “thought” (verb and noun), “brain,” and “nerves”
occur often: there are more than eighty instances of “mind” in its various
forms in the poems, close to twice as many of “heart.” Dickinson frequently
personifies or anthropomorphizes these entities. Mind, heart, brain, and
nerves – Dickinson figures all of these as living, often self-willed, and
occasionally conflicting entities within the world of her poems. She goes
well beyond the clichés of folk psychology (my mind is weary, my heart
aches), showing how these elements are experienced but not privileging any
one faculty as being more in touch with God. This set of techniques can be
read as her response and contribution to the nascent science of psychology.
(John D. Morell’s 1853 Elements of Psychology was the first book published in
England with the word “psychology” in the title; Frederick Rauch’s 1840
Psychology, or a View of the Human Soul Including Anthropology was the first
U.S.-published book whose title contained “psychology” and was published
in an adaptation “for the use of colleges” in 1850.) Psychology was not yet
divorced from philosophy but was tending in that direction, following
the lead of the natural sciences in searching for basic elements (such as
atoms, cells, reflexes), methods of quantification, and holistic field theories
(Hilgard 12–13). Like their philosopher cousins, practitioners of this emerg-
ing discipline grappled with the relationship between physiology and
thought; unlike those cousins, psychologists tended to take seriously the
possibility that the mind not only relied on matter but was itself material.
This possibility looms in the work of Alexander Bain, whose various
publications were the most important English-language mental-science texts
from 1855 until 1890, when William James came out with The Principles of
Psychology. Bain’s first book, Senses and the Intellect (1855), begins with a
substantial section on the most up-to-date neurological information available,
including the speed of nerve impulses and the distinction between sensory and
motor nerves; in fact this was the first English-language psychological work
to begin in such a way. Bain presented this information, however, as “intro-
ductory”; the book’s main business is considering “the subject of Mind proper,
or the enumeration and explanation of the States and Varieties of Feeling, the
Modes of Action, and the Powers of Intelligence, comprised in the mental
nature of mind,” a subject he treats primarily from the perspective of “faculty
psychology” (quoted in Kearns 106). Thus, although Bain argued for doing
away with the long-standing notion of a “sensorium” (a physical chamber for
processing, storing, and recovering sensory data), he offered no alternative
explanation of how phenomena from the external world eventuate in thoughts
 Emily Dickinson: Anatomist of the Mind 15
and could not demonstrate an unbroken causal chain from nerve impulses to
thoughts.1 This problem vexed him enough that in later editions of Senses and
the Intellect he resurrected the sensorium (Kearns 106–7). That said, Bain was
clear that “[t]he Brain is the principal, although not the sole, organ of mind,
and its leading functions are mental . . . Sensation, emotion, volition, and
intelligence are suspended” when the hemispheres are destroyed or severely
damaged, and any bodily movement which still occurs is without purpose,
proving the dependence of mind on brain (Mental 5).
Dickinson’s academic exposure to mental science predated Bain’s work,
being based instead on the faculty psychology promulgated most notably by
Thomas Reid (in his Inquiry into the Human Mind of 1764 and his Essays on
the Intellectual Powers of Man of 1785), refined and transmitted by Dugald
Stewart, and disseminated in the United States by Thomas Upham,
Thomas Brown, Joseph Haven, and others. The Scottish tradition of
Reid and Stewart may have been even more important in America than
elsewhere, because its emphasis on education tallied with the development
of public schooling in the United States (Hearnshaw 95). According to
faculty psychology, humans possessed definite and discrete mental powers
or capacities such as the will, ideation, and feeling, which were associated
with specific physiological functions. Reid held that “first principles, which
are really the dictates of common sense, and directly opposed to absurdities
in opinion, will always, from the constitution of human nature, support
themselves, and gain, rather than lose ground among mankind”
(Essays 607). Two of these first principles are a belief that the material
world exists and that every change must have a cause. Others, such as “the
distinction between substances, and the qualities belonging to them;
between thought, and the objects of thought,” are evident “from what is
common in the structure of all languages” (Essays 611–12). The most
important such distinction for Reid was between matter and mind; he
regarded the mind as unequivocally immaterial (Inquiry 255–7).
Although unwilling to admit that mind was a product of material
processes, Reid believed that as an “anatomist of the mind” he was engaged
in natural history (Inquiry 3). His anatomical method consisted mainly
of reflecting on the processes of his own mind, guided by analogy and
classification (Essays 504–5). Reflection was essential, Reid argued, because

1
In 1690 John Locke had referred to the brain as “the mind’s presence-room” – chapter iii, Book I of
Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Although that metaphor came to be commonly used, it was
not uniformly embraced. Reid for one mocked it, humorously hypothesizing that the optic nerves
were made up of empty tubes which transmitted the rays of light from the retina to “the very seat of the
soul, until they flash in her face” (Inquiry 196).
16 KEARNS

the mind’s “original perceptions and motions . . . are so mixed, com-

pounded and decompounded, by habits, associations, and abstractions,
that it is hard to know what they were originally” (Inquiry 5). Thus,
although he used and even emphasized the language of natural history,
and although he recognized that consciousness was “impressed” (shaped) by
the tangible world, Reid consistently sought to conduct the study of mind
in a mental rather than a material realm. Like all mental scientists until the
second half of the nineteenth century, he argued that the principal goal
of his discipline was to better appreciate the handiwork of God: knowing
more about how the mind developed and functioned would lead to greater
self-knowledge, which in a well-regulated mind would naturally culminate
in recognizing God as creator. This goal, shared by moral philosophy,
also informed the era’s developmental psychology and thus was central to
education: early in life, the mind acquires perceptions that are grouped by
the laws of association, but as the mind matures it develops the ability
to reflect as well as to select among experiences (Kearns 75). According to
Stewart, the principal task of education was to “associate an infant’s first
conceptions of the Deity with the early impressions produced on the heart
by the beauties of nature,” thus helping to ensure that the mature individual
will be sensible of the “innumerable proofs” of the universe’s “harmony of
design” (2: 73–5; see Kearns 77).
The leading thinkers spent considerable effort classifying the faculties
of mind: Bain for instance identifying three, Reid naming a dozen.
Underlying this activity were two unvarying principles: the faculties could
not be reduced to specific material locations in the brain, and the mind was a
unified and immaterial entity, the faculties being powers rather than com-
partments or divisions. Faculties required sensory data in order to develop
but were not limited by those data. The concept of cerebral localization,
so important to the later development of psychology as a science grounded in
physiology, was simply not accepted by the established psychology of the first
half of the nineteenth century. (See Robert M. Young.) This was the case
even though the faculty psychologists described themselves as following the
methods of natural science. Stewart makes this point at some length:
Upon a slight attention to the operations of our own minds, they appear
to be so complicated, and so infinitely diversified, that it seems to be
impossible to reduce them to any general laws. In consequence, however,
of a more accurate examination, the prospect clears up; and the phenomena,
which appeared at first to be too various for our comprehension, are found to
be the result of a comparatively small number of simple and uncompounded
faculties, or of simple and uncompounded principles of action. These
 Emily Dickinson: Anatomist of the Mind 17
faculties and principles are the general laws of our constitution, and hold the
same place in the philosophy of mind, that the general laws we investigate in
physics, hold in that branch of science. (II, 51–2)

Stewart’s assertion notwithstanding, faculty psychology at best was only a

taxonomy; no faculty psychologist could predict behavior or could prove
why a person would have the kinds of thoughts that Dickinson found so
chillingly fascinating.
The other main component of orthodox psychology of the first half of the
nineteenth century was associationism, which had been given its most
complete expression in David Hartley’s Observations on Man, His Frame,
His Duty, and His Expectations, first published in 1749. (The phrase “asso-
ciation of ideas” in this sense was first used by Locke in 1700, in the fourth
edition of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding.) Like faculty psy-
chology, association psychology was based on cataloging the laws of asso-
ciation and analyzing how these laws lead to specific ideas. Another
similarity is that associationists thought of themselves as practicing empiri-
cal science. Most of the faculty psychologists accepted the validity of
associationist principles but maligned Hartley himself as a mechanist and
materialist, in part because he refused to admit the existence of innate or
intuitive ideas, and in part because he grounded his quite reasonable
discussion of associations on a speculative theory of vibrations in the
brain’s “medullary particles” (Observations 5). These medullary vibrations,
he asserted, are occasioned by impressions from external objects and are
transmitted through the nerves to the brain, where they are somehow
transformed into ideas and “presented to the mind” (8–11).
When Hartley’s theory of vibrations became widely known at the begin-
ning of the nineteenth century, thanks to a new edition of the Observations
brought out by his son, he was attacked by mental scientists who did not
wish to see the mind reduced to a mechanism, an outcome that was
becoming more plausible as physiologists measured the speed of nerve
impulses, located some functions in specific areas of the brain, and better
understood sense organs (Brett 436). The accusations of materialism were
not entirely fair. His book followed the same pattern as those by Reid and
his followers: it began with a statement of propositions or principles, moved
to a discussion of human actions, and concluded with a celebration of the
mind’s divinity by asserting the doctrine of “ultimate, unlimited happiness
to all,” which should elevate “our hearts . . . to the highest pitch of love,
adoration, and gratitude towards God” (Observations 458). Furthermore,
the theory of associations explained how the ordering of sense impressions
18 KEARNS

and the ideas derived from those impressions would correspond to the
structure of the external world. A child whose early impressions were of a
loving and God-fearing household would grow into a moral being.
Similarly, a mature adult needed continual interaction with the external
world and especially with society to preserve sanative associations. As
Upham wrote, if a person withdraws into solitude “and thus loses the
opportunity both of acquiring a fund of new ideas and of renovating his
former stores of knowledge, he will be likely to find his mind collapsing into
a state of weakness and ignorance, approaching, in the end, a condition of
idiocy” (Outlines 273). Frequent commerce with society, on the other hand,
ensured “trains of associations” that would preserve mental health.
What set Hartley apart from the tradition of Reid was his attempt to
ground his system on physiology, even though that physiology was spec-
ulative. This approach was not taken up again until Bain’s Senses and the
Intellect in 1855; during Dickinson’s formative years, the mental science she
would have known was that of Reid, Stewart, and Upham. According to the
1875 edition of The American Cyclopedia, Stewart’s work – especially his
Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind – influenced American
mental science both directly and through Upham’s widely used Elements
of Mental Philosophy (447). Stewart’s conception of psychology combines
Reid’s moral anatomy of mind with Hartley’s associationism (minus the
theory of vibrations). His Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind
stands as the most representative English-language text on mental science
during the century from Reid to Bain, judging from the encyclopedias of
the period; his name was mentioned as often as Locke’s, and his works were
recommended as excellent aids for the study of mind.
What Stewart was to English-speaking countries in general, Haven,
Brown, and Upham were to the United States – Upham being the most
salient candidate for introducing Dickinson to mental science. A professor
of mental and moral philosophy at Bowdoin College for nearly half a
century, he began publishing on mental science in 1827 (Elements of
Intellectual Philosophy), and his books were still being reprinted almost
sixty years later. He was noteworthy for his focus on “alienated or insane
behavior,” publishing Outlines of Imperfect and Disordered Mental Action in
1840 and including sections from this work in his major textbooks, espe-
cially Elements of Mental Philosophy (Madden and Madden 227–8).
Dickinson had plenty of opportunity to become familiar with Elements of
Mental Philosophy, as it was used at both the Amherst Academy and Mount
Holyoke Female Seminary when she attended those institutions (Habegger
143, 195). In fact, “mental philosophy” was one of the subjects she noted as
 Emily Dickinson: Anatomist of the Mind 19
forming her Academy curriculum when she was fourteen, along with
“Geology, Latin, and Botany”; she commented on these four subjects,
“How large they sound, don’t they” (L6)? Dickinson could also have
known Joseph Haven’s well respected Mental Philosophy; Including the
Intellect, Sensibilities and Will, published in 1857; this was part of the
Dickinson family library, as was Thomas Brown’s Principles of the Interior
or Hidden Life and Upham’s Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind
(Kirkby 250–1). Haven shared Upham’s influences and was for years a
professor of mental philosophy at Amherst College; like Brown and
Upham, Haven stressed that the study of mind was valuable as a way to
understand the human being’s divinity. Habegger characterizes Upham’s
Elements of Mental Philosophy as setting forth “the traditional ‘faculties’ of
the mind at a time when psychology was not yet a science, linking such
topics as perception, reason, memory, desire, and the imagination to the
orthodox scheme of things” (143), a fair characterization but also one that
misses the most important point: although not scientific, this psychology
was a systematic and generally complete survey of human nature, human
behavior, and mental phenomena.
Habegger’s cursory nod to pre-scientific psychology is consistent with the
tendency of scholarship in general to ignore that there did exist a coherent
theory of the human mind before Freud and before the era of the great neural
physiologists such as Pierre Paul Broca, Hermann von Helmholtz, and
Wilhelm Wundt. As is clear from the popularity of the works of Stewart,
Upham, and others, and from encyclopedia articles on mental science and
similar topics, the combination of faculty and association psychologies
worked for people. It had no less predictive power for most situations than
scientific psychology has achieved in the twenty-first century, and it is
appropriately regarded as the orthodox psychology of Dickinson’s era. It
was a psychology balanced, albeit uneasily, between conceiving of mind as
dependent on neural action and mind as self-motivating, between regarding
knowledge as resulting strictly from sensations and as resulting from sensa-
tions plus innate processes and intuitions – balanced between regarding mind
as material and believing it to be intrinsically immaterial (Brennan 135–40). At
its best, this psychology was “flexible and open-ended” and “recognized
complex and integrative mental phenomena” (Brennan 119). In the hands
of such educators as Upham, it could also become reductive and prescriptive.
But Habegger’s reference to “the orthodox scheme of things” also captures
how that psychology reflected and reinforced the privileging of perception
and reason as well as the common understanding that “the relationship
between the mind and the external world” reflected God’s design and goals
20 KEARNS

(Kearns 75). Upham describes the relationship this way: “Inanimate matter
seems to have been designed and appointed by Providence as the handmaid
and nurse of the mind in the days of its infancy. . . Material eyes were given to
the soul. . . that it might see. . . and material hands, that it might handle”
(Elements of Mental Philosophy 119). The concept underlying this passage is the
opposite of cerebral localization. Upham’s metaphor of the soul controlling
eyes and hands reflects his commitment to the mind as unitary and imma-
terial. Whether termed mind or soul, there is a single active power whose
developmental goal is to comprehend God’s creation using all available
means. This power has been designed with the ability to “become acquainted
with whatever is visible and tangible”; Upham feels no need to be more
precise about the relationship between mind (or soul) and the tangible world
than to say it is God’s design.
To sum up thus far, the mental science most prominent during the years
when Dickinson was in school and until around 1860 gestured significantly
toward the methods of natural science and made extensive use of metaphors
drawn from physics and biology. These gestures, however, tended to preface
the main business, which was describing how the relationship between mind
and world was designed to lead to a recognition of God’s presence and of
education’s role in furthering that end. The division in the mental scientists’
rhetoric of presentation between prefatory material stressing empiricism and
the body of the text revealing a strong idealistic bent prefigures the
nineteenth-century shift in the study of mind from a moral to a natural
philosophy, from the methods of introspection and deduction based on the
rules of logic to the methods of experimentation based on anatomy and
physiology. There was a true conflict here, between identifying the mind with
the brain and localizing functions within the brain, on the one hand, and on
the other treating the mind as divine, immaterial, and unified. According to
Daniel N. Robinson, “in the fifteen centuries beginning in a.d. 200, there is
no record of a serious psychological work devoid of religious allusions,” but
“since 1930, there has not been a major psychological work expressing a need
for spiritual terms in an attempt to comprehend” human psychology (279).
The tensions leading to this transformation are most dramatic in the first half
of the nineteenth century, especially in the contrast between the mental
science Dickinson would have learned from Upham’s textbook and others
in that line, and her consistent emphasis on the tangible quality of nerve
impulses, the mind/brain identity, the felt reality of internal conflicts, and the
illogical quality of some mental activity.
To locate mind in body means to take seriously the felt, tangible reality of
internal conflicts. Dickinson scholars have never questioned that, as a lyric
 Emily Dickinson: Anatomist of the Mind 21
poet, she diligently recorded what grief, transport, and so forth actually felt
like. Suzanne Juhasz, for instance, has demonstrated at length that, for
Dickinson, mental events were as tangibly real as events in the external
physical world and that she understood the mind to be a tangible place.
Juhasz, however, takes the mind as singular and conflates Dickinson’s
references to mind, brain, soul, and so forth. To consider Dickinson as an
anatomist of the mind, however, is to recognize that she worked with two
general scenarios: a single self experiencing extreme sensations located
implicitly or explicitly within the brain, and a collection of internal actors
involved in conflict. Her most explicit statement of the mind / brain
identity is “The Brain – is wider than the Sky –” (Fr598). Obviously, the
poem is expressing a metaphorical relationship in its first two stanzas, but
the third arguably shifts to metonymy, as the human brain can literally be
weighed. Read thus, the brain – the physical organ – is where meaning is
made (syllables are distinguished); the poem is not just about the power of
the human imagination but explicitly critiques orthodox psychology’s
privileging of mind’s immateriality.
A more complex problem for anyone considering seriously the concept of
cerebral localization is where to place the self, how “I” relates functionally
and spatially to the mind and the brain. Dickinson dramatizes this problem
in “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” (Fr340) and “I felt a Cleaving in my
Mind –” (Fr867B). The psychology of Dickinson’s time relied heavily on a
basic notion of continuity: the mind was a single entity and thoughts flowed
in currents. But the poems contradict that notion: the “thought behind”
can’t be joined “Unto the thought before,” and the simile “Like Balls –
opon a Floor –” gives the impression of the thoughts as discrete bodies. Yet
the mind, brain, and thoughts are not here portrayed as independent agents;
this extreme sensation of the brain itself being split (“I felt a Cleaving in my
Mind – / As if my Brain had split”) takes place within a unitary “I.” The
same is true of the more extensive “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain.” This
poem’s action lies within the speaker’s brain: mourners treading, a drumlike
“Service” beating, the numbing of the “mind,” the creaking of “Boots of
Lead” across the “Soul,” finally the breaking of the “Plank in Reason.”
Brain, Mind, and Soul are all implicitly subservient to the unitary “I.”
As with “The Brain – is wider than the Sky,” distinguishing metaphor
from metonym in this poem is difficult. Part of the poem’s complexity
results from the fact that the “I” seems both located within and constitutive
of a space, which could literally be the sensorium, the “presence room” of
the mind in which sensations are perceived and become thoughts.
(Dickinson’s 1844 American Dictionary of the English Language, compiled
22 KEARNS

by Noah Webster, defines “sensorium” as “the seat of sense and percep-

tion,” a definition not significantly different from the one offered by Bain.)
Thus, the brain is a room, the floor of which is the soul (“And then I heard
them lift a Box / And creak across my Soul / With those same Boots of Lead,
again”). The images fail to coalesce into a coherent spatial relationship,
however. “I” may be in the Brain room but may also be located on a lower
level whose floor is “Reason,” so that when the “Plank” breaks, I drop
“down, and down.” How far down the poem doesn’t say, although it is a
place where “knowing” is “Finished.” This poem demonstrates on the one
hand how well the sensorium functions either as metaphor or metonym,
even though no such space or organ has ever been located in the brain, and
on the other hand how cautious Dickinson was – if indeed she had in mind
the sensorium – not to over-literalize by establishing an actual location for
every faculty or sensation. Her goal seems always to have been to render the
experience in ways that foreground sensations rather than to craft a system.
The second scenario makes Brain, Soul, and Mind agents in the internal
drama rather than mere recipients of sensations. A fascinating poem in this
regard is “The first Day’s Night had come” (Fr423). This poem presents a
set of entities – the speaking self, Soul, Brain, and “That person that I was” –
all located within the single body of the speaker and all with some
independent power to act. The Soul is first mentioned: being instructed
by “I” to “sing,” the soul replies that “her Strings [are] snapt – / Her Bow –
to atoms blown,” so the speaker sets about “mend[ing] her.” Next a huge
and horrible day looms, causing “My Brain” to laugh, “And tho’ ‘tis Years
ago – that Day – / My Brain keeps giggling – still.” This stanza implies that
the speaker would have stopped the “giggling” if possible but instead only
“mumbled – like a fool.” The poem’s concluding stanza drives home this
sense of fragmentation and internal conflict: “And Something’s odd –
within – / That person that I was – / And this One – do not feel the
same – / Could it be Madness – this?” This stanza is not simply an example
of the mind being “divided against itself,” a condition that was frequently
portrayed by Romantic and later artists; Brain and Soul are here deemed
independent. Certainly, the pair of selves, “That person that I was” and the
present person, feel dissimilar, but the speaking self also emphasizes a sense
of alienation even from the present person by referring to it abstractly as
“this One” – it is not “myself” or even “my present self.” The fact that
“Something’s odd – within” further underlines that alienation; the speaker
cannot identify the oddity but regards it as significant enough to justify the
upper-case emphasis. The final line’s grammatical overdetermination works
the same way, “it” and “this” combining to call attention to the speaker’s
 Emily Dickinson: Anatomist of the Mind 23
uncertainty. The concluding question is almost beside the point; perhaps
the speaker is experiencing madness, but what is of more interest is the
anatomizing of this condition, not in a clinical or disapproving manner nor
with any expressed interest in healing but in a way that recognizes the power
of the internal forces.
Careful mental scientist that she was, Dickinson also attended to the
experience of conflict both between interior and exterior selves and between
several interior selves. She consistently presented these conflicts as multi-
faceted, for instance in the well-known “One need not be a Chamber – to be
Haunted –” (Fr407B). On the one hand, “The Brain has Corridors –
surpassing / Material Place”: a person easily encounters within these passa-
geways the “cooler Host,” the “[internal] Ghost.” That “Ghost” (possibly in
the Christian sense of Spirit) seems an avatar of the self. More terrifying is to
encounter “Ourself behind ourself, concealed”; it would be preferable to
encounter an “Assassin hid in our Apartment.” This sensation of discover-
ing a hidden and possibly malicious second “self” has been shared by anyone
who has for instance thought vicious or evil thoughts; we wonder where
those thoughts came from and if we indeed harbor darker selves capable of
unspeakable actions. This being a Dickinson poem, a further twist is
present: “The Body – borrows a Revolver – / He bolts the Door – /
O’erlooking a superior spectre – / Or More –”. That set of actions is futile:
one cannot bolt the door against oneself, nor would a pistol serve any
purpose save killing oneself. Although the stanza dramatizes the often-felt
conflict between body and mind, it offers no judgment as to which should
be running the show, unlike the conviction of mental scientists that
God intended the rational mind to be the highest expression of human
development. Nor does Dickinson suggest how to rid oneself of the
haunted feeling or for that matter how it arises.
More dramatically revealing of Dickinson’s physiological orientation is
that whether referring to “nerve” or “nerves,” she presents this component
of human anatomy as having the potential to act. Most famous of course is
the line “The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs” (Fr372, “After great
pain”); another striking instance, from “Severer Service of myself,” is
“I strove to weary Brain and Bone – / To harass to fatigue / The glittering
Retinue of nerves –” (Fr887). Nerve in the singular is evoked in “I’ve
dropped my Brain –” (“My nerve in marble lies –”) and in “A single
Screw of Flesh,” (“One more new-mailed Nerve / Just granted, for the
Peril’s sake –”) (Fr1088, Fr293). By themselves, these examples could simply
be taken as expressions of folk psychology, like “You’re getting on my last
nerve.” As a group, however, these poems show that compared to orthodox
24 KEARNS

mental scientists such as Stewart and Upham, Dickinson was much more
willing to localize and embody sensations and thoughts. Certainly, such
words as “heart,” “brain,” and “nerves” can stand metaphorically for the
faculties cataloged by Upham and others: “brain” as “reason,” “heart” as
“feeling,” and so forth. But Dickinson’s use of these words seems designed
as well to evoke actual physical sensations – the feeling that one’s heart is
palpitating, that one’s head is throbbing – associated with strong emotions.
That is, Dickinson locates mind in body rather than ignoring or attempting
to transcend the physiological basis of sensations, emotions, and thoughts.
While many aspects of Dickinson’s thought and technique reveal them-
selves equally in her poems and letters, this does not seem to be the case with
her interest in mental science, at least insofar as representing individual
entities in conflict; I agree with Jed Deppman that “the lyric may have been
the richest language game she knew for such difficult projects of thought”
(2005, 89). She refers to the brain in only six letters, references that do figure
the brain as somewhat independent but that never show the kind of
complex interaction present in many poems. (The letters are 22, 256, 281,
320, 382, and 735.) The epistolary reference closest to what the poems show
is from a letter to Samuel Bowles of late March 1862: “Austin is chilled – by
Frazer’s murder – He says – his Brain keeps saying over ‘Frazer is killed’ –
‘Frazer is killed,’ just as Father told it – to Him. Two or three words of lead –
that dropped so deep, they keep weighing” (L256). Dickinson’s request of
Bowles, “Tell Austin – how to get over them!” sounds naïve compared to
how she renders powerful emotions in her poems, when “getting over” the
emotions simply doesn’t come up. Two letters to the Norcross cousins are
similar: in 1863 she notes that some worries had given her “a snarl in the
brain which don’t unravel yet” (L281), and in 1873 she writes, “I know ’tis
love for [my friends] that sets the blister in my throat . . . when winds go
sweeter than their wont, or a different cloud puts my brain from home”
(L382). “Nerve” and “nerves” she mentions only three times (L252, L907,
L937), with only one of these attributing some independent power to this
component of the mind, in a quatrain included in a letter to Bowles:
“‘Speech’ – is a prank of Parliament – / ‘Tears’ – a trick of the nerve – /
But the Heart with the heaviest freight on – / Does’nt – always – move –”
(L252). This letter and stanza together suggest that for Dickinson the
anatomizing of mental phenomena was better carried out within the lyric
environment.
Dickinson does frequently refer in her letters to “mind” and “heart,” but
as with “brain” and “nerves” the epistolary occurrences are less complex
than what the poems show. As faculties, both the mind and the heart are
 Emily Dickinson: Anatomist of the Mind 25
able to act independently, and Dickinson also figures each as a place or a
container (the mind more often than the heart), but she does not show these
entities in conflict with each other. Thus the letters reflect the folk psychol-
ogy of Dickinson’s time, whereas some poems show her exploring new
dimensions. Writing to Austin in 1852 she comments, “Our minds are not
well, mine especially, has quite a number of symptoms – and I apprehend a
result!” and later in the same letter, describing a conversation, she remarks
that she “[f]led to [her] mind again, and endeavored to procure something
equally agreeable with [her] last happy remark” (L79). Ten years later she
writes to Mrs. Samuel Bowles, “The Heart wants what it wants – or else it
does not care –”; another ten years later she writes to Louise Norcross that
“An ill heart, like a body, has its more comfortable days, and then its days of
pain, its long relapse” (L262, L380). Occasionally she invokes the senso-
rium, for instance “A circus passed the house – still I feel the red in my mind
though the drums are out,” but aside from her use of synesthesia this
example is in no way remarkable (L318).
Writing to Higginson, Dickinson comes closest to presenting the mind
the way she presents it in her poems; perhaps she made these rhetorical
choices because she wanted her lyrical sensibility to strike Higginson from
the first moment he encountered her words, whether he began with the
letter or the enclosed poems. Each of her first two letters to Higginson
contains a statement that would be at home in a poem like “One need not
be a chamber”: “The Mind is so near itself – it cannot see distinctly” and the
famous “Two Editors. . . came to my Father’s House, this winter – and
asked me for my Mind” (L260, L261). There is also the equally famous
“A letter always feels to me like immortality because it is the mind alone
without corporeal friend” (L330; a similar statement occurs over two
decades later in a letter to James D. Clark, L788). In 1877 she comments
to him that “the mind of the Heart must live if it’s [sic] clerical part do not”
(L503). None of these references, however, suggests that Dickinson is
anatomizing mental phenomena or that she is advancing hypotheses that
would have earned her the disapproval of Thomas Upham or Joseph Haven.
The only letter I have been able to find that does so is the one quoted in my
epigraph, standing alone as the exception proving the rule: Dickinson
preferred lyric poetry as a field for seriously exploring those mental
phenomena that could not be reconciled with a divinely established
symbiotic and sanative relationship between mental phenomena and the
external world.
Why did Dickinson privilege the lyric for this exploration? That may
remain one of the mysteries of her practice. Certainly, she treated the lyric
26 KEARNS

and the letter otherwise equally as fields for experimentation; as has been
often noted, her diction, syntax, personae, and themes are scarcely if at all
distinguishable from lyric to letter. Perhaps she regarded the lyric as the best
field within which to “distill” mental phenomena, if she deemed such
distillation part of her experimental apparatus. This possibility fits with
Jed Deppman’s explanation of how Dickinson used poems to embody
experiments she carried out on her own mind, an explanation that comple-
ments my discussion of her anatomizing of the mind. Like Deppman,
I regard her as moving well beyond the methods advocated by Reid,
Upham, Stewart, and others, methods based on gleaning evidence by intro-
spection and interpreting that evidence according to a God-as-creator ontol-
ogy and the rules of logic. Deppman suggests that “Dickinson’s poetry is
much more about thought than feeling” (86); I would add that the poetry is
about how these thoughts are felt: felt as somehow both of the mind but
separate from it and especially felt and explored without an overtly Christian
imperative. The best example of this point is the pair of poems Fr1381B and
1384E. The second of these poems presents Mind and Heart in a parasite/host
relationship, emphasizing the presence of at least two discrete entities:
The Mind lives on the Heart
Like any Parasite –
If that is full of Meat
The Mind is fat –
But if the Heart omit
Emaciate the Wit –
The Aliment of it
So absolute.

The second stanza suggests that “mind” is the faculty of “wit,” but why
would the heart be the mind’s sole (“absolute”) source of nourishment, and
what constitutes the “meat” of the heart? These relationships imply that the
mind is the faculty of reason, insofar as wit manifests intellect rather than
feeling. Mind would also seem to be the active power here, but that begs the
question of what condition or power could result in the consequence
ambiguously evoked in line five, an omission either of or by the heart. Is
another agent involved, one that causes the heart to be omitted in some
way? This brief poem does not overtly pose a riddle, but like the best of
Dickinson’s riddle poems it takes away more than it grants.
For all of its ambiguity, this poem leaves no doubt that the relationship
between mind and heart does not benefit both parties: the parasite ulti-
mately kills its host, and Dickinson surely would not have used the parasite
 Emily Dickinson: Anatomist of the Mind 27
simile unless she meant exactly this. Fr1381B, however, oddly terms Heart
and Mind as a city and a state that together constitute “A single Continent”:
The Heart is the Capital of the Mind
The Mind is a single State –
The Heart and the Mind together make
A single Continent –
One – is the Population –
Numerous enough –
This ecstatic Nation
Seek – it is Yourself.

This poem emphasizes a unity among heart, mind, and the self, elements
related both spatially and functionally: heart providing governance from the
center, mind manifesting the effects of this governance, and the continent
identical with the single self whose unity is cause for ecstasy. The poem echoes
Upham’s metaphorical characterization of the entity Mind in terms of a
textured interior space containing “inward powers” and “hidden fountains,”
a sanative space wherein the mind’s faculties cooperate and where “the soul
finds knowledge in itself which neither sight, nor touch. . . nor any outward
forms of matter, could give” (Elements 119). Mind and Heart are of a single
mind, so to speak; this desirable condition only needs to be sought to be
found, the poem implies. “It is Yourself,” like salvation always within reach.
Each of these poems presents a compelling case for a vision of the mental
realm: Fr1384E insisting that the human interior contains multiple self-
willed actors with conflicting goals, Fr1381B that the interior is an indivisible
entity, albeit layered. Together these poems represent Dickinson as a
consummate natural historian of the mind, committed to representing
even the most contradictory realities of the human experience. Franklin
dates the manuscript of “The Heart” to late 1875 or early 1876 and that of
“The Mind” to early 1876; the earliest dated poem I’ve considered, “I felt a
Funeral,” was written in fair copy around 1862 but could have been
conceived and drafted much earlier. In other words, Dickinson’s lyrical
exploration of the mind was taking place during the same decades when she
was most fully engaged as a poet.
That Dickinson held a conflicted set of concepts about the mind suggests,
finally, that she may not have accepted the ontological basis of orthodox
mental science – the premise that God had so designed the human mind that
in a healthy state it precisely replicated the external world. The Hampshire
and Franklin Express, Amherst’s local paper, carried several articles during the
1840s and 1850s celebrating the power of the mind and noting the need for
28 KEARNS

study that would nurture this power (Kirkby 252–3). These articles referred
to the mind as unitary, immortal, and active, qualities that were deemed
essential for the task of grasping God’s design. Both in tone and in figurative
language, these popular manifestations of orthodox psychology are substan-
tially similar to the writings of Upham, Haven, Reid, and others in the
Scottish tradition, but substantially different from Dickinson’s character-
izations of mental phenomena. According to Madden and Madden, “Upham
believed that in the perception of objects and their relations we are directly
aware of them as external and objective – aware of them as objects and
relations in the physical world”; thus he disagreed with the Lockean tradition
that ideas of these relations were developed and perceived (237). He held that
“relations [among objects] objectively exist and the mind is constructed to so
apprehend them” (237). He also believed that “the intellect is so constructed
to yield the concept of space; the concept is not imposed on sensations but
rather is a faithful transcription of precisely what space objectively is” (238).
Dickinson’s poem Fr1103A can be read as directly countering these
beliefs:
Perception of an object costs
Precise the Object’s loss –
Perception in itself a Gain
Replying to it’s Price –
The Object absolute – is nought –
Perception sets it fair
And then upbraids a Perfectness
That situates so far –
Regardless of the benefit that might accrue from perceiving an object, that
perception according to Dickinson is the opposite of possessing the “Object
absolute.” She intimates that there might be a preperception state in which
the object can be possessed, but when Perception (either as independent
agent or as a power of the mind) becomes involved, an absolute distance is
established between the object and the perceiver. The poem’s final two lines
even suggest that God (“Perfectness”) is responsible for this component of
the human condition, just as He is for “these strange Minds, that enamor us
against” Him.
It would seem that for an anatomist of the mind of Dickinson’s caliber,
for whom the specific, the local, the immediate sensation was so important,
the mind could not “absolute[ly]” apprehend material realities precisely
because it was grounded in the material realm. Insofar as these realities
existed within the mind, they did so as ideas locally stimulated by nerve
impulses. Similarly, Dickinson does not consistently privilege one internal
 Emily Dickinson: Anatomist of the Mind 29
entity or faculty, not even “Soul” or “I,” but repeatedly shows the faculties at
times in conflict, at times in concert, always multiple. In these ways she
went considerably beyond the orthodox psychology of her era and can be
seen as supporting the materialist angle on such central psychological and
philosophical issues as the location and composition of mental activity.
Whether she developed these bold explorations of mental phenomena in
tandem with her ventures near the limits of lyric, certainly the puzzles and
the felt reality of the phenomena could not have been better expressed than
in her lyrics.
 chapter 2

Dickinson, Hume, and the Common Sense Legacy

Melanie Hubbard

Emily Dickinson had a problem. The Common Sense philosophical train-

ing she was given inspired some of her greatest intellectual enthusiasms, but
it also squelched the very questions it inspired. The great inspiration of
Common Sense for Dickinson was its elaborate archaeology of the mind, its
invention of terms to label mental processes, and its extensive engagement
with the question of whether or not we can truly know the world.
Dickinson responded enthusiastically to these Common Sense agendas.
Less enthusiastic was her reaction to Common Sense religious dogmatism.
It took off the table questions like “Can we know what God is like?” and
“Do we know if immortality is true?” – insisting that we simply know the
answers to these through intuition. Now, Dickinson had many admiring
thoughts about intuition, but in the hands of Common Sense philosophers,
it had two large drawbacks. The first was that such a nonanswer to large
questions did nothing to allay her philosophical and religious skepticism.
Another, more subtle but no less pressing, drawback to intuition as a
response to skepticism is that it was explicitly and unambiguously a wordless
form of knowledge. This dissatisfied Dickinson deeply, given that she was a
poet committed to words as her very lifeblood.
One of Dickinson’s important philosophical inquiries, then, engages
Common Sense theories of the role of language in forming our very
perceptions, in establishing our relationships in the world, and in providing
us access to the real. In her poetry, she works through and plays with
Common Sense ideas about language, trying them on, seeing where they
lead, and testing them against her own fundamental philosophical skepti-
cism. Her poems work out the idea that language – with its mediation and
interpretation of experience – presents to us the only world we can know.
Once Dickinson arrives at a philosophy that cedes the field of consciousness
to language, her poetry becomes a place where practical work is also
theoretical – where the attempt to articulate experience is also a test of
ideas about the relationship of language to perception.
30
 Dickinson, Hume, and the Common Sense Legacy 31
Dickinson works to undo Common Sense dogmatism, and to make a
place for poetry, by examining its claims in two areas: sensation and
reflection. Certain of Dickinson’s poems consider sensory experience and
the work of perception; the speakers in these poems either work to eliminate
mediation and reasoning, and thus language (taking a Common Sense
position), or more skeptically examine the mediating processes we go
through in order to have a perception, and thus see representation and
interpretation as constitutive acts. If Dickinson found that sensory data is
inaccessible apart from the mediations of perception, she deduced how
much more inaccessible must be nonsensory objects like God. Certain
poems weigh Common Sense claims that we can intuitively know meta-
physical objects. In these poems, Dickinson’s speakers make a place for the
immediate intuition of one’s own states, but not of another’s, and not of the
existence of God. Instead, one must either be content with “terms” and
uncertainty or, better yet, accept that the mediations of language produce
and nurture human community.
The philosopher David Hume had pushed to its logical conclusion
Locke’s divorce of private consciousness from the world, skeptically con-
cluding that we can only infer the nature of reality from our perceptions.
The fact that we do so rapidly and unconsciously, rather than rationally,
ought to make us doubt what we think we know. In reaction, the Common
Sense philosophers declared that since our perceptions and conclusions are
rapid, unconscious, and universal, we must declare these habits to be
common sense, that is, first principles, not to be questioned. The 1862
poem beginning “‘Why do I love’ You, Sir?” (Fr459) operates with these
unmistakably Common Sense notions as it traces out their implications.
Entertainingly, Dickinson’s poem performs in a nutshell a typical Common
Sense analysis: its speaker goes to great lengths to eliminate the need for
explanation. Dickinson’s speaker would seem to endorse an end to poetry
itself, since she is quite comfortable with Common Sense’s “reasons not
contained – Of Talk.”
The poem begins with the speaker’s quotation of her skeptical inter-
locutor’s question, a question impossible to answer rationally. Coquettishly
responding in terms of a philosophy familiar to both, Common Sense, the
speaker argues that her love is compelled by the nature of her beloved: the
only possible response to his presence is to love him. There is no gap
between the wind and the moving grass; in fact we perceive the presence
of the wind because of the grass’s movement. It is as if the moving grass were
a syllogism entailing the wind. The “Eye” shuts automatically in the face of
“Lightning” – there is no time to reason (“Wherefore”) a response – and
32 HUBBARD

reason in fact has nothing to do with it; the eye’s closure is an unwilled
reaction. “Sunrise” provides light for an eye that can “see” with ease, whose
sight is in fact “compelled” by light. Dickinson’s speaker is arguing from our
usual understanding of cause; we think of it as a power transmitting action
from one object to another. We cannot avoid having this sort of idea of
cause; we think that what Hume calls a “principle of union or cohesion”
knits objects and events together (12, I, 1, 5).
Hume contended that the “power” knitting cause and effect in our
accounts of causation is a fiction; we have no sensible evidence for this
power of causation, only an inference we rely on whenever events and
results are constantly conjoined. For Hume, this is the beginning of a
disillusionment that will end in a thoroughgoing skepticism. “And how
must we be disappointed, when we learn, that this connexion, tie, or energy
lies merely in ourselves, and is nothing but that determination of the mind,
which is acquir’d by custom, and causes us to make a transition from an
object to its usual attendant, and from the impression of one to the lively
idea of the other” (266, I, 4, 7)? Quite cannily, as if to avoid both skepticism
and the cruder notions of causation involving objects banging into each
other, none of the speaker’s instances of causation revolve around our usual
notions of substance or matter (notions Hume also discredited as fictitious).
Wind, electricity, and light are insolid, even invisible – and yet we know
they exist almost solely by their effects. In fact, the entire edifice of science is
based on detecting, with instruments if necessary, often invisible causes
from effects. The attributive nature of causation is both plainly visible (since
the grass’s movement may remain inexplicable until the “Wind” is hit
upon), and shrewdly hidden in the reactive eye, an eye (in)formed by
light. The poem stands out for its speaker’s facility with Common Sense
ideas and for her implicit trust that her skeptical interlocutor is already
familiar with them. If the speaker puts her faith in certain fundamental
fictions without question, it is to call her skeptic’s bluff: they both know
there can be no reason for love.
The Common Sense philosophical principle that allows us to have the
convictions we do in the first place is “belief.” Dickinson would have known
this from the textbook taught at the Amherst Academy, Thomas Upham’s
The Elements of Mental Philosophy. It is an amalgamation, sometimes
confusing or contradictory, of Common Sense ideas:

Nothing is better known than that there is a certain state of the mind which
is expressed by the term Belief. . . . Of this belief, we take it for granted, and
hold it to be in the strictest sense true, that there are original and
 Dickinson, Hume, and the Common Sense Legacy 33
authoritative grounds or sources; meaning by the term original that these
grounds or sources are involved in the nature of the mind itself, and meaning
by the term authoritative that this belief is not a mere matter of chance or
choice, but naturally and necessarily results from our mental constitution,
and is binding upon us. (24)
Now, “belief” is a technical Humean term; and in Hume, it does in fact
refer to our sense of the unavoidable reality of things. “‘Tis merely the force
and liveliness of the perception, which constitutes the first act of the judg-
ment, and lays the foundation of that reasoning, which we build upon it”
(I, III, V, 86). But in Hume, “belief” is ultimately a cause for doubt, not
certainty. Our ideas are suppositions or fictions, though act on them we
must. For Hume, since these lightning-quick perceptual processes are not
reasoning, and they don’t lead us to any truth outside of our individual
consciousness of them, we do not “know” the world; we “suppose” or
“infer” it by way of the imagination, and we “believe” our perceptions.
The imagination persists in going beyond simple sensory experience in
order to present the world as stable, durable, continuous, immediate, and
predictable. Though what our minds present to us are “fictions” and
“illusion,” we cannot do without them. Therefore, “the question is, how
far we ought to yield to these illusions” (Treatise, 267, I, 4, 7). For Hume the
answer is a prophylactic skepticism, no matter how devastating to philos-
ophy. On the other hand, we must go about our lives, denying, in effect, our
skepticism. “Carelessness and in-attention alone can afford us any remedy.
For this reason I rely entirely upon them” (218, I, 4, 2). This state of affairs is
one we operate under daily, and must simply accept: “I may, nay I must
yield to the current of nature, in submitting my senses and understanding;
and in this blind submission I shew most perfectly my sceptical disposition
and principles” (269, I, 4, 7).
Where Hume took the rapidity and unconsciousness of our perceptions
as cause for doubt, or at least caution, about our conclusions, Common
Sense philosophy took them as divinely instituted capacities for reality,
claiming that such processes, being automatic, had to be taken as primary or
given – “binding” – and as guarantors of an invulnerable access to reality.
Where Hume found that our beliefs, beyond the available sense-data, in
mind, matter, and causation were at best imaginative leaps, perhaps
unavoidable but not deducible from the evidence, the Common Sense
philosophers, including Upham, argued that since everyone believed in
both mind and matter, “we are unable to harbour the supposition, that
men are deceived and led astray in this opinion; that they so generally and
almost universally believe in the existence of what, in point of fact, does not
34 HUBBARD

exist” (31). This is clearly a circular argument, and the better philosophers
acknowledged as much, insisting that first principles were inarguable – that
they were, in fact, common sense. Accordingly, in Dickinson’s poem, the
power and necessity of belief is the basis of the speaker’s argument that her
lover’s presence does indeed “cause” or compel her love.
If earthly knowledge is, to the skeptic, tenuously grounded, the speaker
of Dickinson’s poem imputes a superior knowledge to the beloved: she
compares the lover to the “Wind,” who “knows” why the grass “Cannot
keep her place.” The beloved is the one presumed to know, but then again,
maybe not: “And do not You” seems as much a question as a description.
The speaker, flustered, confesses, “We know not – / Enough for Us / The
Wisdom it be so – ”. Her love is inexplicable. The speaker is careful to
acknowledge that “Because” is not a reason but an attribution of effect;
she knows it isn’t a reason, but it’s unfair to “require” one. We do not
“know,” then, but deduce: “Therefore – Then –” ironically reproduces the
language of carefully constructed argumentation where finally no argument
will do. While acknowledging that “We know not,” Common Sense
philosophy insists on “The Wisdom it be so –,” and for this speaker, that
is “Enough.”
This flirtatious set-piece uses words while attempting to eliminate the
need for them: “You . . . know” and “Because” are not reasons; they are the
speaker’s bashful attempt to turn the interlocutor back to his own intu-
itions. What’s more, the “Lightning” knows the eye “cannot speak;” it can
only instinctively react. In fact, the speaker’s examples steer clear of human
articulation altogether; she renders herself as brainless and material as a
passive object in the landscape. If the poem’s “reasons not contained – Of
Talk – ” reproduces the sense of the famous aphorism, “The heart has
reasons reason cannot know,” the speaker’s circular argument is “I love you
[because] I love you.” The speaker rests, rather volubly, in the insouciance
of her belief.
Common Sense philosophy in general was an attempt to rid Locke and
Hume’s ideal philosophy of its mediating term – ideas – but Common
Sense’s keen attention to perceptual processes had a way of admitting
experience, interpretation, and causal attribution – that is, mediation –
back into our knowing. If Dickinson’s speaker is content to use reasoning to
eliminate “reasons,” paying attention to perceptual processes only to over-
look them, in other poems Dickinson slows down the act of perception in
order to examine its parts, which Common Sense philosophy broke down
to two, knit by the often elided middle term: (physical) sensation, (habitual)
reference, (mental) perception. Where Common Sense philosophy tended
 Dickinson, Hume, and the Common Sense Legacy 35
to overlook the work of reference, some of Dickinson’s poems, especially
the riddles, explore the gap between sensation and perception as the crucial
territory of language. Guessing the subject of a teasing poem is, after all,
akin to putting together sensations until they lock into a construct you
recognize – a perception simple, and funny, 1863 poem about a bird –
“You’ll know Her by Her Foot” – explores the process by which we turn
visual and aural sensations into the perception of an object in the world, and
it explicitly focuses upon the middle term in the process that Common
Sense philosophy routinely ignored: reference (Fr604). Overall, this poem
describes how we know that a thing we are looking at is a robin; you’ll
know, it says, by her foot, her fingers, her vest, her cap, and her voice. In the
end, the perceptual process is climaxed or even halted by the overwhelming
aural sensation of “Threnodies of Pearl.” You now know what you are
experiencing: a “Robin in your Brain.” Or, as the variant would have it, if
you deny what you are experiencing, “you’re an Infidel –,” having misplaced
your Common Sense belief. The robin is so real it hurts. And you can’t turn
it off. Just as Locke insisted in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding
that pain assures us of the unwilled reality of the world, this poem insists
that Common Sense belief is hardly a choice. And the reference of sensation
to external cause (perception), though it can be parsed, inevitably unites
us to the world. As Upham clarified for his students:

Sensation, when applied to the mind, expresses merely the state of the mind,
without reference to anything external which might be the cause of it,
and . . . it is the name of a truly simple feeling. Perception, on the contrary,
is the name of a complex mental state, including not merely the internal
affection of the mind, but also a reference to the exterior cause. Sensation is
wholly within; but Perception carries us, as it were, out of ourselves, and
makes us acquainted with the world around us. (81)

Common Sense approaches tended to emphasize the rapidity and immediacy

of the sensation-perception dyad; we could hardly help noting, categorizing,
and believing the nature of what we felt.
But Common Sense philosophy also insisted that our associative habits
on this score were learned over time through experience, during which we
made the finest distinctions to refer private sensation to causes outside of
ourselves. We relied on the constant conjunction, say, of a sweet smell and
the visual, tactile presence of honeysuckle, rapidly imputed cause and effect,
and thus categorized our experience – that is, we had a perception. There is
an effort involved in being oriented in the world, an effort we mostly
overlook, but that Common Sense philosophers took seriously. What we
36 HUBBARD

know, and the attribution to a cause outside ourselves, has been arduously,
though unconsciously, learned. As Upham puts it,
It might, indeed, be suggested to us by the change in our mental states, that
there must be some cause or antecedent to the change; but this suggestion
would be far from implying the necessity of a corporeal cause.
How, then, does it happen that we are not merely sensible of the particular
sensation, but refer it at once to some external object, to the rose or the
honeysuckle? . . . we make this reference by experience. . . . we form the habit
of attributing the sensations to that body as their cause. (87, 88)
Habit rules our attributions of cause, our ability to refer sensations to a
cause outside of ourselves, but habit is “far from implying the necessity” of a
connection between our sensations and perceptions. In the case of sound,
the attribution of cause is even more clearly a learning process:
It is by custom or experience that we learn to distinguish the place of things,
and, in some measure also, their nature, by means of sound. . . . [I]n the
process of time, we learn not only to refer the origin of sounds to a position
above or below, to the right or the left, but to connect each particular sound
with a particular external cause. . . (94)
In fact, Upham says, “the sound itself never gives us any direct and
immediate indication” of where it is coming from (95). There is a division
between the “Robin in your Brain” and “the other.” Upham follows Hume
here, and tends, as Dickinson might note, to reproduce his conclusions.
He takes care, for example, to mention the traditional Humean (and
Berkeleyan) objection to moving too quickly from our sensations and
simple ideas to knowledge of the material world.
We have taken for granted the actual existence of an external, material
world. . . . And we are now prepared to assert explicitly, that this supposed
outward world has an actual and independent existence.
But an objection is made here. It may be said that the mere fact of our having
sensations or ideas of externality, extension, colour, and the like, does not
necessarily involve and imply the true and actual existence of those things
which they represent, or of which they are supposed and believed to be the
effect. In other words, we may possess certain internal affections, and
attribute them to something external and material as their cause; and we
may truly and sincerely believe the reality of such a cause, while, in point of
fact, it does not exist; and, consequently, our conviction of a truly existing
material world may be a self-imposition and delusion. (131–2)
Upham explicitly notes that this position has had “some acute advocates,”
but must side with “all common humanity” on this point (132, 133).
 Dickinson, Hume, and the Common Sense Legacy 37
Hume had insisted that all these processes were acts of the imagination.
And belief was precisely where we leapt to conclusions:
Now since nothing is ever present to the mind but perceptions, and since all
ideas are derived from something antecedently present to the mind, it follows
that it is impossible for us so much as to conceive or form an idea of anything
specifically different from ideas and impressions. Let us fix our attention out
of ourselves as much as possible; let us chase our imagination to the heavens,
or to the utmost limits of the universe; we never really advance a step beyond
ourselves, nor can conceive any kind of existence, but those perceptions
which have appeared in that narrow compass. This is the universe of the
imagination, nor have we any idea but what is there produced. (67–8, I, 2, 6)
Hume is quite strict about what we can know; he says that we can know
only “ideas and impressions,” which he renames “perceptions,” all of these
being products of the “imagination.” We cannot, in fact “conceive of any
kind of existence, but those perceptions.” That is, we cannot get beyond the
contents of our imaginations to a supposed world. The problem, as estab-
lished first by Locke, is that our perceptions, what Locke called “ideas,”
cannot be checked against reality, nor can they be taken to somehow
resemble reality (though Locke seems to fudge on this point sometimes).
The Common Sense philosophers as a whole agreed, and were even ada-
mant on this point: Whatever the contents of our minds, they in no way
resembled or represented whatever the world might actually be, though they
resulted from contact with it.
Upham is also adamant: “our sensations are by no means copies, pictures,
or images of outward objects; nor are they representations of them in any
material sense whatever; nor do they possess any of their qualities” (78). As he
puts it just a little farther on for the inattentive, “It is hardly necessary to say
that we are altogether ignorant of the subjective or real essence of matter”
(82). But he is certain that the world is both ‘out there’ and knowable, even if
he hesitates to say how: “We find ourselves unable to resolve and explain the
connexion between mind and matter in this case as we do in all others. All we
know and all we can state with confidence is, that a mental affection is
immediately subsequent to an affection or change which is physical” (80).
That is, a mental response is constantly conjoined to a physical sensation,
even if that response does not immediately identify the stimulus.
The problem is that Upham must explain how a mental response is
immediately knit to a sensation – since it appears that mediation (habit and
interpretation) intrudes all the time. Following certain strands in Locke
and Stewart, he compares the sensation-perception dyad to the sign-signified
dyad because the sign rigidly entails its signified. Both dyads consist of
38 HUBBARD

admittedly arbitrary relations, but they nevertheless carry knowledge. He is

aware that it is a nice argument and draws special attention to it in the text.
This is one of those difficult but decisive points in MENTAL PHILOSOPHY,
of which it is essential to possess a precise and correct understanding. The letters
which cover over the pages of a book are a very different thing from the
thought, and the combinations of thought, which they stand for. . . .
Nothing which is seen or heard, nothing which is the subject of taste, or
touch, or any other sense, nothing material which can be imagined to exist in
any place or in any form, can furnish the least positive disclosure either of its
intrinsic nature or of the mode of its action.
What, then, is the relation between the sensation and the outward object,
between the perception and the thing perceived? Evidently that of the sign
and the thing signified. And as in a multitude of cases, the sign may give a
knowledge of its object, without any other grounds of such knowledge than
mere institution or appointment, so it is in this. The mind, maintaining its
appropriate action, and utterly rejecting the intervention of all images and
visible representations, except what are outward and material, and totally
distinct from itself both in place and nature, is, notwithstanding, susceptible
of the knowledge of things exterior, and can form an acquaintance with the
universe of matter. (104–5)

In the first paragraph, Upham is arguing that, in the same way that “letters”
don’t resemble “thought,” no “subject” of “sense” can “furnish the least
positive disclosure . . . of its intrinsic nature.” That is, a sensation of “sharp”
is just that; it doesn’t mean anything in itself. In the second paragraph,
Upham says that the arbitrary relationship of the sign-signified dyad
“without any other grounds of . . . knowledge than mere institution and
appointment” doesn’t prevent our immediately attributing meaning to the
word. And perception acts in the same way: a sensation immediately evokes
a perception. Perception is snugly knit to sensation in just the same way that
the signified is snugly knit to its sign.
Of course, there is a problem with this argument, and it has to do with
the sign-signified dyad being a matter “of mere institution and appoint-
ment.” We have designated the conventional relationship between word
and meaning; that is why one works to evoke the other. It’s not at all clear
that we can go from sensation to perception so securely. It is just this gap
between sensation and perception, and even sign and signified, that the
Robin poem emphasizes. Dickinson’s poem insists on the division between
“The Robin in your Brain” and the “other,” and if you notice the distinc-
tion, you might not be a Common Sense believer at all: “Deny she is a
Robin, now / and you’re an Infidel.”
 Dickinson, Hume, and the Common Sense Legacy 39
Dickinson’s comic understanding of perception in “You’ll know Her by
Her Foot” has it both ways; it insists on the skeptical division of sensation
from world, and then makes us see, from a Common Sense perspective,
how ridiculous it is to insist upon skepticism. It’s crazy to address “the
Robin in your Brain.” It’s crazy to have a “Robin” in your “Brain.” You
don’t, in fact, have something as silly as a resembling idea when you have a
perception, do you? Why, then, does this poem’s divided “Robin” strike
one, with a laugh, as true? Because Dickinson’s “Robin” and “the other”
represent the division between sign and signified, the very division we
overcome to read the poem. When we put the pieces together, we are
rewarded with an imaginary “Robin.” The joke is that the speaker must take
her imaginary robin as real. But it bears the same relation to reality as ours
does: she may represent it to herself. She may dwell in the realm of language.
The bird, at least, may dwell in song, even if the song is a “Threnody,” or
hymn of mourning, perhaps a lament for the division of human conscious-
ness from nature. This poem climaxes at the moment of simultaneous
perception and address. The speaker “begs” the robin to “be still” – at
least in the closed universe of her “Brain.”
But in a darker, more painful poem such as “Pain – has an Element of
Blank –,” there is only pure sensation without even the pretense of reference
(Fr760). The poem represents an experience in which the speaker’s sensa-
tions are so intense as to render her unable to process the world, even to
establish whether it exists. In this poem Dickinson freezes the perceptual
process in time, and no articulation seems possible or even applicable.
Instead of articulation, there is “Blank;” instead of past and future, there
is “Infinite,” undefinable experience. Even the perceiver has been elimina-
ted by pain, for “Pain” is the protagonist, the “It” unable to recollect, and we
are unable to determine who or what is “enlightened” only to “perceive/
New Periods – Of Pain.” Pain destroys relationships between the sufferer
and the world. Although the sensation of pain is immediate, as Common
Sense philosophy pointed out, it produces not knowledge but confusion.
There is no understanding without language to turn sensation into some-
thing we understand; there is only a mindless, inhuman blank. It is
disorientation without memory or habit, without reference to an external
world, without a referencing consciousness. Dickinson’s attention to
the disconnect between sensation and interpretation, especially in her
representations of madness, disorientation, and physical extremity, puts
language, even society, at the center of the self. Common Sense philosophy
asked her to believe the immediacy of her mind’s connection to the real, but
her philosophical skepticism drew her attention to the crucial role language
40 HUBBARD

played as a mediator between the human and the real, and consequently its
definitive relationship to the self.
Dickinson draws an analogy between the limits of our ability to know our
sensations and our ability to know God, eternity, and Heaven. For
Dickinson, if sensory perceptions were the products of cognitive, rational,
and linguistic processes, mediated by language, then our knowledge of them
is uncertain. Similarly, certain philosophical and religious concepts naming
things unavailable to our senses were even more dubious. In doubting our
ability to know things beyond our sense perception, she allied herself with
the skeptics – Locke and Hume – whose theories had generated the
Common Sense defenses, which Dickinson knew from Upham and others,
of our ability to know the real. Locke had allowed that not all our mental
contents come (or seem to come) from outside our consciousness; we seem
to form ideas, such as space and time, which don’t have physical correlates
or immediate origins in sensation. He termed these “reflections.” Common
Sense philosophers, especially Reid and Stewart transmitted by Upham,
maintained that these beliefs (First Principles or Original Suggestions) were
intuitive and instinctual; they rejected Locke’s contention, which was
shared by Hume and Brown, that we “suppose” them subsequent to the
unconscious associative processing of our sensations. And they went fur-
ther: Common Sense philosophy insisted that we can bypass language and
mediation and directly know not only space and time, but other bedrock
objects of our intuition such as the existence of God and our eternal souls.
Dickinson, it must be said, grants to consciousness immediate access to the
passions as much as to the sensations. But the religion of the intuitive heart that
flourished in Dickinson’s day relied on Common Sense philosophy to correlate
the passions and sensations we could know with the metaphysical objects we
could not know. And that correlation had to be immediate, not subject to
unregulated associations and indeed not a matter of “habit” at all. The existence
of God could not be subject to a reasoning process, even an unconscious one;
the idea had to be immediately, intuitively apparent.
Dickinson explores the Common Sense idea of intuition as a site of
languageless knowledge in a poem beginning “You’ll know it – as you know
‘tis Noon –” embedded in a fascicle full of poems about sight, darkness,
madness, ignorance, and death (Fr429). The speaker, taking a Common
Sense position, asserts that there is a way to know: we know by way of
“intuition . . . – and not by terms –.” Repeating the Common Sense moves
of “Why do I love you, Sir?” the speaker employs metaphors from the
natural world that emphasize the perfect reciprocity and unspoken fitted-
ness of knower and known. “Lightning” is the “lisp” of “Omnipotence,”
 Dickinson, Hume, and the Common Sense Legacy 41
sounding without talking, and the “Sun” is “His Conversation – with the
Sea – .” Despite the word “conversation,” there is no talk: the sun is remote
and silent while the sea’s flashing waves reciprocate light. Blinding light is
substituted for “terms,” and knowledge (or is it blankness?) is a matter of
immediate sight, or insight, “as you know ‘tis Noon –,“a phrase which
curiously implies that now, the present tense in which you (always) know, is
“Noon.” But this poem takes place mostly in the future tense – “shall” – and
so does the addressee’s knowing. “Consult your Eye!” is a command that
bases future knowledge on an analogy with present sight. It also, curiously,
requires a verbal “consult” with a body part that can’t possibly talk. The
hilarity or high spirits of the speaker’s certainty seems to cover for a variety
of complications. Can one know, or see, “Glory?” Or “Heaven?” What
about “Noon” or “Midnight,” those invisible meridians the speaker asserts
that one can know? “Sunrise” is a process; the “Sun” is impossible to look at
directly. On closer inspection, knowing seems doubtful indeed. We are
never told what “it” is that the addressee will “know,” although the
implication is that it is one of those “Mightiest things,” a first principle in
Common Sense thought. Is it, after all, love? But this is just a guess – the
sort of guess the lover herself has to make, when she “shall” know, based on
her “intuition.”
The poem engages Common Sense ideas in opposing intuition to
“terms” and in associating intuition with “Mightiest Things.” Upham
names or takes for granted (within the first three paragraphs of his book)
such mighty things as the existence of an eternal, unchangeable soul, the
existence of substance or matter, and the existence of God. Additional
mighty things in what seems like an endless list (derived from Reid) include
time, space, causation, number, extension, and many other intuitive con-
cepts. Upham insists, contrary to Locke, that the active mind generates by
itself certain ideas “immediately inspired by our constitution . . . independ-
ently of reasoning” (232). By extrapolating from sense experience, the mind
conceives of certain ideas; for example, “It was before observed, that we
perceive extension to be one sensible quality of bodies, and thence are
necessarily led to conceive space, though space be of itself no object of
sense” (127). Hume argues similarly that the imagination goes beyond sense
data to limn our world, but his insistence that our categories are enabling
fictions is meant to discourage dogmatism, especially religious dogmatism.
Common Sense did not intend to be dogmatic, but it did insist that the
inarguable nature of our intuitions provides a bedrock for religion. It is
crucial, therefore, that such intuitions be not the result of even unconscious
associative processing, but rather are “immediately inspired” by our contact
42 HUBBARD

with sense data. Thus, on the foundation of intuition, Common Sense

manages to assert that such “Mightiest Things” as God are invulnerable:
These great truths are made known, not by deduction nor by direct experi-
ence, but by a spontaneous and original intimation of the Suggestive
intellect. As they are not the creations of a process of reasoning, so they are
not destructible by such a process. They stand imbedded in the mind’s
structure, and cannot be overthrown without a subversion of the essential
elements of our mental nature. (255)

Upham both resembles and resists Kant here. Like Kant, he claims that
these intuitions “stand imbedded in the mind’s structure.” However, he
differs from Kant by insisting that they are not the product of “deduction.”
Instead, they are “spontaneous and original.” (Hume had called them
“unconscious.”) This subtle but important distinction leads him to prefer
the term “Suggestion” over Kant’s term “Reason” – for reasoning is precisely
the process to be expunged. “In giving an account of the ideas from this
source, we have preferred, as designative of their origin, the term
SUGGESTION, proposed and employed by Reid and Stewart, to the
word REASON, proposed by Kant, and adopted by Cousin and some
other writers, as, on the whole, more conformable to the prevalent usage
of the English language” (253).
Lest these seem to be either Locke’s innate ideas or Kant’s Transcendental
knowledge of the Absolute, Upham is careful to argue, using Stewart, that
our intuitions are activated by our sensuous contact with the world; we would
not have them without it (258). Though the senses initiate our intuitions, we
never can know these First Principles directly through the senses:
It will, then, perhaps be asked, Why do we not direct our attention at once
to the true subjective existence, to matter itself, and not delay upon its
appendages? The answer is, we cannot; the mind has its limits. It might be
asked, with the same reason, Why we do not look directly into the existence
and essence of the Deity, instead of studying Him in his works and inter-
mediate manifestations? It might be asked, Why we do not directly con-
template the existence and essence of the mind, instead of studying it in its
attributes and operations? The answer in all these cases is the same, viz., that
we are unable to do it. (178)

Thus Dickinson’s question and answer “‘How shall you know? / Consult
your Eye!’” is fully freighted with the conflicts Common Sense philosophy
cannot, after all, resolve. We cannot “look directly” at the sun, or at God.
Upham’s point is that physical experience is necessary but insufficient for
knowledge of “Mightiest Things.” The speaker’s adjuration to “Consult
 Dickinson, Hume, and the Common Sense Legacy 43
your Eye!” thus gestures toward the senses while joking about their insuffi-
ciency. Upham himself must work hard to maintain the “immediate”
inspiration of our metaphysical conclusions while also maintaining our
inability to directly access these objects of knowledge. Just as with percep-
tions based on sensation, we cannot compare our intuitive ideas with reality.
The poet whose favorite verb after “to be” is “to know” derives both her
“belief” and her skepticism from a philosophy which makes knowing
tantalizingly unassailable but also, by definition, impossible. She is less at
ease than Upham about this, though she only jokes about it here.
If knowledge of God is doubtful on an intuitive basis, perhaps intuitions
yet have a place in our dealings with others – and perhaps words don’t.
Our ability to detect the feelings of others is a crucial social survival skill.
Dickinson as a poet might want to get to the limits of language, or of our
knowing, and if God is unavailable for testing, other humans are at least
physically present. But they are also curiously distant. While Dickinson’s
speakers can immediately experience their own sensations and passions,
the passions of others turn out to be as unknowable as the existence of God.
The poem beginning “Sweet skepticism of the Heart –” clarifies this
(Fr1438).
In the previous poem, our ability to know “Mightiest Things” is
presented as a metaphor for our ability to intuit whether we’re in love;
the speaker suggests that looking into one’s own heart (or consulting one’s
“Eye”) will suggest that intuitively. “You’ll know,” she says, knowingly. But
in “Sweet skepticism,”, if you may know your own heart, you may not
know another’s; you have to guess. “Sweet skepticism,” “with its delicious
throe,” that “knows – and does not know –” is preferable to “Certainty,”
“Lest Certainty be sere.” Certainty is like a killing frost or “snow,” the
encroachment of death. To be always on the point of knowing, of “trans-
port thrilled with Fear – ,” is to live, to be in love and vulnerable to another.
Certainty, this poem gives us to imagine, might be of the beloved’s failure to
reciprocate, of an unfittedness between one’s intuitive conclusions and the
reality. Common Sense knowing might fail. Of course, you could always
ask, and then you will have your certainty. Or not, since the beloved could
lie. Even to receive a reassurance in terms will likely not be enough to dispel
your doubts. The problem is, once again, that you can never know. Better,
then, not to try.
Language, Dickinson says, cannot resolve the problems of skepticism. As
a mediator, it always makes our access to the world something less than
immediate. In saying so, Dickinson concurs with the incipient skepticism
to be found in Locke’s account of language. Locke is careful to observe that
44 HUBBARD

words neither really refer to the objects beyond our ken, nor do they really
correspond to the ideas we wish to excite in the mind of another:

But though words, as they are used by men, can properly and immediately
signify nothing but the ideas that are in the mind of the speaker, yet they in
their thoughts give them a secret reference to two other things, First, they
suppose their words to be marks of ideas in the minds also of other men with
whom they communicate. Secondly, because men would not be thought to
talk barely of their own imaginations, but of things as really they are,
therefore they often suppose their words to stand also for the reality of
things. (225, III, 2, 4–5)

Our words, in effect, get us nowhere beyond “the ideas that are in the
mind;” they signify “nothing but. . . ideas” and not “the reality of things,”
and especially not “Mightiest Things.” Language is exiled from the realm of
knowledge on two counts, and it would seem that a poet would find in this
philosophy little encouragement.
But Dickinson, like Locke and his follower Upham, can use such a
semiotics; as Locke says, though language guarantees we cannot know the
world, the fact that we share it means we can share our perceptions. Just as
Dickinson’s skepticism at the level of perceptual processes yields a fascina-
tion with articulating interior states and with articulation itself, thus clear-
ing a space for poetry, Dickinson can use the Common Sense tradition of
skeptical linguistic theory to yield power for a reading and writing com-
munity. The poem “God is a distant – stately Lover –”explicitly drives
Common Sense semiotics against Common Sense dogmatism (Fr615). The
poem takes advantage of the fact that, after the insights of Locke and
Stewart, it was clear that language was an arbitrary system of signs that
operated merely by societal agreement. Dickinson’s poem is therefore very
Common Sensical, as far as its semiology, but with skeptical panache it
proceeds rigorously to outlaw metaphysical conclusions, and save a place for
human intercourse.
The poem translates the story of the courtship of Miles Standish to the
realm of God’s courtship of the soul and reads the analogy in a blasphemous
way. But it also plays on the idea that Jesus is, as the Gospel of John puts it,
the “Word” of God. In this semiotic line of interpretation, the all-too-
human soul, “Priscilla,” falls for Miles’ / God’s stand-in, John Alden / Jesus,
and the Word or representative is taken not to refer back to any intrinsic
meaning. The scandal is that God comes off as a con artist, a nasty trickster;
he would take a soul against her will by the force of his logical authority – for
if anyone can guarantee reference, He can.
 Dickinson, Hume, and the Common Sense Legacy 45
His insistence that his “Word” (Jesus) is “Synonyme” with himself should
be a reassurance to the saved: to know Jesus is to know the very person of
God. Jesus, as sign, corresponds to God, the signified. But God’s verbal
dismissal of the loveable materiality of the word suddenly makes that semi-
otics unimpeachably cruel. God insists that Jesus is the abstraction, being a
mere representation, but Priscilla knows that John Alden exists as Miles’
stand-in, not Miles Standish. Dickinson’s insistence that John Alden is not
transparent succeeds in securing the necessity of the sign and therefore the
primacy of reading, interpretation, and relationship in time. The poem, by
wittily discrediting the rapacious Miles, discredits the idea of the author and
ground of Being (God) as the originator or locus of the meaning of His Word
(Jesus). It insists on the conventionality of the link between sign and signified,
offering an alternative interpretation – a human(e) misreading – of the Word.
Dickinson here uses Upham’s (and Stewart’s) insistence on association
and interpretation, the work of “an intellect that has been trained up so as to
correspond” to words, to put the responsibility for meaning squarely on the
shoulders of the human percipient (303). Stewart had helpfully pointed out
that we tend to make two mistakes: one is to attribute intrinsic meaning to
the word, and the other is to locate meaning in the word (or its referent) and
not ourselves. In fact, so intent are we on our meanings, that we tend to
forget the operations of the sign altogether. “‘It is well known,’ says Upham
quoting Stewart, ‘to be a general law of our constitution, when one thing is
destined, either by nature or by convention, to be the sign of another, that the
mind has a disposition to pass on as rapidly as possible to the thing signified,
without dwelling on the sign as an object worthy of its attention’” (301).
Dickinson’s poem about Miles and Priscilla emphatically dwells on the
sign. What the word may refer to is a matter of human will. And thus,
intrinsic meanings or Divine coordinations are strictly unnecessary, even
impositions. Though Common Sense philosophy insists that God exists,
Common Sense semiology perhaps unwittingly insists that the term “God”
could just as well refer to a definition. In using Common Sense semiotics to
challenge Common Sense dogmatism, (thus being thoroughly skeptical)
Dickinson’s poem seizes power for humanity and for poetry, the place
where meanings, and love, might be worked out.
Dickinson was required to read Common Sense philosophy during her
schooling and probably pursued philosophical reading long after. What she
made of it, however, was her own, perhaps aided by the contradictions
inherent in Upham’s amalgamation, itself the result of deep disagreements
among the Common Sense philosophers as they wrestled with the skepti-
cism of Locke and more especially, Hume. Upham’s presentation of crucial
46 HUBBARD

philosophical issues as resolved tended to expose and unravel those issues,

and a perspicacious reader could draw her own conclusions. In effect,
Dickinson was trained to do philosophy, and she found that skepticism,
with its emphasis on mediation, made a place for poetry – a place Common
Sense was intent on eliminating.
But Common Sense and its attendant emphasis on the processes of
perception was useful in itself; it indicated an active Imagination at the center
of consciousness, each person putting together and naming a world out of
fragments of experience. And it legitimized what Dickinson’s sister Vinnie
called Emily’s “job:” “to think.” Dickinson thought through the poems,
pursuing certain Common Sense notions as in themselves worthy of atten-
tion. Though a term like “intuition” or “belief” might be handy in love and
friendship, it might also provide a sort of lever for thinking about the place of
language, indeed poetry, or whether one could know God. If Hume had
hoped, by the end of Book One of the Treatise, simply to bring “the only
science of man” – thinking about “Human Nature” – “a little more into
fashion,” then Dickinson took it as her favorite subject and thought about it
in terms that Common Sense both laid out and left unresolved (I,7, 272).
 chapter 3

Outgrowing Genesis? Dickinson, Darwin,

and the Higher Criticism
Jane Donahue Eberwein

In an 1882 letter to Otis Phillips Lord, Emily Dickinson commented on

a recent conversation with the widow of an Amherst College president:
“Mrs Dr Stearns called to know if we didnt think it very shocking for
[Benjamin F.] Butler to ‘liken himself to his Redeemer,’” she reported with
reference to the latest news about a predictably controversial Massachusetts
politician, “but we [herself and her sister, presumably] thought Darwin
had thrown ‘the Redeemer’ away” (L750). This is one of only two direct
references to Charles Darwin in her collected writings, but it conveys
awareness of his radicalism even as it adopts a mirthful tone toward
upheavals in both science and religion. Intellectual historians often parallel
the impact of Darwin’s ideas in her era to the Copernican revolution in
astronomy. Yet the poet’s arch comment reflects poise in coping with a
world in flux even as she zeroed in on the key issue confronting Christians
attempting to align natural with scriptural revelation: not the role of the
Creator in fashioning terrestrial life but that of the Redeemer in giving it
eternal purpose.
Other topics Dickinson raised in that letter provide instructive context.
The merry tone typified the playfully erotic manner of her correspondence
with Lord, but there were also solemn concerns. She reported deaths of
Charles Wadsworth and Ralph Waldo Emerson, each of whom prepared
her to withstand the shock of Darwin’s findings. Wadsworth had fired her
passion with a romantically inflected, literary, yet doctrinally orthodox
confidence in God, while Emerson offered a symbolic approach to nature
that was neither daunted nor limited by scientific advances. She also
commented cheerily on the merit of keeping “Believing nimble.” It was
that often joyful dexterity of hopeful love in a world besieged by death and
doubt that prepared her to cope with threatening forces.
I foreground Darwin here as the chief figure in a complex intellectual
movement that included scientists like Charles Lyell and Asa Gray but also

47
48 EBERWEIN

scriptural scholars associated with the Higher Criticism. Although Darwin

had been Lyell’s student, he became recognized as the more radical of the
two scientists – partly because of the daring sweep of his theory but also
because he made less effort to present his findings as compatible with
theistic belief. The Higher Critics, although religious scholars, adopted
scientifically rigorous standards of inquiry that drastically transformed
scriptural understanding. Even without any direct connection between
these two intellectual currents, they combined to stimulate doubts of
biblical revelation. My thesis is that Dickinson recognized the challenges
such thinking posed to the tradition of natural theology associated with
William Paley as well as to the evangelical inflection of that tradition in the
work of Edward Hitchcock. I argue, moreover, that Dickinson’s poems and
letters reflect awareness of the Darwinian struggle for survival while also
responding to alternative ways of interpreting nature, some of which
reinforced belief. Even when Darwin’s specific findings may have been
unknown to her, the kinds of evidence he and biblical scholars such as
David Friedrich Strauss demanded influenced her own grounds for hope.
Yet the questions Dickinson sought to resolve were not Darwin’s: while
he searched for biological sources of entire species, the mysteries absorbing
her passion concerned the immortality of each person, body and soul.
In youth, Charles Darwin seemed no more likely to launch a revolution
in science than Emily Dickinson to transform U.S. poetry. Raised by an
unbelieving father and Unitarian mother, Darwin followed a brief period of
medical study with education for Anglican orders. Ironically, when Captain
Robert Fitzroy recruited Darwin to serve as naturalist aboard the Beagle for
its 1831–36 voyage, Loren Eiseley reports he was looking for someone to
“refute those who used rocks to promote heretical whisperings” (3) – one of
those errant geologists being Charles Lyell, whose three-volume Principles of
Geology Darwin read over the course of the voyage even as he gathered
biological specimens in the Galapagos Islands and other isolated ecosys-
tems. Returning home, Darwin devoted himself to studying specimens he
had collected; recording observations, experiments, and hypotheses in his
notebooks; publishing findings on formation of coral reefs; and working out
theoretical insights into interrelationships among plant and animal species.
It was a hidden and largely domestic process much like Dickinson’s with-
drawal to her home, where she gradually compiled fascicles of poems.
Darwin maintained contact with the scientific community even as he
struggled in chosen obscurity to develop his thoughts for eventual publica-
tion in a never-written magnum opus. Only when startled in June 1858 by
receiving a manuscript from Alfred Russel Wallace, who had independently
 Outgrowing Genesis? Dickinson, Darwin, and the Higher Criticism 49
reached strikingly similar conclusions, was Darwin jolted into breaking his
public silence. Wallace, unaware of Darwin’s progress toward a theory of
evolution through natural selection, asked him to review the manuscript
and, if he thought it worthy, forward it to Sir Charles Lyell. When Darwin
did so, Lyell (already well aware of Darwin’s progress) persuaded him
to present his own paper in tandem with Wallace’s to the Linnaean
Society in July, 1858 and to move ahead with publication of The Origin of
Species in 1859.
Darwin and Wallace addressed shifting questions about the origins and
relationships of botanical and zoological species and even the races of man.
How long had organic life existed on earth? Were current species descended
directly or indirectly from those known only from fossil evidence, or were
they products of separate, sequential creations? Had the divine Creator
initiated all life in a process literally or metaphorically interpretable in terms
of the six days of Genesis, or was a continuing creation still ongoing? Had
biological life been obliterated by one or multiple catastrophes over the
course of time with new species created to replace those extinguished, or did
changes occur gradually through uniform natural processes? Darwin’s
theory of evolution focused on the idea of natural selection rather than
creation. He based judgments on his own observations and experiments as
well as extensive readings in biological and geological reports from around
the world, and he was strongly influenced by Lyell’s uniformitarian under-
standing of geological development as well as Thomas Malthus’s ideas
about the competition for survival that results when population density
exceeds natural resources.
Darwin posited that all life traced its roots to some extremely primitive
being whose progeny had gradually split into multifarious plants and
animals. Species gradually emerged and evolved as a result of tiny advan-
tages in the competition for survival. A creature possessing any slight feature
likely to make it more resistant to harm or more attractive to a mate than
others of its kind might pass along that trait to its offspring, and that trait
would become a hereditary feature of the species over the course of many
generations. Changes in the natural environment could favor certain kinds
of development while dooming others without regard for hierarchies of
being or differences in apparent strength. As Lyell summed up Darwin’s
discovery, “Mr. Darwin argues, and with no small success, that all true
classification in zoology and botany is in fact genealogical, and that
community of descent is the hidden bond which naturalists have been
unconsciously seeking, while they often imagined that they were looking
for some unknown plan of creation” (322). None of this would have been
50 EBERWEIN

imaginable if it were not for Lyell’s own findings and those of his fellow
geologists about the awesome age of the planet and the long history of
documentable life. If Bishop James Ussher’s seventeenth-century calcula-
tions of the earth’s age, based on scriptural evidence, as only 6,000 years
were still widely accepted, there would have been no time for the slow,
subtle working out of natural selection. Yet geological evidence had severe
limitations, with much evidence destroyed from early periods and fragile
environments: as Lyell was fond of pointing out “it is not part of the plan of
Nature to write everywhere, and at all times, her autobiographical memoirs”
(349). There were still scientists who interpreted breaks in data to catastro-
phes (if not the worldwide flood of Noah, then more localized disasters)
while ascribing the emergence of each new species or race to separate divine
creation. Even Darwin held out some possible role for the Creator in his
exalted conclusion to The Origin of Species. Yet his major insight was that
organisms evolve through a purely natural process.
Although Origin stopped short of applying this theory directly to human
beings, Darwin had long included man among the species subject to natural
selection. After leaving that case to be made by others and being disap-
pointed by Lyell’s The Antiquity of Man (1863), Darwin felt pressure to
develop his argument explicitly in The Descent of Man (1871). His claims
were that all men and apes traced their origin to some common ancestor
(and, before that, through other mammals and fish back to whatever
primitive organism formed the basis for all life) and that all human races
derived from some primal pair and only gradually evolved distinctive traits
suitable to diverse environments. Although the idea of “struggle for
survival” or “survival of the fittest” suggested to many Victorians the
dominance of those animals best equipped for violence, Darwin’s argument
privileged no one set of powers as fostering survival. He took special interest
(as had Lyell) in the emergence of man’s linguistic, artistic, and moral
capacities and his belief in spiritual forces as distinctively human traits
but concluded that “the idea of a universal and beneficent Creator does
not seem to arise in the mind of man, until he has been elevated by
long-continued culture” (Descent 914). He felt little concern about the
ensoulment of individual human embryos or the immortality of the soul,
those being concerns not testable by science, and he rejected the concept of
miracle.
Although Dickinson probably never read Darwin’s books, her education
prepared her to grasp what was at stake as a result of his evolutionary theory.
As Richard Sewall observed, “she did not live in a college town for nothing”
(10), and her intellectual environment had always stressed both science and
 Outgrowing Genesis? Dickinson, Darwin, and the Higher Criticism 51
religion. Fourteen-year-old Emily’s account of subjects she was studying
suggests an apt preparation for her eventual encounter with Darwinism,
when she wrote that “I have four studies. They are Mental Philosophy,
Geology, Latin, and Botany. How large they sound, don’t they?” (L6). It
was probably in connection with botanical studies that she compiled the
herbarium that has recently been made available in facsimile; it shows her
ability to collect specimens and to label and classify them in accordance with
scientific standards of the time. At Miss Lyon’s Seminary, Dickinson was
exempted from the botany class on the basis of prior knowledge but studied
chemistry, physiology, astronomy, and natural philosophy (Erickson 46).
A particularly important book that Carlton Lowenberg documents as
part of her Amherst Academy curriculum was the 1830 edition of William
Paley’s Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the
Deity (1802). Paley attempted to counteract David Hume’s radically ration-
alistic skepticism by arguing for a God knowable through natural laws.
Freshening the traditional argument from design for an age of invention,
Paley interpreted the world as an intricately ordered machine, analogous on
a sublime scale to a clock. If one discovers a watch, he argued, one assumes
the existence of a watchmaker. If one observes an intricately designed organ
such as the human eye, one attributes it to a wise Creator. As James Turner
points out, Paley’s thought introduced the idea of a “new, reliable Deity”
even into the Peter Parley books for beginning readers to which Dickinson
sometimes referred (79), and Paley influenced virtually everyone of her time
who was interested in science and religion – even the young Charles Darwin
(Ghiselin 136). In part because of Paley’s influence, science in the early
decades of Darwin’s and Dickinson’s century placed heavy reliance on
optical instruments like the microscope and telescope that enhanced the
eye’s power to discover how nature revealed its God. Darwin, in contra-
diction, argued from the imperfection of organisms and their gradual
evolution to refute the assumption of an omniscient Creator (Gruber 12).
Paley’s Natural Theology had lasting influence in nineteenth-century
England and the United States. Still, not all Christian thinkers before
Darwin accepted Paley’s argument as adequate reflection of God’s glory,
however useful it might prove in refuting unbelievers. For one thing, it
assumed predictability and uniformity that could not always be found in a
world where, as Dickinson once noted, “Jehovah’s Watch – is wrong”
(Fr427). Worse, natural theology dispensed with the Bible as a source of
evidence. As many scientists in the first half of the nineteenth century were
clergymen (often evangelicals like the Rev. Edward Hitchcock, president
of Amherst College from 1845–54), they maintained that God showed
52 EBERWEIN

himself to men in the complementary revelations of scripture and nature.

Hitchcock’s contributions to Emily Dickinson’s education and to her
poetry have been well established by Richard Sewall and Hiroko Uno.
Uno pays particular attention to suggestions Dickinson could have found
in Hitchcock’s lectures and The Religion of Geology about the preservation
of personal identity in the resurrection body anticipated in epistles of Paul
and Peter – suggestions that influenced this poem among others, which
show Dickinson’s tendency to look to science for corroboration of her
hope for immortality (170–86):1
The Chemical conviction
That Nought be lost
Enable in Disaster
My fractured Trust –
The Faces of the Atoms
If I shall see
How more the Finished Creatures
Departed Me! (Fr1070)

It was important that Hitchcock was a geologist because geological findings,

especially Lyell’s, posed an increasing challenge to belief in biblical chro-
nology and called on religious believers to adopt flexible ways of reading
those relatively few Bible passages dealing specifically with God and nature.
Most of these were found in Genesis, especially stories of the Creation and
the Flood. Dickinson’s writings show her responding to challenges she
would have known about through Hitchcock and others.
Even before nineteenth-century geological findings upset Bishop
Ussher’s chronology, Sir Isaac Newton’s discovery of the law of gravitation
placed the science of astronomy in direct conflict with books of the Bible
attributed to Moses (Addinall 125), though Newton’s titanic scientific
reputation and well-known piety put him beyond criticism. As Dickinson
declared in her 1832 comic valentine, “gravitation stumbling / Fell from an
apple tree” (Fr2a), she treated that famous Newtonian apple as a sort of
biblical type of Adam’s fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. Creation
narratives in Genesis were even more imperiled by anthropological findings
such as the discovery of Neanderthal man in 1856, geological evidence
documenting ice ages, deserts and oceans succeeding each other, and
other phenomena indicative of massive extensions of time. According to

1
“Resurrection body” was Hitchcock’s term for the reunion of body and soul the saints would
experience at the General Resurrection.
 Outgrowing Genesis? Dickinson, Darwin, and the Higher Criticism 53
Gruber, Lyell tended to “soften his critique of the history of Mosaic geology
for prudential reasons,” remaining “comfortably vague, using such terms as
‘20,000 years or more’ when he ha[d] aeons in mind” so long as his readers
grasped the impossibility of accommodating geological evidence of the
planet’s age to a 6,000-year frame (91). The response of Christian scientists
was generally to explore alternative ways of reading key biblical texts, such as
the two accounts of Creation in the opening chapters of Genesis.
Among those open to such reconciliations of scripture and biology were
Edward Hitchcock and his Yale teacher, Benjamin Silliman. In The Religion
of Geology (1851) and earlier writings, Hitchcock availed himself of Thomas
Chalmer’s 1833 metaphoric interpretation of the biblical six days by which
“day” was understood to mean some unspecified but extensive period of
time. Perhaps because Lyell remained a religious believer himself,
Hitchcock included his findings in another Dickinson textbook,
Elementary Geology (1840). He actively advanced exploration in her home
region, conducting the first statewide geological survey in the United States,
and was probably aware of Lyell’s 1852 visit to the Berkshires to study
evidences of glacial drift (Lyell 280ff).
Geological discoveries upset findings about Noah’s ark, despite
continuing efforts of scholars to accommodate scientific evidence to beliefs
in one great Deluge or a succession of localized catastrophes that called for
new starts to biological life. Still, Hitchcock wrote of geology, “no other
science presents us with such repeated examples of special miraculous
intervention in nature” (Gillespie 23), and Rodney Stiling argues that it
was the reassuring orthodoxy of Hitchcock, Silliman, and other Christian
geologists that allowed ideas of “nonliteral creative days of Genesis chapter
one and a regional or nonuniversal Genesis Flood” to become widely
accepted (186). In this shifting intellectual world, Dickinson came to accept
that “Ararat’s a Legend – now – / And no one credits Noah” (Fr532).
The point where geology and biology cohered to give Darwin crucial
evidence for his theory of evolution through natural selection was fossil
evidence of extinct plants and animals embedded in stone or perpetuated in
peat. By Dickinson’s time fossil evidence was widely sought out in her area
and Amherst College gained recognition for its collections (see Uno 190–7).
Hitchcock’s geology text taught her how comparative anatomy, a biological
subdiscipline, could avail itself of such records in stone to reveal “the
external form and figure of the body, the food, and habits, and haunts,
and mode of life of creatures that ceased to exist before the creation of the
human race” (193). This context helps us see what is typical of her
intellectual environment in the following poem – but also what it
54 EBERWEIN

demonstrates of Dickinson’s ability to distinguish her own questions from

those Lyell or Darwin would have posed.
A science – so the Savans say,
“Comparative Anatomy” –
By which a single bone –
Is made a secret to unfold
Of some rare tenant of the mold –
Else perished in the stone –
So to the eye prospective led,
This meekest flower of the mead
Opon a winter’s day,
Stands representative in gold
Of Rose and Lily, manifold,
And countless Butterfly! (Fr147)
The first stanza, often cited to document her knowledge of scientific
findings, clearly reflects Dickinson’s attention to lessons learned in geol-
ogy, biology, and natural philosophy classes. But the second stanza, while
also building on botanical evidence, shifts the balance away from the
linear story of species emerging and disappearing (like the mammoths
that once lumbered about the terrain now known as the Connecticut
Valley) toward cyclic renewal. It also reminds the alert reader of the
lithograph in Hitchcock’s Religious Lectures on Peculiar Phenomena in
the Four Seasons that shows a butterfly emerging from its cocoon as an
example of metamorphosis that a reader like Dickinson could interpret as
an emblem of resurrection (reproduced in Wolff 95). In light of Paley’s
and Darwin’s emphasis on the human eye, her reference to “the eye
prospective” merits special attention. Hers is the eye that looks ahead
toward heaven; Darwin’s, by contrast, is the eye retrospective, and back-
ward was not the direction in which Dickinson chose to gaze.
Many thinkers preceded Darwin in exploring evolutionary possibilities.
As his opening chapter of Origin makes clear, he acknowledged debts to
researchers around the world, and his biographers and critics have since
filled out the lines of influence in greater detail. So, when his book appeared
in 1859 (selling out in one day), those who shared Darwin’s scholarly
interests were prepared to respond in keeping with their established dispo-
sitions. Neal Gillespie summarizes the range of positions: “There were then,
in 1859, a minority of naturalists, some of them influential, who believed in
miraculous creation; others, of shifting number, who believed in direct
divine intervention in some mysterious but lawful manner to create each
new species; a third group, a small minority, who had accepted the descent
 Outgrowing Genesis? Dickinson, Darwin, and the Higher Criticism 55
theory; a fourth, larger group who were moving away from a belief in direct
divine intervention in favor of a natural cause, but who were either skeptical
of its being found or who were engaged in a quest for laws rather than true
causes; and, lastly, a group that busied itself with practical work and
renounced theory altogether” – most of them ready to dispute Darwin’s
claims (39). Religious writers also reacted defensively at times, including
Albert Barnes (a clergyman generally open to scientific inquiry) who went
on the attack in an 1862 issue of the Presbyterian Quarterly Review; Barnes
summarized Darwin’s book as arguing that “elephants, and tadpoles, and
men; Bacon, Newton, Plato, the orang-ou-tang and the ape; the lizard [and
fifteen more such creatures,] the malt that lay in the ‘House that Jack built,’
and the rat that ate the malt [etc.] all are derived from the same origin; all are
the results of the ‘strugglings’ of the ‘strongest’ in the formation of ‘species;’
all have, in fact, come from one little ‘monad,’ in its ‘struggles’ to develope
itself” (quoted by Marsden 148).
Emily Dickinson knew of such attacks. She could have read both serious
and comical critiques of Darwin in publications received in the Homestead.
Joan Kirkby has documented some of this material from the Hampshire and
Franklin Express, the Springfield Daily Republican, Harper’s, Scribner’s, and
the Atlantic Monthly. Among the humorous responses in the Republican was
a poem in which a jilted man warns his former sweetheart that her new
Darwinian lover will come to regard her as “Something better than a frog – a
little higher than an ape.”2 That paper, edited by Samuel Bowles, published
reviews and poems critiquing Darwin but also commending him – unlike
Josiah Holland’s Scribner’s, which only issued attacks. A Republican article
in 1872 honored Darwin as “a man who, by his genius has done more in this
age to extend the bounds of science than any other man living”; it praised
him chiefly, however, for his recognition of separate spheres of intellectual
authority, “science ruling supreme in the world of intellect and religion
ruling supreme in the world of morals” (Kirkby).
There is no evidence of Dickinson actually reading Darwin’s books to see
for herself how he presented his argument or of her taking active interest in
scientific and religious controversy. One reason for the serenity with which
she faced the intellectual turmoil Origin unleashed is that she probably
learned of it chiefly through her readings in the Atlantic Monthly, which

2
“[We] thought Darwin had thrown ‘the Redeemer’ away” (11–12). In addition to the textual evidence
and commentary Kirkby provides in this article, she maintains a gathering of additional “Darwin
References” on her Web site: www.ccs.mq.edu.au/dickinson/publications.html. That site is my source
for the 1872 quotation from the Republican that I quote later in this paragraph.
56 EBERWEIN

distinguished itself for the substantive treatment of Darwin’s theory in a

series of three 1860 articles by Asa Gray on Origin and its reviewers. Himself
a U.S. biologist rooted in evangelical faith, Gray was Darwin’s friend and an
early but not uncritical reviewer of his work. His rhetorical approach to
opening readers’ minds to Darwin’s argument entailed adopting the stance
of a genial but skeptical thinker, curious about novelty in the world of
thought but reluctant to upset comfortable opinions. Although Gray
claimed to have started his reading “like our neighbors, and, as was natural,
in a somewhat captious frame of mind” (110), Gray appreciated Darwin’s
beginning his book with attention to artificial selection as practiced by
breeders of plants and animals. Even if not a farm boy like Gray who grew
up “among cows and cabbages” (110), Dickinson might have felt similarly
comfortable in light of her own and her mother’s floricultural experiments
and her father’s and brother’s interest in horse breeding. Gray also referred
often to critics who looked for flaws in Darwin’s argument, especially the
point that little confirmatory evidence remains prior to the tertiary period.
Since then, Gray acknowledged, abundant evidence supported Darwin’s
positions on the struggle for survival and gradual evolution of plants and
animals – including man. Even while confessing at the end of his July essay
that Darwin’s “analogical inference which ‘makes the whole world
kin’. . .discomposes us” (116), Gray recognized the appeal of Darwin’s
reasoning and noted that the theory “singularly accords with great classes
of facts otherwise insulated and enigmatic, and explains many things which
are thus far utterly inexplicable upon any other scientific assumption” (231).
With Gray providing Dickinson’s introduction to Darwin, it is no wonder
that she recognized explosive potential in the new scientific thinking but
responded without fear – even, at times, with amusement.
With regard to natural selection (and sexual selection, in particular),
James Guthrie provides a delightful example of Dickinson’s ability to recast
Darwin’s argument in her own cryptic, whimsical manner in “There is a
flower that Bees prefer” (Fr642), an 1860 poem that he reads in terms of The
Origin of Species. Many of her poems show close attention to biological
processes in plants and animals, sometimes reflecting scientifically detached
observational skills but often revealing the counter-influence of
Transcendental Romanticism; they interpret natural phenomena symboli-
cally and assume a close spiritual connectedness between the natural envi-
ronment and the human mind that responds to it, conveying a sense of
empowerment comparable to Emerson’s ecstasy while crossing a bare
common in the November rain or Thoreau’s awareness of pine needles
expanding in sympathy.
 Outgrowing Genesis? Dickinson, Darwin, and the Higher Criticism 57
Several strands of her complex approach to nature appear in this poem:
God made a little Gentian –
It tried – to be a Rose –
And failed – and all the Summer laughed –
But just before the Snows
There rose a Purple Creature –
That ravished all the Hill –
And Summer hid her Forehead –
And Mockery – was still –
The Frosts were her condition –
The Tyrian would not come
Until the North – invoke it –
Creator – Shall I – bloom? (Fr520)
There is a trace of Darwin here in the sense of struggle for advancement
and the attention to environmental factors that retard or favor evolution,
though Dickinson’s personification of the aspiring wildflower also calls
to mind Emerson’s image of the worm that “Mounts through all the
spires of form.” Yet Dickinson embeds this little story in language that
assumes reliance of the “Creature” (a word, oddly enough, commonly
used by Darwin, though in lower case) and “Creator,” ending with a
question directed to her own aspirations for deferred poetic glory and/or
eternal life.
Some aspects of Darwin’s theory that affronted many of her contemporaries
seem not to have fazed Dickinson. Her four references to monkeys all
preceded 1859, and “ape” appears only as a verb. If it was offensive to think
that Darwin ascribed shared inheritance to human beings and anthropoid
apes, young Emily amused herself by imagining such a combination right on
her own family tree when she linked “School masters and Monkeys” in an 1850
reference to her brother (L37). She seemed to anticipate the conflict that would
erupt between Darwinians and biblical literalists when she commented on
their father’s reaction to Jenny Lind’s concert triumph that it was “as if old
Abraham had come to see the show, and thought it was all very well, but a little
excess of Monkey” (L46). Dickinson was quite capable of affirming affinity to
lower animals, even the earthworms to whom she referred as “Our little
Kinsmen” (Fr932). In any case, religion could offend human pride more
sharply than Darwin, as she noted in a letter complaining that “Our Pastor
says we are a ‘Worm’” (L193). If this letter were not dated by Thomas Johnson
as probably written in 1858, one would suspect comic allusion to Darwin in her
suggestion that “‘Vain – sinful Worm’ is possibly of another species.”
58 EBERWEIN

Dickinson’s poems certainly reflect concurrence with Darwin’s argument

that men and women who “behold the face of nature bright with gladness”
often “do not see or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us
mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life; or we
forget how largely these songsters, or their eggs, or their nestlings, are
destroyed by birds and beasts of prey” (Origin 52). Despite many joyous
evocations of natural beings, she shows us a bird that “bit an Angle Worm in
halves / And ate the fellow, raw” (Fr359). Nature, in Dickinson’s poems,
often shows herself as “the Gentlest Mother” (Fr741); yet she “sometimes
sears a Sapling – / Sometimes – scalps a Tree” (Fr457).
An important motivation ascribed to Darwin for rejecting the idea of
divine involvement with the succession and extermination of life forms was
his revulsion against the sort of “Approving God” Dickinson represents as
allowing frost to dispatch the “happy Flower” (Fr1668).3 Neal C. Gillespie
summarizes Darwin’s beliefs from the late 1830s through late 1850s as built
on four assumptions: “that God cannot be the author of the cruelties and
waste seen in nature; that God cannot be the Creator of a world that
deceives, mocks, and misleads honest inquiry; that he has created only
through general laws; and lastly, that he does not stoop to trifling works
of natural engineering” (125). Dickinson, who remarked bitterly “how many
barefoot shiver I trust their Father knows who saw not fit to give them
shoes” (L207), certainly sympathized with the first of those views, though
without wholly casting off the Calvinist idea of an inscrutably unsentimen-
tal God. As her sister retorted when told her cats were preying on birds,
“You must blame the Creator” (Sewall 247).
But what of Darwin’s threat to “the Redeemer?” How had he thrown
Jesus away? For the most part, it was God the Creator whose glory was
undermined by new approaches to science. Truth to tell, Paley’s natural
theology offered no evidence for Christ’s role in salvation history, though he
suggested that the wise and benevolent deity discoverable in natural order
would reveal himself further. Paul’s teaching that Christ is the new Adam
atoning for Original Sin and its aftermath served as the basis for Christian
belief, but questions about the possibility of any primal human pair raised
doubts about the very need for redemption. In an ironic twist, the argu-
ments for successive creations that were often used by those attempting to
maintain a role for the biblical Creator – and especially the tendency of the
time to assume separate creation for each race as a distinct species – left

3
Patrick J. Keane foregrounds this poem, “Apparently with no surprise,” throughout Emily Dickinson’s
Approving God: Divine Design and the Problem of Suffering to place her in a Darwinian context.
 Outgrowing Genesis? Dickinson, Darwin, and the Higher Criticism 59
unsettled which pair might be Adam and Eve and, perhaps, whether
Christ’s atonement applied only to one race. Darwin bore no responsibility
for those concerns; his theory actually came down in favor of one originat-
ing pair – themselves evolved from other organisms leading back, probably,
to some primal living cell from which plants as well as animals derived.
“Evolved” is the key word. Whereas Christian theology (especially within
the Calvinist tradition) emphasized the Fall and Atonement, Darwin’s
theory prompted understanding of man as having risen over the course of
millennia – and by natural processes operating randomly (Brooke 193;
Carter 49). In that sense, he may be seen as throwing the Redeemer away
if the fundamental lesson of the New England Primer (“In Adam’s fall / We
sinned all”) turned out to be fictitious. If Dickinson could make fun of this
possibility in her letter to Judge Lord, it was because the dogma of Original
Sin never figured strongly in her own religious consciousness and because
her love for Jesus rested on a sense of shared suffering rather than belief in
forensic justice. After all, the Creator God of the Old Testament promised
Abraham innumerable progeny (quite a Darwinian proof of life force,
though achieved by divine rather than natural selection), but it was Christ
who held out hope to her for personal immortality.
It was to scriptural more than natural revelation that she had been taught
to look for religious assurance, but “science” (in the sense of orderly,
systematic thought, which was what it often meant in Dickinson’s usage)
had begun to blur vision in her “eye prospective.” Not only had astronom-
ical, geological, and biological discoveries undermined literal interpretations
of the relatively few Old Testament passages directly concerning natural
phenomena (Stiling 177), but scriptural scholarship as practiced by advo-
cates of the Higher Criticism introduced interpretive methods based on
linguistic, anthropological, and literary research. In Dickinson’s childhood,
President Heman Humphrey of Amherst College enjoined parents to
educate their children in strict obedience to the Bible. One of his worries,
however, was that families might encourage scripture-reading of a sort by
which the revealed word would be approached for its story-telling interest
(as Dickinson later urged in her “Diagnosis of the Bible, by a Boy,” Fr1577).
As a young woman, she responded most warmly to preaching by Edwards
Amasa Park, and she was attracted to Park’s and Horace Bushnell’s aesthetic
approaches to homiletics, which reflected an emerging Romantic literary
culture (Habegger 310–13). This may also account for Dickinson’s impas-
sioned response to Charles Wadsworth, whose influence first reached her
through his preaching before he became her “dearest earthly friend” (L807).
Bushnell also figured among the clergymen who, according to Peter
60 EBERWEIN

Addinall, attempted to harmonize science with religion – especially with

respect to events perceived as miraculous (122). Another factor influencing
biblical reading in her time was the proliferation of texts and translations. In
the revivalistic culture dominant throughout the antebellum years and
reaching its crescendo in 1858, just one year before Origin, Protestant readers
found many but often discordant guides to interpretation. Among these,
Dickinson seems to have been drawn to the more literary and symbolic
approaches, those most reflective of Romantic culture but also most
in accord with the mytho-poetic insights offered by the century’s most
theologically “scientific” approach to scripture.
The most disturbing intellectual energy in this theological environment
was the movement beginning in Germany known as the Higher Criticism.
Its practitioners set biblical stories in perspective as records compiled by
unidentified and sometimes contradictory authors over vast time spans,
responding to different historical conditions, and inflected by myths of
neighboring peoples. Dickinson responded, a little sadly, to such findings
when she acknowledged “No Moses there can be” (Fr521) and identified
Eden as “a legend – dimly told” (Fr378). Attacks on Old Testament
historicity, though unsettling for the new kinds of evidence employed,
reinforced discoveries already being made by geologists like Lyell. Far
more disturbing was the assault of the Higher Critics on the New
Testament, especially David Friedrich Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu (1835–6)
and Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jésus (1863).
Although one of Dickinson’s favorite poets, Robert Browning, directly
referred to Strauss in “Bishop Blougram’s Apology” and caricatured his
methods in “Christmas-Eve,” she made no such overt references to current
readings in her treatment of the challenges to belief she shared with
Browning. Very likely, she heard of Strauss’s book only indirectly – as had
been the case with The Origin of Species. She must have known, however, that
her beloved Marian Evans (George Eliot) translated Das Leben Jesu for its
1846 English publication and that Evans’s own spiritual unrest had led her to
support this new scholarly approach. Influenced by philosophers Kant,
Schelling, and Hegel, Strauss professed respect for all religions, Christianity
in particular, yet insisted on applying insights of philosophy, linguistics,
comparative religion, political science, anthropology, and poetics to distin-
guish layers of reliability within New Testament texts (Dodd 91). Strauss
took a mytho-poetic approach to source materials to elucidate a kind of truth
about Jesus different from the tenets literalistic readers accepted. It was also
an evolutionary approach in terms of recognizing how sequential historico-
cultural understandings inflected biblical writings.
 Outgrowing Genesis? Dickinson, Darwin, and the Higher Criticism 61
Dickinson had one great advantage over literal-minded Christians in
responding to Strauss’s challenge: she felt comfortable with metaphor. As
she assured George Gould in a sprightly 1850 letter in which she declared
herself “Judith the heroine of the Apocrypha,” “That’s what they call a
metaphor in our country. Don’t be afraid of it, sir, it won’t bite” (L34).
Dickinson took an often playful approach to biblical materials, drawing
hopeful inferences even from stories discredited as facts:
Paradise is of the Option –
Whosoever will
Own in Eden notwithstanding
Adam, and Repeal. (Fr1125b)
There were, however, New Testament passages to which Dickinson clung
with special fervor, especially those offering hope of eternal life. “‘Sown in
dishonor’?” (Fr153), for example, seizes upon I Corinthians, 15:42, where
Paul speaks of the human body as “sown in corruption [but] raised in
incorruption” and identifies Christ as the New Adam. As Hiroko Uno has
shown, Dickinson had taken special interest in Edward Hitchcock’s
Lecture XI of The Religion of Geology in which he speculated on “the
nature of the future glorified body” and questions of whether whole
bodies would rise at the General Resurrection or only their tiniest com-
ponents (177–84). The poet would comfort her cousin Perez Dickinson
Cowan when his daughter died in 1879, citing this passage and affirming
reliance on its historical authenticity: “Paul knew the Man that knew the
News, / He passed through Bethlehem” (Fr1537b). Paul’s knowledge of
Jesus came through his miraculously direct encounter with the ascended
Jesus – an experience never replicated. Unlike Strauss, who claimed that
his writing emerged from “internal liberation of the feelings and intellect
from certain religious and dogmatical presuppositions” that “the author
easily attained by means of philosophical studies” (4), Dickinson
struggled with application of biblical promises to her own condition.
Still, she turned to scripture with hopes of conviction and probably felt
no attraction to Strauss’s learned but dispassionate analysis, which paid
special attention to authorship, to time gaps between events and written
records, and to the intellectual culture of the early faith communities that
generated these New Testament texts.
If we compare Strauss’s treatment of the conversation John’s gospel
presents between Jesus and Nicodemus with Dickinson’s allusions to the
same event, differences in manner leap out; yet both seem to have seized
upon the same essential truth conveyed by this text. Strauss thought of
62 EBERWEIN

religion as “the perception of truth, not in the form of an idea, which is the
philosophic perception, but invested with imagery” (61) and therefore
approached this story for its mythic value even when assuring readers in
his “Preface” that “the supernatural birth of Christ, his miracles, his resur-
rection and ascension, remain eternal truths, whatever doubts may be cast
on their reality as historical facts” (4). Strauss’s first concern with the story in
John iii: 1–21 had to do with the puzzle of its inclusion only in John’s gospel.
His analysis zeroed in on the rhetorical situation faced by the author of the
fourth gospel as he wrote for a relatively sophisticated Greek-speaking
readership. Proceeding with his analysis, Strauss called attention to details
of the story that suggested embellishment. He looked for “inducements”
leading the evangelist “to represent this individual as more simple than he
really was,” and that inquiry took him to answers that were more literary
than theological: the appeal of narrative contrasts, the pleasure for Christian
readers in seeing a master of Israel befuddled by a figure of speech they
themselves grasped easily, and the “constant method of the fourth evangelist
in detailing the conversations of Jesus, to form the knot and the progress of
the discussion, by making the interlocutors understand literally what Jesus
intended figuratively” (397–8). Even if Nicodemus were an invented char-
acter and the dramatic interchange unconvincing, Strauss found a core of
truth in this instructive tale’s message of rebirth through repentance.
Dickinson’s “An altered look about the hills” (Fr90) appears as a concise
and doctrinally apt distillation of what Strauss found true. Dispensing with
narrative altogether, Dickinson left it to her reader to recall John’s story and
its riddle. Like John’s original Christian readers, as Strauss conjectured
them, she responded gleefully to her own (and her intended readers’)
ready grasp of what Christ meant by being born again. Basically, of course,
this is a poem about nature and the first intimations of spring (“An added
strut in Chanticleer – / A flower expected everywhere”) as evidence of the
earth awakening after winter, though the concluding lines also imply
human expectation of life after death: “And Nicodemus’ Mystery /
Receives it’s annual reply!” In a much later poem, “The Bone that has no
Marrow” (Fr1218), she confronts biological evidence of lifelessness, then
moves into a sort of mock-moral didacticism as though it is the fossil’s duty
to regain life, and ends with questions that assume the reader’s knowledge of
how Nicodemus responded to Christ’s figure of speech:
But how shall finished Creatures
A function fresh obtain?
Old Nicodemus’ Phantom
Confronting us again!
 Outgrowing Genesis? Dickinson, Darwin, and the Higher Criticism 63
But what was the evidence for hopes of immortality? Cycles of natural
renewal offer no rescue for any particular flower, nor could fossils on view at
Amherst College recover warmth and motion without miraculous inter-
vention like that in Ezekiel’s prophecy of dry bones. Within her theological
tradition, heaven would be restricted to Christians experientially renewed
by grace. Whether or not she read books by Lyell, Darwin, and Strauss,
Dickinson must have observed that standards of evidence had become ever
more exacting. Strauss built his case on extensive citations of biblical
commentary read in light of deep linguistic scholarship. Darwin’s writing,
like Lyell’s, relied on attention to scientific findings from all over the world,
and their conclusions emerged from extremely varied, empirically testable
experimental knowledge. Darwin built his case with reference to as many
species as possible: to plants, fish, worms, birds, reptiles, mammals, domes-
ticated beings and wild ones, and to human beings from as many environ-
ments as he could. He conducted painstaking research on honeycombs,
coral reefs, and birds’ bills in the Galapagos. He delved into fossil evidence
to trace organic processes in the distant past, considered what could be
learned from the presence of vestigial organs in living creatures, and sought
continuing evolution in life forms of his own day that were discovered in
transitional ecosystems. Darwin meticulously examined reasons for doubt-
ing his own conclusions, paying special attention to problematic areas. Still,
when today’s scholars seek what was distinctive in his work, it is not the
empirical inductive method they stress, since that met the expectation of the
times. It is, rather, his brilliance in a complex kind of thought that set him
apart from Lyell and other scientists examining similar questions – his
willingness to engage in abstract thinking, his eagerness to test hypotheses,
his genius in synthesizing his own findings with those of others, and his
arrival at a theory that has continued ever since to generate fruitful questions
for scientific research (Gayon 240–1; Ghiselin 15, 241).
In some ways, Dickinson’s artistic and intellectual leaps resemble
Darwin’s in her tendency to seek insight from many different sources
(Higginson, Gladden, Wadsworth, Emerson, Eliot) and from observations
of nature close at hand in her conservatory as well as those she knew from
friends’ travels and her reading. Like Darwin’s, her writing has been
commended for its heuristic value in sparking fresh questions for herself
and thousands of readers to explore (McIntosh 3). Virginia Oliver draws
instructive parallels between Dickinson’s mental processes and the science
of the time, though recognizing that she pursued quite different questions –
eschatological rather than biological. Oliver argues that even Dickinson’s
frankly acknowledged doubts served her “as efforts to pile up evidence for
64 EBERWEIN

belief” (6), as did Darwin’s late chapters in Origin examining likely objec-
tions to his theory.
The questions Dickinson addressed, however, resisted empirical test-
ing, like the question of the origin of life itself that Darwin admitted he
could not answer. Looking at ways different kinds of thinkers attempted
to prove or refute evidence for immortality, she found limitations in all
approaches.
This World is not conclusion.
A Species stands beyond –
Invisible, as Music –
But positive, as Sound –
It beckons, and it baffles –
Philosophy, dont know –
And through a Riddle, at the last –
Sagacity, must go –
To guess it, puzzles scholars –
To gain it, Men have borne
Contempt of Generations
And Crucifixion, shown –
Faith slips – and laughs, and rallies –
Blushes, if any see –
Plucks at a twig of Evidence –
And asks a Vane, the way –
Much Gesture, from the Pulpit –
Strong Hallelujahs roll –
Narcotics cannot still the Tooth
That nibbles at the soul – (Fr373)
In declaring that “Philosophy, dont know,” Dickinson may well have
referred to natural philosophy as the decreasingly sturdy foundation for
science. “Sagacity” must work “through a Riddle” rather than field or
laboratory research, a methodology congenial to someone who would tell
her sister-in-law many years later that “in a Life that stopped guessing, you
and I should not feel at home” (L586). “To guess [or prove], it puzzles
scholars,” however much commentary they may amass in the manner of the
Higher Critics. Religion points confidently to the expected answer but
seems more clamorous than convincing.
What keeps the issue alive in this poem, however, is the experiential base
of human behavior, including heroic sacrifices of martyrs. Perhaps the
strongest evidence comes from an intuitive power equivalent to a new
sense as “positive, as Sound,” though not dependent on any bodily organ
of sensation. She may have been thinking of the experience Jonathan
 Outgrowing Genesis? Dickinson, Darwin, and the Higher Criticism 65
Edwards defined in “A Divine and Supernatural Light” as “a true sense of
the divine excellency of the things revealed in the Word of God, and a
conviction of the truth and reality of them, thence arising” (111). In this
context, “Faith” may appear weak in her lack of direction, plucking at “a
twig of Evidence,” but reliance on inner assurance, openness to all possi-
bilities, an aptitude for riddles, and relentless curiosity might still be the
most promising approach to conviction.
A key word in line 2 of this poem brings Darwin to mind. What did she
mean by “Species” in “A Species stands beyond?” Another species of world?
If so, “species” acquires an astoundingly comprehensive meaning. A new
species of humanity, vested in a resurrection body? Although the word
suggests Darwin and appears in a poem dated 1862, by which time Origin
had become well known, she seems not to have meant biological groupings.
On the other hand, this word so central to scientific discourse itself bespoke
the limitations of science. If the first rule of systematic argumentation is to
define one’s terms, then “species” turned out to be as resistant to definition
as “immortality” is to empirical proof. Chapter II of Origin begins with the
admission that scientists had been unable to agree on a definition of this key
term, and Lyell acknowledges in Antiquity of Man that “zoologists
and botanists are not only more at a loss than ever how to define a species,
but even to determine whether it has any real existence in nature, or is a
mere abstraction of the human intellect” (Origin 38; Antiquity 304). In
Dickinson’s usage, “species” sometimes referred in general terms to evi-
dence of organic variety in the natural environment such as the “familiar
species / That perished by the Door,” which only the true poet would find
inspiring (Fr446). “Perished” is a key word in that natural life processes
resulted in decay, the death of the individual plant or animal, and (from
Darwin’s perspective) of the species itself. Yet an early poem, “Went up a
year this evening!” (Fr72) shifts the range of thinking somewhat toward the
heavenly “Species” that “stands beyond” by portraying a dying person
talking “softly of new species [of Roses] / To pick another day.”
In light of standards of proof dominating religious inquiry as well as science
in her time, the correspondence between Dickinson and the Rev. Washington
Gladden takes on special poignancy. That letter to Otis Lord with which I
began this discussion may never have been mailed. On the afternoon of May
1, 1882, when she added her mischievous comment that “we thought Darwin
had thrown ‘the Redeemer’ away,” the Judge was taken gravely ill. Johnson
places an undated letter from Gladden to Dickinson (L752a) as a probable
answer to an inquiry she addressed to him when alarmed about her lover’s
danger. Under other circumstances, the poet appreciated Lord’s humorous
66 EBERWEIN

approach to religion and respected his choice not to join a church. As he hung
between life and death, however, her “eye prospective” fastened on prospects
of eternity. It was a familiar question for her – “Where go we – / Go we
anywhere / Creation after this?” (Fr1440), but now it entailed another person’s
ability to believe. Gladden’s response, beginning with a quotation from her
own letter, shows that she approached him with the question that dominated
her life: “Is immortality true?” and that she posed her own inquiry as a request
for arguments she could use to convince a dying yet skeptical friend.
Gladden’s answer resoundingly affirmed his personal faith. Beyond his
own confidence in the soul’s eternal destiny, he cited the argument from
authority: “I believe in the life everlasting, because Jesus Christ taught it.”
After Strauss, could Dickinson or Lord feel certain that the proof-text
Gladden quoted, “In my Father’s house are many mansions,” was actually
Christ’s language and not just a reflection of faith within the early Christian
community? Gladden’s “say what you will about him” hints at awareness of
such doubts, so he reinforced the proof-text with a different basis for trust in
Jesus: recognition of his unparalleled insight into “the human soul, its
nature, its laws, its destinies.” Stopping short of claiming proof for a faith
that inevitably remained speculative, the minister acknowledged that “abso-
lute demonstration there can be none of this truth; but a thousand lines of
evidence converge toward it; and I believe it.” Whether this argument
would have satisfied Judge Lord with his legal habits of reasoning is unclear.
It probably comforted Dickinson in her anxiety, especially as Gladden
concluded on a pastoral note of gentle compassion toward her friend. In
this moment of crisis, she found herself once again threatened by loss of the
sweetness that made her mortal life joyous. Whether religion could make
sense of threatened loss remained a mystery, but she knew this question lay
beyond the reach of even the most brilliant scientist. As she had written to
Elizabeth Holland in 1871 (the year Descent of Man appeared), “Why the
Thief ingredient accompanies all Sweetness Darwin does not tell us” (L359).
It was, however, the sweetness of this life that Emily Dickinson savored, and
the sweetness guided her thoughts to immortality, which could never be
rationally proven but could be sensed through natural epiphanies, experi-
ences that told her “Amherst has gone to Eden” (L354), and in the friend-
ships that reminded her how “to be loved is Heaven” (L361).
Perhaps because her own spiritual experience depended more on riddles,
surprises, and everyday miracles than systematic embrace of doctrine,
Dickinson continued to discover evidence of new birth all around her.
Undaunted by Darwin, she kept her “eye prospective” focused on intima-
tions of immortality and her eye retrospective focused on sustaining
 Outgrowing Genesis? Dickinson, Darwin, and the Higher Criticism 67
memories, often rooted in nature. One among many assertions of grateful
joy in the ongoing energy of creation serves as an especially fitting coda to
this essay in its recapitulation of familiar themes. Only weeks before her
death, Dickinson wrote a note thanking a friend for a gift of spring flowers.
Evidently they reminded her of other daphnes and arbutus she had searched
out as a girl, of plant specimens in her herbarium, of floral gifts received by
her or sent to friends, of friendship itself, of the Bible, of new beginnings
and transformations, and of all the experiential evidence that sustained her
in hope. “If we love Flowers, are we not ‘born again’ every Day, without the
distractions of Nicodemus?” she asked: “Not to outgrow Genesis, is a sweet
monition” (L1037).
 chapter 4

Touching the Wounds: Emily Dickinson and

Christology
Linda Freedman

At the center of the Christian story there is a death, and not just any death
but the death of a figure who is both God and man and who, by dying,
challenges the very assumptions on which we base the categories “God” and
“man.” Christology is the theological term given to the varied philosophical
attempts to rationalize and make relevant the existence of this highly
contradictory person. It has become a commonplace of Dickinson criticism
to say that the poet turned to Christ as a representative man of suffering and
that she formed a poetic identification with him on those grounds.1 The
purpose of my essay is to argue that her poetic identification with Christ was
also part of an epistemological and aesthetic philosophy and that, for this
reason, her poetry is illuminated and illuminating in a Christological
context.
I focus specifically on Dickinson’s meditations on the death and
resurrection of Christ, exploring the relationship between suffering and
change on the cross. I argue that the paradox of the God-man gives us a
vocabulary for understanding the animating epistemic absences in
Dickinson’s poetry. The opacity of Dickinson’s poetic texture derives its
quality from her desire to accommodate the beyond into the world of
experience. Nowhere is this clearer than in poems that concern Christ’s
death and resurrection. I argue that the incarnation provides a model for the
makings of poetry in the ultimate coincidence of opposites in the God-man,
and that the resurrection suggests a further narrative to express poetic
possibility.
Embodiment is a much studied subject in nineteenth-century American
literature, and it would be wrong to equate Dickinson’s focus on the body

1
Eberwein, Dickinson: Strategies of Limitation; Lundin; and McIntosh. McIntosh’s argument is partic-
ularly relevant as he argues convincingly and sensitively that the unknown was the ground on which
Dickinson encountered God. However, McIntosh is far more concerned than I am to establish a direct
connection between Dickinson’s personal and poetic religiosity.

68
 Touching the Wounds: Dickinson and Christology 69
unproblematically with her interest in the incarnation. Incarnation is an
older theological notion; embodiment is a modern and often secular issue
relating, among other things, to gender, violence, and sex.2 That said, her
concern with embodiment has a vitally involved theological component,
and she frequently returns to the peculiar fact of the incarnation to express a
fundamental poetic tension between the finite and the infinite. This has
attracted some critical attention. Dorothy Oberhaus comments on the
thought Dickinson gives to the physical body of Christ, quoting “‘sure
foot,” “second face,” “divinest tiptoe,” “highest head”” (344). Most signifi-
cantly, perhaps, Roxanne Harde has argued that Dickinson revised
Christianity through a Christology of the body. Poetry and bodiliness, she
argues, are at the heart of Dickinson’s Christology, and embodiment
became her primary means of defining her relationship with Jesus (4). In
this respect, Harde’s article most closely anticipates my reading of
Dickinson’s Christological aesthetic. However, her investigation operates
purely within the binaries of faith and doubt. Images of the body depict
faith; images of disembodiment depict doubt. Harde concludes that
“Dickinson’s world view was Christian. The presence of salvific love in
her life came with the insistence that she identify with the purpose and
mission of Jesus of Nazareth, and her writing centres on that mission” (8).
I am also indebted to the groundbreaking work done by James McIntosh,
whose study of Dickinson’s religious imagination assesses her poetry as an
alternate expression of faith, concluding that, for Dickinson, the unknown
was the ground upon which one truly encountered God. I am in complete
accord with his claim that “the unknown is not so much a subject she takes
up as a condition of her poetic existence she perpetually comes up against”
(125). This seems to me to be a wonderful way of expressing the vitality of
Dickinson’s poetic texture and the paradox of her epistemic reaching
enabled and halted by its own limitations. McIntosh, like Harde and
Oberhaus, gears his argument towards discovering Dickinson’s personal
faith.
My essay is not intended to decide whether or not Dickinson believed in
God. Instead, I want to emphasise the philosophical common ground
between poetry and theology that I think enabled Dickinson to draw
from a rich religious history and so enables us to read the Christological
aesthetic of her verse without it being necessary to define her personal
beliefs. With this in mind, I will draw from the Christologies to which

2
See for example Cameron, The Corporeal Self; Noble, Masochistic Pleasures; Sanchez-Eppler, Touching
Liberty, and Homans.
70 FREEDMAN

Dickinson would have been exposed – from Paul to Calvin to Edwards and
the liberal theologians of her own day. But I will also read her poetry in the
light of the twentieth-century thinker Jürgen Moltmann.
Moltmann is a German Protestant theologian, strongly influenced by
Karl Barth’s rejection of nineteenth-century liberal Christianity and atten-
tion to Christian paradox. In a post-liberal return to some of the more
perplexing questions of Reformation theology, Moltmann helps frame
Dickinson’s unique position in relation to the Christologies of her day.
The philosophical common ground between Moltmann and Dickinson
helps us comprehend the intensity with which Dickinson engaged with the
aesthetic implications of the Puritan God-man even as she felt sympatheti-
cally drawn towards the human and historical Jesus defined by the Higher
Criticism. Moltmann illuminates Dickinson’s unique philosophical and
poetic engagement with Puritan ideas not only because he encourages us
to think about the way humanity and divinity might be held together but
also because he elucidates the relationship between theological revelation
and aesthetic representation. Most importantly, perhaps, discussing
Dickinson in relation to Moltmann shows how she took the tension
inherent in Puritan revelation beyond an inherited sense of how notions
of the absolute might affect representation towards an understanding of
how representation might affect notions of the absolute.

incarnation aesthetics
Moltmann’s theology is aesthetically relevant to Dickinson’s poetry because
he, like Dickinson, relies on a certain degree of slippage between revelation
and representation. In this sense Moltmann offers a triangulation of
Dickinson with her Puritan heritage. Moltmann talks of Christ as God’s
representation, not just his revelation. This is important because represen-
tation implies a creative function. Where revelation suggests a tight con-
nection between the image and the original, representation suggests the
image has an effect on the original. Representation belongs to the world of
art. It opens up a space for creative possibility. Crucially, in Moltmann’s
theology, Christ not only reveals the original, his representation makes a
new place for God.
In order to understand Dickinson’s philosophical relationship to
Moltmann, and the poetic implications of this statement, we must first
understand something of her debt to Puritan thought. From the first
century c.e., the notion of a hypostatic union was used to express the
union and distinction of the humanity and divinity of Christ in clear terms.
 Touching the Wounds: Dickinson and Christology 71
“Hypostasis” refers to the essential person of Christ as opposed to his
human and divine natures. According to the doctrine of the hypostatic
union, the human and divine natures of Christ remain separate even as they
are joined together in the fact of the incarnation. This doctrine aimed to
solve a paradox, but really it articulated a philosophical crisis that would
continue for thousands of years. The hypostatic union was carried into
Calvinist theology and, by the nineteenth century in New England, Puritan
ministers had been instrumental in introducing some conceptual slippage
between divine revelation and human representation that centered on the
way in which absolute and relative could be held together.
In their sermons, Puritan theologians from Samuel Mather through
to Jonathan Edwards and Dickinson’s own minister, Aaron Colton,
struggled repeatedly with the problem reflected in the doctrine of the
hypostatic union – the difficulty of holding humanity and divinity together
in a single relationship. Puritan theories of representation frequently
mirrored theories of revelation. The theory of technologia, for example,
held that the rules of art were the rules of God. Early ideas of typology
enforced historical connections between type and antitype. By asserting the
strictest possible connection between human images and divine truths,
technologia and typology sought to limit the dangerous powers of the
imagination. But, as critics from Perry Miller to Susan Manning have
noted, the specter of the unknowable continued to haunt whatever could
be written, thought about, or otherwise experienced in human terms
(Miller New England Mind).
For these reasons, Dickinson’s Puritan heritage was probably the single
biggest influence on her Christological aesthetic, but it was complicated by
the influences of liberal Christianity and comparative religion dominant
within Boston intellectual society and fed through her correspondence
with, and reading of, writers on both sides of the Atlantic who were
conduits for an earlier Lockean rationalism and a more recent German
idealism. A development of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
Puritan traditions which Dickinson inherited, this nineteenth-century
Christology was clearly far too varied for me to be able to do it justice
here but, broadly speaking, it emphasised a Jesuology, a focus on the
humanity of Jesus, either through a Deistic and rational concern to establish
a historical basis for belief or through a more spiritual desire to see the God-
man as an example of perfected humanity – a Man-god. When Emerson
wrote: “Jesus astonishes and overpowers sensual people. They cannot unite
him to history or reconcile him with themselves. As they come to revere
their intuitions and aspire to live holily, their own piety explains every fact,
72 FREEDMAN

every word,”3 he rejected the “corpse-cold” Unitarianism which sought to

provide a rational basis for faith in historical evidence and echoed something
of Schleiermacher’s desire to see Christ as a perfected humanity in which
deity was experienced (385).
Dickinson’s poetic thinking through of the paradox of the hypostatic
union reflects both the concerns of her Puritan forbears to work from above
in order to understand how God could become man and the concerns of her
more liberal contemporaries to work from below, drawing from the human
life of Jesus and finding parallels with classical and mythological figures.
Well-schooled in the tenets of the hypostatic union, she felt Christ to be
both human and divine, and her sympathy and interest often turned on that
very point. For example, in 1877, in a letter of consolation to Thomas
Wentworth Higginson, she wrote: “To be human is more than to be divine,
for when Christ was divine he was uncontented ‘til he had been human”
(L519). Implying that sorrow and grief are superior because they are human
feelings, Dickinson also acknowledges the peculiarity of the Christian God-
man. Unlike Greek stories of men like Prometheus who aspire to the
condition of the gods, the Gospel story depicts a God who descends to
the embodied mortality of a man.
It is here that Moltmann’s theology is particularly illuminating. He
argues that a Christology maintaining that the death of Jesus is the death
of God cannot seek to maintain a dialectical tension between the divine and
the human – they must encompass each other (205). He opens up one of the
fundamental difficulties in placing Dickinson firmly in a Puritan or liberal
tradition. For Dickinson, as for Moltmann, Christ is not the Puritan vehicle
or the historical human being. The fact of the incarnation changes her
understanding of the meaning of both divinity and humanity because it
forces these opposites into a relationship with each other. Moreover,
Moltmann, like Dickinson, extends the theological problem to aesthetic
principles. Both the twentieth-century theologian and the nineteenth-
century poet see Christ’s body as having a fundamental role in challenging
the basic distinction between the nature of God as immutable and eternal,
and the being of humanity as mutable and temporal. Moltmann writes,
“God allows himself to be forced out. God suffers, God allows himself to be
crucified and is crucified” (248). It is in the experience of mental and bodily
suffering that Moltmann locates the possibility of a changing absolute.
Dickinson’s “A Word made flesh is seldom” is a touchstone poem for
understanding the aesthetic implications of this theological tension.
3
Emerson, “History,” p. 16. A copy of the essay was in the Dickinson library.
 Touching the Wounds: Dickinson and Christology 73

A Word made Flesh is seldom

And tremblingly partook
Nor then perhaps reported
But have I not mistook
Each one of us has tasted
With ecstasies of stealth
The very food debated
To our specific strength –
A word that breathes distinctly
Has not the power to die
Cohesive as the Spirit
It may expire if He –
“Made Flesh and dwelt among us”
Could condescension be
Like this consent of Language
This loved Philology (Fr1715)
The last two lines point suggestively to “This” poem. Language has con-
sented to be part of human communication, and it is both the condition
and object of the poet’s love. The word “philology” is a considered choice. It
has its etymological roots in philos (love) and logos (the creative principle
associated with speech or action). So, Dickinson’s love of language reflects
an affinity with the verbal character of Christ.4
Dickinson’s “loved Philology” acknowledges writing to be engaged in
a similar compromise as revelation. For Dickinson, writing, like
revelation, seeks to accommodate absolute truths and make inspiration,
the animating principle of poetic “Language” and a force which echoes
religious “Spirit,” comprehensible to human beings. It is through her own
poetic relation to a notional absolute that Dickinson tries to understand the
incarnation. But if philology is loved in this poem, then it is also capable of
loving. This is a poem about relationship as opposed to doctrine. It is about
an active rather than passive revelation. The power of the Eucharist, here,
lies in Christ’s ability to remain distinct in the flesh of each individual – the
food is consumed “to our specific strength.” It takes on a new life in
each body, not only investing the body with divine power but
gaining “specific strength” from embodiment. The spiritual quality of this

4
In the first centuries c.e., Jesus was commonly perceived and represented as the logos because as a
secondary principle the logos, like Christ, was a way of understanding an absolute.
74 FREEDMAN

religious experience is therefore enhanced by the corporeal nature of the

Eucharist.
Partaking in the sacrament is characterized by human experiences
of nervousness and awe. Trembling is theologically resonant; there are
thirty-three references to “trembling” in the King James Bible. The theo-
logical context is probably best known to a modern audience through
Kierkegaard’s appropriation of the phrase “Fear and Trembling” for his
meditation on the story of Abraham’s test of faith. There are, indeed, many
occasions in the Bible when “trembling” is coupled with “fear,” but the
pairing is not without distinction. Psalm 2, for example, commands: “serve
the Lord with fear; rejoice with trembling.” Fear and trembling are com-
panionable states and both reflect a nearness to God, but trembling is the
appropriate expression of happiness, not terror, in the presence of the
absolute. “Tremblingly partook” implies an ecstatic state of being.
But why, one feels compelled to ask, does this poem emphasize secrecy
and rarity? Puritans did not outlaw the Eucharist as they did all other
Catholic sacraments except Baptism, and the Lord’s Supper was performed
in Dickinson’s own church (though Dickinson herself, officially a non-
member, was ineligible to partake of it). In part, perhaps, Dickinson
emphasizes secrecy to express something sacred, something beyond normal
human reach. But it goes beyond that. Calvin had emphasized that the body
and blood of Christ were received in a spiritual, not physical, manner. The
speaker’s sacrament is characterized by ‘ecstasies of stealth’ – a physical
pleasure in the tantalizing possibility that she may be caught at the for-
bidden shrine, which is to say worshipping in a way that focuses more upon
the physical than Calvin would have approved. The “Word made Flesh” is
the only way the divine can enter the human, just as words must consent to
be part of language and language must consent to be part of human
communication. Flesh refers both to the flesh of Christ and to our own
human flesh. The connection between writing and divine revelation is
forged through the transgressive physicality of the Eucharist’s ecstasies.
Consumed “to our specific strength,” the Word becomes incarnate in
each individual poetic body.
The way in which meaning shifts from the theological to the aesthetic and
vice versa is a key to understanding the kind of mutability that Dickinson’s
incarnation aesthetics embrace. For just as pleasure of the Eucharist affects the
kind of literary experience rendered here, so that literary experience, the
impact of “this” poem, affects our notion of the absolute Word. The relation-
ship that Dickinson establishes moves beyond condescension on the part of
God to consent and consensual relationship. As in Moltmann’s theology the
 Touching the Wounds: Dickinson and Christology 75
movement works both ways, altering our sense of both the human and the
divine and resisting the desire to privilege either position.

reading the resurrected body

It is important to remember that the Christological preoccupation with the
body does not end with the death on the cross. Paul talks of the resurrection
of both Christ and man in terms of an “incorruptible body:” “all flesh is not
one flesh . . . there are also celestial bodies and bodies terrestrial . . . . So also
is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption and raised in
incorruption” (I Cor 15:39–42). Paul’s description of resurrection merges
two orders of reality: the essential and infinite with the sensual and finite.
Paul’s “incorruptible body” is an idea of essential flesh, finite infinity.
Calvin’s Christology uses the incorruptible body to shed light on the
paradox of the hypostatic union. He connects Christ’s transfiguration and
his resurrection, arguing that although the disciples did not understand the
transfiguration at the time, after Christ’s resurrection they believed it to
have demonstrated that “Christ continued to retain his divinity entire,
though it was concealed under the veil of flesh” (Edmondson 199). To
Calvin’s mind, their witnessing of the incorruptible body also made it easier
to understand the fact of the hypostatic union, the way in which the shining
of divinity and the corporeality of humanity could coexist.
The best example of the aesthetic possibilities of the resurrected body can
be seen in the story of doubting Thomas. In John’s Gospel, Thomas is not
convinced of Christ’s resurrection until he has physically touched his
wounds. John writes: “But he [Thomas] said unto them, except I shall see
in his hands the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will
not believe” (John 20:25). It is the reality of these flesh wounds which
convince him the man is Jesus. But Christ’s willingness to allow Thomas to
push his fingers into his wounds suggests that he feels no pain: “Then saith
he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach
hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side”(John 20:27). The wounds
convince because they are real, and yet they do not have the attributes of
real wounds; they do not hurt. The wounds are simultaneously real and
representational, human and divine, literal and allegorical. They are a
corporeal sign.
The resurrected body concretizes, literalizes, and gives proof of some-
thing that asks for faith, something that persistently resists representation.
By the very necessity of their existence, the wounds compromise their own
representational value. Touching the wounds is the action of a skeptic. The
76 FREEDMAN

wounds must be real to convince Thomas. But, as Christ feels no pain, the
wounds also suggest something beyond the physical, something the skeptic
cannot know with any degree of satisfaction. This uncertainty, this craving
for knowledge, motivates him to thrust his fingers into the wound. It would
surely have been disappointing if Christ had cried in pain.
“Split the Lark – and you’ll find the Music −” uses the story of doubting
Thomas to satirize a failure of faith in poetic experience.
Split the Lark – and you’ll find the Music –
Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled –
Scantily dealt to the Summer Morning
Saved for your Ear, when Lutes be old –
Loose the Flood – you shall find it patent –
Gush after Gush, reserved for you –
Scarlet Experiment! Sceptic Thomas!
Now, do you doubt that your Bird was true? (Fr905)
This poem brings Dickinson’s characteristic irony and humor to bear on
the limits of experimental science and rationalism and their inability to
compass poetic experience, but it also goes some way toward mapping a
Christological vocabulary for that experience. The violence of release inher-
ent in “Bulb after Bulb” as in “Gush after Gush” mimics the force and
movement of uncontrolled and inexhaustible bleeding. These lines are
shocking because of their intense physicality. There is a play on the fear
of menstrual bleeding in Gush after Gush” and “Loose the Flood.” This is a
taboo subject, Dickinson implies, a grotesque rendering of the body’s
involuntary seepages. Yet the protected delicacy of “in Silver rolled” suggests
that what is being released is pure. The uneasy juxtaposition of music with
bloody violence reflects Dickinson’s search for a language which can
describe the paradox of the resurrected body. And as the songbird also
relates to poetic potential, she elides the difference between divine and
poetic presence.5
This poem is a good example of the way in which Dickinson mixes the
personal with the philosophical. The last line is a direct address to a specific
reader. “Your Bird” suggests the speaker herself has been doubted, perhaps
in the authenticity of her love. Cut me open, she seems to say, and you will
find out that I have been true to you. The personal and quasi-romantic tone
of the poem is important.

5
See: Cooley, p. 35; Jackson, p. 187.
 Touching the Wounds: Dickinson and Christology 77
Dickinson teases the lover and the rationalist who, like the religious
skeptic, destroys the god of the unknown by bringing it too close to his
understanding through an analytic, as opposed to sensual, approach to
meaning and interpretation.
Dickinson laughs at the need to make everything visible, or “patent.”
Poetic experience, like love and faith, demands that one accept a certain
absence of knowledge. We must take a certain amount on trust (or faith).
Christ’s wounds, and Dickinson’s “lark,” function as a tangible absence of
signification, mocking the desire for concrete evidence. They refer only to
that which cannot be properly signified by the flesh and yet can only find
expression there.
This paradox is the fundamental problem of incarnation aesthetics and
one that Dickinson makes vital to her poetic texture and perspective. To see
more clearly how it matters to her, consider “The Admirations – and
Contempts – of time −.” This poem uses the narrative of the open tomb
to explore the unusual perspective of poetic vision. Typically, resurrection
narratives begin with an open tomb which no longer conceals the body of
Jesus. It portrays, then, another vital absence. The open tomb is a lacuna so
suggestive of possibility that it is no surprise Dickinson finds it an engaging
symbol with which to describe the penetrative mobility between the finite
and the infinite across a gap that can never quite be closed.
In Matthew (Dickinson’s favorite Gospel account)6 the open tomb is
revealed by an angel whose “Countenance was like lightening, and his
raiment white as snow.”7 Matthew narrates:
And for fear of him, the keepers [of the tomb] did shake and become as
dead men. And the angel answered and said unto the women, Fear not ye:
for I know that ye seek Jesus, which was crucified. He is not here: for he
is risen, as he said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay. (Matt. 28:4–6)

The angel heralds mortal death and eternal life. In Hebraic tradition, to look
upon the face of God is a death sentence (something Dickinson acknowl-
edges in the ending to Fr1353, “For none see God and live.”) To look on the
face of an angel of the Lord is to “become as dead.” The keepers’ reactions
are a simulacrum of an encounter with God as the messenger is a simula-
crum of God’s presence. Pointing them towards the open tomb, and

6
See Capps, 192–3.
7
Matt. 28.3. The same phrase is used to describe Christ’s appearance during his transfiguration. The
shining light is clearly associated with divine presence.
78 FREEDMAN

referring to the corpse in the past tense, the angel makes the absent body a
signal of future life.
Inspired by this story, Dickinson writes:
The Admirations – and Contempts – of time –
Show justest – through an Open Tomb –
The Dying – as it were a Hight
Reorganizes Estimate
And what We saw not
We distinguish clear –
And mostly – see not
What We saw before –
“Tis Compound Vision –
Light – enabling Light –
The Finite – furnished
With the Infinite –
Convex – and Concave Witness –
Back – toward Time –
And forward –
Toward the God of Him – (Fr830)
In this poem, a funeral is not only a time when what we know is
“Reorganize[d],” but when our attitude towards knowledge shifts with
perspective. The speaker balances admiration with contempt and clarity
with obfuscation, pivoting on the sense of perspective that changes when a
confrontation with “Dying” begins to open a path of reconciliation between
the finite temporal world and the infinite sense of beyond.
The open tomb is the reification of the gap in Christological thinking,
the literal rendering of the space in between humanity and divinity or the
corruptible and incorruptible body. For Dickinson, this hiatus is the poet’s
vantage point. The speaker’s perspective is from both sides of the tomb or
lens, both sides of the dying. We can see this reflected in the poetic move-
ment. The second stanza pushes back and forth, refusing to arrive and
constructing a relationship through gesture as opposed to meeting.
The Dickinson Lexicon defines “compound” both as “having a dual
nature” and as “additional or augmented.”8 Like the incarnation and
resurrection of Christ, the compounding movement of Dickinson’s poem
hinges on a duality that cannot be reconciled and that matters precisely
because it is irreconcilable and precisely because the relationship brings both

8
Emily Dickinson Lexicon (http://edl.byu.edu/index.php)
 Touching the Wounds: Dickinson and Christology 79
terms into an altered state of being. Such duality is also fundamental to
Dickinson’s poetic texture. One example can be found in the “as it were” of
the first stanza. The gesture of the simile not only allows for a gap, it
depends on one for its meaning and function. Dickinson draws our atten-
tion to the sense of otherness that her experiential verse can only imagine or
“Estimate.” The simile is also a gesture, a reach “forward” or “toward” what
Moltmann would call a fuller and freer space beyond the compromising
conditions of representation or revelation.
In this poem, “Dying” has its visual correlative in the lens and a linguistic
correlative in the simile. Like the funeral, the simile allows for altered
perspective. It has a dual nature, and that duality augments the poetic
experience. Dickinson’s poetic “lens” preserves the distinction between
time and eternity while enabling their interaction. Out of this stereoscopic
vision she breeds multiplying possibilities, expressed in the endless refrac-
tion of light – a reference, too, to the shining angelic visage. The visible
becomes visionary through intuition. Like the faith Christ demands from
the doubting Thomas, Dickinson’s poetry pushes the limits of reason. She is
impatient of fixity and therefore impatient of a singular perspective (belief
or disbelief). She brings the dynamic of faith and doubt to bear on the
aesthetics of her own epistemological crisis because it is a preoccupation
with epistemic approach – how we begin to negotiate the beyond – that
draws Dickinson to the open tomb at this moment.
The poem also suggests a reticence in this approach. “Convex” and
“Concave” seem to register two perspectives on time. In “Dying” we look
back towards time but also forward toward the “God of Him” − eternity or
immortality. Dickinson replaces the abstract noun with a personal pro-
noun, making “Time” the speaker’s companion as well as the condition of
mortal being. She wants that familiar and human dimension; moving
forward away from this companionable state is a daunting and lonely
prospect. Dickinson’s speaker is understandably nervous, driven toward a
visionary reorganization of thought but clinging still to the “convex” form
of seeing “Back – toward Time.”

process and change on the cross

The “Dying” that acts as the pivotal point for an altered perspective recalls
the reader to process and change. The gerund refuses death as an endpoint,
and this mutability is entirely consonant with Dickinson’s theology of the
cross. In her depictions of the crucifixion, Dickinson displays a clear under-
standing of the fact that Calvary throws the paradox of the hypostatic union
80 FREEDMAN

into relief because at the very moment that Christ’s human and changeable
nature is about to become redundant, it becomes the focus of the narrative.
He cannot die if he is not at that moment very much alive. In a poem where
she yearns to know “just how He suffered,” Dickinson conceives of Christ’s
death in terms of his emotional response to transition.
To know just how He suffered – would be dear –
To know if any Human eyes were near
To whom He could entrust His wavering gaze –
Until it settled broad – on Paradise –
To know if He was patient – part content –
Was Dying as He thought – or different –
Was it a pleasant Day to die –
And did the Sunshine face His way –
What was His furthest mind – Of Home – or God –
Or What the Distant say –
At News that He ceased Human Nature
Such a Day –
And Wishes – Had He any –
Just His Sigh – accented –
Had been legible – to Me –
And was He Confident until
Ill fluttered out – in Everlasting Well –
And if He spoke – What name was Best –
What last
What one broke off with
At the Drowsiest –
Was he afraid – or tranquil –
Might He know
How Conscious Consciousness – could grow –
Till Love that was – and Love too best to be –
Meet – and the Junction be Eternity (Fr688)
This poem does not name Christ, but the end of human nature is a
concept definitely associated with Christology. Though this might easily
be read as a poem about the death of one of Dickinson’s loved ones, it can
also be read as a poem about the death on Calvary. This ability to merge
theological meaning with personal experience is characteristically
Dickinsonian. It gives her philosophical intensity an important emotional
quality and makes sensitivity to feeling an essential part of her epistemic
reaching.
 Touching the Wounds: Dickinson and Christology 81
So the poet in Dickinson wants to read the dying man’s emotions as she
might read a work of literature – his expressions of grief “accented” by the
supreme Author and “legible” to her human eyes. But an accurate reading of
a legible script is impossible here, and Dickinson’s speaker derives partial
satisfaction from wondering and imagining what it would be like
“to know.” Dickinson frames the question of knowledge as a matter of
emotional response – “Was he afraid − or tranquil − / Might He know” –
because feeling is the privilege of human experience and the root of
epistemic reaching, the reason, to Dickinson’s mind, that the grieving
Higginson can draw consolation from the idea that Christ was
“uncontented ‘til he had been human.”
One of the ways in which Dickinson draws a parallel with the death on
Calvary is by taking “human nature” to its breaking point. Implicit in the
speaker’s longing “to know if any human eyes were near” is an acknowl-
edgment that only humanity, and not God, could offer support for this
intensely mortal experience. “Wavering gaze” refers back to “human eyes.”
“Wavering” suggests fear and faltering; so the bond between “wavering
gaze” and “human eyes” emphasizes the vulnerable nature of humanity.
The rhyme of “dear” and “near” suggests that, just as this knowledge would
be precious to the speaker, that human bond would have been precious to
the dying man. The safekeeping implied in “entrust” implies that this
“wavering,” his vulnerable and precious humanity, is not something that
he can take with him to the world beyond. The contrast between “waver-
ing” and “settled broad” compounds this. Change and movement are the
conditions of mortality; stillness is the condition of death, even a divine
death. Humanity is valuable because of its vulnerability; the shaky weakness
of a “wavering gaze” expresses the mutability and possibility of human
existence.
Here Dickinson’s Christology leads her to define the contours of human-
ity and divinity in terms of movement and fixity. The process of dying is an
intensification of humanity – a consciousness of consciousness. The way in
which the dying man’s awareness of the world and people around him can
be seen to matter at the point of his death is partly what gives the poem its
poignant tone. Dickinson’s vocabulary, “suffered,” “entrust,” “wavering,”
“patient – part content,” “thought,” “pleasant,” “wishes,” “sigh,” “confi-
dent,” “drowsiest,” “afraid,” “tranquil” and perhaps most importantly,
“love,” depicts the dying man in terms of emotional (and therefore
human) possibility.
Moltmann’s theology opens up our understanding of this poem because
he seeks to allow for a concept of God that can be challenged, corrected, and
82 FREEDMAN

readjusted by the human God who is present in Jesus. For Moltmann,

Christian epistemology requires a dialectical language that exposes meaning
through opposition. The figure of Christ suffering and abandoned on the
cross is not something other than God. This aspect of Moltmann’s
Christology illuminates this poem. Moltmann argues that the problem
that has preoccupied modern theologians is not whether God can be seen
to have suffered on the cross, but whether he can be said to have changed.
This concern with mutability is also the sticking point of Dickinson’s
Christology. She is fascinated by the paradox of the transitory, changeable,
and mortal suffering of an incorruptible, unchangeable, and indivisible
God, who is necessarily incapable of suffering and death.
Moltmann reconciles this philosophical dilemma by arguing that Christ’s
intervention can be seen not only as mediation (“an emergency measure on
the part of God”) but also as creative action, a continuous making of
possibilities. Christ is God’s representative on earth, and Moltmann sug-
gests that representation, or the representative, does not replace the original
but stands in relationship to it. It must represent something or someone
(260). However, if the place occupied by the real occupant is either not
there yet or not there in its full and free form, then the representative has an
effect of making the original. Therefore, for Moltmann, the incarnation not
only represents divinity to man, but in the unfolding of Christ’s life, and in
his death and resurrection, it creates a new kind of God.
So, to return with these ideas to the final stanza of Dickinson’s poem:
Was he afraid – or tranquil –
Might He know
How Conscious Consciousness – could grow –
Till Love that was – and Love too best to be –
Meet – and the Junction be Eternity
Something new is born here and born in the space generated by an
impossible union. “Love that was,” Christ’s human affection, dies with
him on the cross, “and Love too best to be −” can never be experienced in
time. Their meeting point is a departure, an “Eternity” that is new, that we
cannot know or experience and that is born from the creative potential of
Christological conflict. In other words, the juxtaposition of the human and
divine allows for experiment and epistemic reaching precisely because the
space between these polar opposites cannot be completely closed, and
bringing them into a relationship in this way forces a continual readjust-
ment of their meaning and function. This poem rehearses the same
dilemma we saw in “The Admirations – and Contempts – of time.”
 Touching the Wounds: Dickinson and Christology 83
Holding the view “Back – toward Time” or “Love that was” together with
the view “forward toward the God of Him” or “Love too best to be” leads us
toward a new perspective, one where the view forward is partly shaped by
the time behind. “Time,” who has stood in for his “God,” now has an effect
on the making of him: the “Junction [that] be Eternity.” Thus, God is
mutable, created by an imaginative act.
Moltmann’s theology strives to keep transcendence and immanence in
balance and so opens a space of vital possibility wherein the transcendent
God is always in the process of being created by the immanent and
necessarily incomplete God in Christ. He, like Dickinson, implies that
the word made flesh means that the flesh then has a part to play in the
making of the word. For both Moltmann and Dickinson, the cross presents
a “Junction.” Creative possibility relies on something which is not quite
there, which is yet to be known. Here we can see how Moltmann brings out
the strand of Reformation theology that had the most profound influence
on Dickinson’s aesthetic.
Like the theology of her Puritan predecessors, Dickinson’s incarnational
aesthetic revolves around the difficult task of holding together the knowable
and human world of experience and the suggestive and elusive quality of the
“beyond” in “Compound Vision.” But Moltmann illuminates a theological
and poetic quality that Dickinson’s Puritan heritage can’t quite explain.
This is the idea that poetry might galvanize one’s notion of the absolute (as
something that is always in the process of coming into being) just as a
notion of the absolute might galvanize the creation of poetry. Thus,
Moltmann describes a crucial dimension of Dickinson’s investment in
Christology.

conclusion
Dickinson’s Christological poetics are defined by the way in which she
engages with the incarnation as representation, finding in the figure of
Christ an archetype of identity (in humanity) and difference (in divinity).
Dickinson was influenced here both by the liberal impulses of a humanizing
nineteenth-century Jesuology and a typically Puritan slippage between
revelation in Christ and representation through human means. But she
was neither a liberal theologian nor a Puritan. It is through a less easily
definable relationship between embodied poetic experience and the abstract
poetic venture that we begin to understand Dickinson’s unique
Christological aesthetic. In this respect I have argued that the theology of
Jurgen Moltmann provides an illuminating companion to her poetry.
84 FREEDMAN

Moltmann engages with the creative possibilities of the cross by challenging

the distinction between humanity and divinity in the moment of suffering
and death. He suggests that this moment revises our understanding of the
conceptual difference between time and eternity, suggesting a God that can
change and an eternity that is new.
The human God that engaged Dickinson’s sympathy also engaged her
poetic identity as she felt Christ’s predicament to be analogous to her own.
But her poetic impetus did not derive solely from human and personal
identification with the man. It also came from a sense of the vitally other
divinity of God. Not only does she draw her characteristic aesthetic of
absence (represented in the simile and the gestural mark most frequently
transcribed as a dash) at least partly from this paradox, she also uses it to
inflect that aesthetic with epistemological meaning. For it is only through
the animating and poetic power of a felt absence that Dickinson’s poetry
can begin to compass the unknown from the human and experiential
boundaries of living life and, perhaps, change it.
 chapter 5

Against Mastery: Dickinson Contra Hegel

and Schlegel
Daniel Fineman

[E]verything is itself the means whereby we can come to know it . . . in

order to feel and come to know a thing completely I would have to make
it my meaning and object at once – I would have to vivify it.
Novalis, Logological Fragments I

Emily Dickinson’s age was influenced by the vexed and contradictory

intellectual tradition of the later enlightenment and its opponents. Two
of its major figures, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel and Friedrich Schlegel,
were particularly influential in the development of later aesthetics, and their
mutual antagonism illuminates the conceptual context in which romanti-
cism formulated its senses of expressive possibility. Studying Dickinson
against the conceptual palette of Hegel and Schlegel gives explicit philo-
sophical voice to the intrinsic questions raised by her poetic practice.
Moreover, her lyrical departure from the underlying shared presumptions
of this influential polar pair of thinkers suggests her differences and con-
tributions to an alternative aesthetic.
In their mutual opposition, these philosophers supply an orthogonal
cognitive dimension against which Dickinson orients her poetics. From
each she takes and alters ideational elements in order to construct possibilities
available in neither. To understand this reorientation of aesthetics necessi-
tates an abbreviated portrayal of the differences and shared denominators of
these philosophers and of her redeployment of their cognitive apparatuses.
Hegel’s vision of a progressive dialectical process where contradiction is
the mechanism of advancement toward absolute comprehension seems
closer to one element in the “plot” of Dickinson lyrics. Many of her
poems enact, in joy or sorrow, an appreciation gained out of an ostensible
loss or disruption of an initially held concept, belief, or emotional posses-
sion. These lyrics appear to realize in miniature the Hegelian trajectory of
history: they gain a new object and enlarged vision out of the progressive
cancellation of their own initial foci.

85
86 FINEMAN

However, for Dickinson these paradoxically constructive losses are not

negations nor are they additively nested into a supposedly self-completing
structure of equivalence between knowledge and being. Rather Dickinson’s
crises of loss seem to reveal a logic of comprehension that is constitutionally
always too late, habitually and irremediably untimely but nonetheless
affirmative. She does not share Hegel’s faith that history advances because
the revolutionary understanding of the last paradigm’s incomplete knowl-
edge, its negativity, is the very means to the next period’s fuller sight. While
historical becoming for Hegel was the step-wise and cumulative achieve-
ment of an adequacy of collective knowing, of science, to being, for her each
instance forms an infinitary challenge that no progressive hope can capture.
For Hegel, in contrast, the science of history has consequences for the
individual, the immediate, and the local, but its agency and realization is
transtemporal and systemic. Hegel posits that history will increasingly come
to terms with itself, that increasingly man will come to master nature’s laws
and its elements, in spite of sensuous particularity which is Dickinson’s
object. For him, the individual encounter with particular instances of appre-
hension are governed by the immediate consequences of any age’s structural
imperfections. Thus, the “at hand” is not, as in Dickinson, the ecstatic ontic
priority, but rather the vexed instance which should properly contribute in its
sublation to an imagined totality. Hegel treats these individual lessons of loss
abstractly, seeing them as positive contributions to the general gains of
scientific understanding. Consequently, in his imagined universal progress
losses are local while the resulting gains are historically substantial.
For Hegel, the definitive blindness that marks a period, its limited
structure of seeing, its cognitive episteme, constitutively causes imperfect
relations to particulars. For him, these individual distortions are the epi-
phenomena of global blindness and contribute to a supposed perfection of
the thought generally. Such events with the local and ontic are not for him
immediate opportunities for appreciative engagement that undo the con-
ceptual limitations imposed by the current literal. Indeed, the losses con-
sequent from collective blindness spur the beneficial recognition of
symptoms. From a teleological perspective, the losses of material instances
are inconsequent but serve to make global constitutive blindness visible.
Without this negative unveiling by loss, our blindness to blindness would
remain and the hegemony of the current state of imperfect knowing would
hide in its ubiquity. In short, particular loss for Hegel is the predictable and
necessary co-condition of scientific and cultural growth. The individual
registers its importance as it donates its particularity experimentally to the
accumulation of better knowing through sublation.
 Against Mastery: Dickinson Contra Hegel and Schlegel 87
In part, Dickinson shares Hegel’s insight that any articulated view of the
world inadequately circumscribes the individual or collective events it
attempts to compass.
“Nature” is what We know –
But have no Art to say –
So impotent our Wisdom is
To Her Sincerity – (Fr721B)
As the quotation marks hint here, seeing a thing is never comprehensive.
Rather, as Wittgenstein would later suggest, “seeing is seeing as” (e193–
e202): we grasp an instance through concepts that make it intelligible but
thereby we also necessarily simplify what we apprehend. For her, there is no
possibility of final epistemic/ontological triumph nor, as will be clearer with
Schlegel, no equally finalistic insuperability or irony. The universal and
insuperable condition of man is to never be able to overcome this incom-
mensurability between our address to occasions and their infinite poten-
tiality. Neither Hegel’s totalizing taxonomic order nor Schlegel’s global
pessimism can justify mastery, whether in affirmation or negation. For
Dickinson, these realizations are not losses but the opening to glories
born of humility before occasions rather than tragedies of humiliation.
What is important for her is not judgment, the rendering of the world in
conclusion, but the opposite, the liberation of the infinite at hand from the
hope for exhaustive rendition. This is not hopelessness but emersion: in so
far as we are in the mutually constitutive act of knowing, we become with
potentialities that processually alter conception for the duration of our
encounter. Our immanence to our locale in an undivided universe registers
in a sublimity for which the ineffable is the effect of the immediate. The
present is not subsumed under the regulation of a posthumous conceptu-
alization but rather appears as the ecstatic emergence of the immediate out
of the confines of its preliminary identification. She thereby disagrees with
Hegel: she suggests that the inadequacies of representation to meet the
particular cannot be resolved, even in theory, by a progressive history of
science, by coming to know “Nature.” Even if the science of the future
masters the exhaustive algebraic description of the elements and laws of
nature abstractly, the quotidian in its diversity and mobility will always
escape exhaustive description. Thus, even as Dickinson shares Hegel’s view
that concepts move stepwise out of the paucity of the previous encounter to
the comparative richness of the next, they cannot catch up with their
particular objects, not only because these are infinitely heterogeneous but
also because of their dynamic alteration.
88 FINEMAN

For Hegel, ideas progress not in smooth development but through

sublation, the periodic cancellation and transcendent overcoming of a
less-perfect concept by its complementary subsequent. Dickinson’s poetic
practice seemingly enacts this sublative aspect in which the terms – often
quoted – with which she begins a poem are quickly cancelled and bring
forth new and more complex conceptual progeny. However, her mode is
not one of high Hegelian seriousness. Given what was for her the inad-
equacy of Hegel’s method to address the particular existential demands of
living encounter, it should not be surprising that her pervasive tone toward
scientific optimism is not masculine certainty.
Instead, Dickinson adopts an ironic and skeptical posture that brings her
closer to Schlegel who, while he later became conservative, was initially
agnostic about both God and the Enlightenment’s epistemological faith in
scientific advancement. Schlegel emphasizes that knowledge must always
tacitly assume its own basis of knowing. Thus, every instance of compre-
hension is implicitly undercut by the inherent presumptions that made that
comprehension possible. This presumptive foundation of knowledge
presents for Schlegel not an individual problem but that of philosophy
generally. Every supplemental clarification logically can only be part of a
potentially infinite regress, the continuing attempt of the system to pull
itself up by its bootstraps. For Schlegel, this irredeemable and even con-
stitutive disproportion between a system’s presumptive and foundational,
but constitutionally indemonstrable, certainty and its specific declarations
demanded an irony as universal and masterful as Hegel’s optimism.
One might then understand Dickinson’s poetic practice as acting out
Hegel’s method of progressive negation, of sublation, coupled with a
Schlegel-like sense of the necessary systemic ironies resident in acts of
comprehension. This paper, however, will suggest that while these figures
supplied the contrapuntal base that orients her aesthetics, her original
intervention is to counter their shared, not opposing, characteristics.
Theirs, then, is the platform from which she departs. Indeed, Dickinson’s
practice is theoretically antagonistic to the dialectical base they constitute
appositionally.
Both Hegel and Schlegel tend to characterize individual events and
entities abstractly as if they had, in advance, a certain comprehensive
perspective. They both understand the sensory instance as just an instan-
tiation of their respective global structural concepts. While every thing
appears within systems, no thing has the power to alter that system’s
mode of interpellation. The interactive traffic is all one way. Neither under-
stands the object primarily in its haecceity, the compound of individual and
 Against Mastery: Dickinson Contra Hegel and Schlegel 89
accidental particularities that make an individual “this one.” Neither partic-
ularly cares about the instance at hand because the infinite scales of their
respective holistic concepts render each occasion insignificant. Even though
the era saw an increasingly inductive and experimental emphasis, as signaled
by Bacon’s Novum Organum and the general rise in experimentalism, Hegel
and Schlegel’s thoughts were largely deductive. Both valorize ideational and
holistic systems rather than particularities themselves.
Their discount of the material instance is possible because both prepon-
derantly view language as abstract and immaterial, the ghostly shadowing
forth of an ideal form. Since language for both functions Platonically,
whether progressively or interminably, neither one values the material and
processual aspects of writing and reading. And it is this indifference to
material specificity that puts them at odds with Dickinson’s poetic praxis
however much she adapts their tools.
In her lyrics, Hegel’s progressivism and Schlegel’s pervasive pessimism
are revealed to be two aspects of a shared presumption of totalization and
mastery that comes from a masculine orientation. These male philosophers
speak but cannot in their expansive texts heft the occasion of speaking.
Dickinson, in contrast, values brevity and the existential occasion: “I fear a
Man of frugal speech – . . . He who weigheth – While the Rest – / Expend
their furthest pound –” (Fr663). Her sense of language inverts the tradi-
tional philosophical stance that subsumes the instance into the general
economy of dematerialized sign exchange, the nondomestic world of mon-
etary masculinity. Thus “pound” plays here against typical manners of
masculine expression: with an empty fiat currency and with a forceful fist
that compensates for an insubstantial utterance. In contrast, her attitude
toward language is incarnationist. She has an immanent, even Spinozist,
notion that the expressive occasion is not mimetic but ontological.
Thus in “A word made flesh is seldom,” Dickinson emphasizes the
materiality and presence of language, implicitly rejecting Platonic tradi-
tions. She approaches this theme through an analogy to the Eucharist,
emphasizing the digestion by which the human incorporates divinity.
Each one of us has tasted
With ecstasies of stealth
The very food debated
To our specific strength – (Fr1715)
The word going out into the realm of disagreement, of debate, does not in
itself nourish any more than food does upon a plate. One must internalize
language in an activity of digestion, and that happens only in the specific
90 FINEMAN

act, not in its abstract possibility. Thus she slyly alludes to the central aspects
of food – promise, pledge, and labor – that preoccupy the Bible starting
with Eden’s first meal, stolen “with ecstasies of stealth.” Each poem, like the
forbidden fruit and the Eucharist wafer, manifests itself only to the degree it
is activated by the appreciative participant. This appreciation is not intel-
lectual alone, as it largely is in Hegel and Schlegel, but orients the mind and
body in a monism of mutual participation that is enunciated by Hegel’s
other, Spinoza: “The human mind is capable of perceiving a great many
things, and this capacity will vary in proportion to the variety of states which
its body can assume” (Ethics, II, 14). If an encounter with a word, like that
with food, does not yield an affect, that failure is not attributable to the
poem alone but also to the reader’s existential failure. A poem, like a dish,
can succeed or fail but only when it is digested. Dickinson’s poems are not
realized in the recipe but in the individual consumption.
Emily Dickinson’s poetic achievement and the historical significance of
her implicit philosophy are revealed not just by her play with both thinkers’
ideas but also in her rejection of their mutual hubris, the masculinist dream
of metaphysical mastery. She does not valorize the mind’s capacity to judge
and denominate, nor does she presumptively and oxymoronically conclude
that judgment is interminably premature. Rather, her poetry enacts the
interplay between the immediate sensory demands of language as object and
the always-frustrated desire for final meaning. In this, she participates in a
now largely forgotten philosophical quarrel initiated by Kant’s most preco-
cious critics, Johann Hamann and his pupil, Herder. They emphasized the
graphic and sonic aspects of language. For them, as for Dickinson, the
tangibility of the concrete and tropic elements of poetic presentation
renders the experience of poetry potentially transfinite. Nor is it inconse-
quential that Dickinson does this as a woman, since the metaphysical pride
in rationality and the devaluation of the concrete is one of the essential
aspects of the patriarchal and paternalistic attitudes that inform Hegel and
Schlegel. Indeed, as feminists such as Cixous have indicated, this disregard
of language’s necessary materiality is a common denominator in the history
of philosophy generally.
Such recognition of a seemingly postmodern concern is not an anach-
ronism, but shows that postmodernism’s roots are part of a historical
development that was her milieu. The spiritual and yet materialist counter-
enlightenment trend that is closer to her practice was known well in
Dickinson’s New England. The head of the Transcendentalist Club,
Frederic Hedge, studied Spinoza and Hamann. He disseminated his knowl-
edge and enthusiasm to Emerson and the other leaders of America’s nascent
 Against Mastery: Dickinson Contra Hegel and Schlegel 91
philosophical core including Bronson Alcott, Theodore Parker, Margaret
Fuller, and George Ripley. Hedge published, in multiple editions, one of
the largest single volumes of German idealism, The Prose Writers of
Germany. Indeed, this tome, which explores, starting with Luther, ques-
tions of the limits of both reason and faith, was held by the Dickinson
family.
Further, we know of Dickinson’s interest in Germanic English writers,
notably Carlyle and George Eliot. We know too from Sewall’s biography
that she read plays in German (422–3) that were fraught with these philo-
sophical issues (notably through Goethe). However, she need not have
directly participated in these movements since they informed the very
ethos of her age. The Dickinson family was deeply involved in the founda-
tion, funding, and administration of Amherst College, and it offered
German as an elective and insisted on philosophical sophistication in its
curriculum. That curriculum represented man as possessing only partial
mastery of his coming powers, positing that the relation between the known
and the knowable is either temporally unfinished or constitutional unavail-
able. Thus her immediate male intellectual peers understood, as did Hegel
and Schlegel, the fragmentary quality of knowing as a problem to be
mastered hypothetically by a conceptual completion to come and not be
celebrated as evocative. The fact that Dickinson’s poetry encourages readers
to interact creatively with the infinitely rich particularities of the material
instance challenged this dominant masculine metaphysical that informed
her community.
This seminal difference between Dickinson and the dominant metaphys-
ical tradition is revealed with more specificity in the varied responses to the
concept of the fragmentary. Modern theorists recognize that the time, about
1800, and the place, Jena, in which these two philosophers interacted,
provided the laboratory for holism’s antithesis, the fragment. Indeed,
modern studies, such as Elias’s The Fragment, persist in viewing this
“anti-genre” through nineteenth century rubrics. While both Hegel and
Schlegel understood the fragment through a concept of totalization, for
Dickinson a poem’s inevitable partiality was catalytic. Her poems do not
reject insufficiency but claim it as processual affirmation: the spur to living
and local, if interminable, becoming. Her poems use their symbolic force to
celebrate and potentiate, and not just to label and categorize. Thus her
writings emphasize themselves, as the auto-dictic character of her demon-
strative pronouns suggest: “Like this consent of Language / This loved
Philology” (Fr1715). The poem insists on its material and vibrant occasion
though an allusion to and association with Christ as incarnation.
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Hegel viewed the fragmentary character of human knowing as a temporary

problem that history would overcome. Schlegel, however, saw the fragmentary
not just as a preferred form of presentation – pithy and provocative – but also
as an admission that knowing itself was constitutionally incomplete, that the
comprehensible by definition never could catch up with its presumptions.
Dickinson plays with both of these orientations, with hope and irony, but
holds neither as her final position. For her, the fragmentary nature of knowing
presents one not with an epistemic failure but with an ontological opportunity.
The poetic encounter for Dickinson is not abstract but rather a concrete play
of recombinant existential possibility activated by the material and linguistic
syncretism of poetry. The poem is “fragmentary” only so long as it appears as a
textual instance of an absent structure, the parole of its langue. But for her, the
poem is a concrete site of work. As such, as a particular occasion open to its
resident and unlimited possibilities, Dickinson’s poetic practice only appears
fragmentary from the perspective of a totalizing Apollonian dream.
Dickinson refuses to view apparent partiality as liability. Her poetry revels
in lack and facilitates a recombinant process of fractalization. She dwells
ecstatically in the possibilities supplied by the unclosed interactivity of the
parts she presents. Her openness to the potentiality manifest in the play of
actants contrasts with the underlying assumptions about literary completion
that have characterized Western aesthetics since Aristotle’s Poetics.
At the start of his three volume philosophical Encyclopedia, Hegel writes:
As the whole science, and only the whole, can exhibit what the Idea or system
of reason is, it is impossible to give in a preliminary way a general impression
of a philosophy. Nor can a division of philosophy into its parts be intelligible,
except in connection with the system (Logic 23).
For Hegel, the fragmentary only makes sense in philosophy as a segment in
the unfurling of the Absolute. Within his concept of the systematic, the
concrete individual only comes into full sense exactly as it loses that
individuality and sees itself in its complementarity to that which it is not.
Thomas Phau explains:
The critical intelligibility of the local, the particular, and the contingent
involves transformation from the merely incidental meaning into a func-
tional component of the macrohistorical process that is being reflexively
articulated in the philosophical present (“Reading” 6).

Hegel’s philosophy did not, however, forgo diversity. While each perceived
entity must both represent, as token to type, its relation to its intelligible class
and see its particularity within the context of its other, these great affiliations
 Against Mastery: Dickinson Contra Hegel and Schlegel 93
do not undo the rich individualities of the particular. While Hegel was
nothing if not systematic, his system was, as his Logic makes clear, in its
essence not scientific in the contemporary sense since he depends upon
contradiction as the progressive mechanism. Thus he could reject “pedantry
and pomposity of science” (Phenomenology, Miller trans. 29). Still, under-
neath this complexity lies a secular version of the Christian master narrative of
genesis, expulsion, and eventual redemption under the rubrics of secular
rather than sacred knowing. Nowhere is this more evident than in Hegel’s
vision of language.
In a passage made more famous by Derrida (“Pit” passim), Hegel reveals a
dualistic attitude toward language:
The sign is some immediate intuition representing a totally different import
from what naturally belongs to it; it is the pyramid into which a foreign soul
has been conveyed, and where it is conceived. The sign is different from the
symbol: for in the symbol the original characters (in essence and conception)
of the visible object are more or less identical with the import which it bears
as symbol; whereas in the sign . . . the natural attributes of the intuition, and
the connotations of which it is a sign, have nothing to do with each other . . ..
Such is the negativity of intelligence (Mind 213).
Like Saussure, Hegel sees the materiality of a sign as disposable. Just as the
soul, in its traditional dualistic reading, transcends and yet temporarily
depends upon its relation to the body, so the written mark relates suppos-
edly to its concept. Thus the grapheme, the trace of writing, is but the
fragmentary container which carries its precious cognitive freight like the
host within the pyx. Further for Hegel, as he makes clear in his Aesthetics,
this semiotic sublation occurs appropriately in the general evolution of art.
Full thought is the criterion even in partiality and mistake. Thus, in the
failed individual attempt to express an idea: “We learn by experience that we
meant to say something other. . .. and this correction of our meaning
compels our knowing to go back to the proposition, and understand in
some other way” (Phenomenology 39). Here error is its own reward and fuels
the advancement of language, literature, and philosophy toward consum-
mation. Poetic beauty transcends its instance since it “must contain, both
the extremes . . . because it unites metaphysical universality with the pre-
cision of real particularity” (Aesthetics II 22). The thing, in its highest
function, alludes, as does the Platonic particular, to its presumed general
form. Thus the initial fragmentary limitations of expression inevitably
outgrow themselves as the one and the One coalesce in mutual evocation.
Such eschatological optimism, however, struck some as inaccurate.
Schlegel saw this hope for totalization as delusional, the projection of
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utopian desire rather than an honest observation of the perennial and

necessary inadequacy of language. For him, partial understanding and
fragmentation were not conditions of expressivity that could be overcome
but its resident character. Thus, it was through Schlegel, according to
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy that “the fragment [became] the romantic
genre par excellence” (40). Indeed, his theories not only adumbrated
romanticism but supplied fodder for postmodernism. This orientation
not only authorized a discourse of the incomplete but inaugurated the
dominant tone of much effete literature down to the present day, a perma-
nent and self-conscious ironization within literature of its own potential.
Such an orientation verges on nihilism, as we see in this quotation from
Schlegel’s scandalous and semiautobiographical novel, Lucinde:
No purpose, however, is more purposeful for myself and this work . . . than
to destroy at the very outset all that part we call “order” . . . [to achieve]
namely the most beautiful chaos of sublime harmonies and fascinating
pleasures (45).

This seems to verge on pure juvenile joy in destruction, a gay willfulness in

the disassembly of propriety. Certainly, this is how Hegel viewed Schlegel’s
efforts, which affronted him morally and repulsed him philosophically. For
Hegel, perpetual irony is impure negativity without sublation. As such, it
creates an “insubstantial” and even “null” selfish freedom where one finds
“. . . this concentration of the ego into itself, for which all bonds are snapped
and which can live only in the bliss of self-enjoyment. This irony was
invented by Fredrich von Schlegel and many others have babbled about
it” (Aesthetics I 66). In Hegel’s lightly veiled image, irony’s self-reflection
becomes ideational masturbation, an affront to historical thought and a
perversion of one’s obligations to the historical family of thinkers.
Such a characterization of Schlegel may be unfair. While Kierkegaard
generally sided with Hegel’s seriousness, he also recognized in mastered
irony the avenue for an apophatic discourse: “Irony is like the negative way,
not the truth but the way” (340). Indeed, Schlegel did not think that
fragmentation was the destruction of some previously extant attic wholeness
that T. S. Eliot could later “shore” against modernism’s anxieties. Rather
Schlegel understood his practice to be a poetics that compassed its own
limitations and thus elevated itself in “artistic reflection and beautiful self-
mirroring . . .. This poetry should describe itself, and always be simulta-
neously poetry and the poetry of poetry” (Fragments 195). This metalin-
guistic play, for him, could substitute a disembodied echoics, an endless
cyclicality of self-reference, for Hegel’s hoped-for logic of ontology.
 Against Mastery: Dickinson Contra Hegel and Schlegel 95
For Schlegel then, language could not triumph over its own limitations
but could only celebrate them. Poetry could not sublate itself in contra-
diction but rather had to resonate between its desire to express and its
inability. Thought was not for him the growing adequacy of concept to
being: “An idea is a concept perfected to the point of irony, an absolute
synthesis of absolute antithesis” (Fragments 176). Thus “fragments are . . .
the fermenta cognitionis for critical philosophy, marginal glosses to the text
of the age” (Fragments 199). Schlegel thus sees the work of the work as
foment, but his victory over what he would understand as Hegel’s credulity
is pyrrhic. As Verstraete notes, celebrating fragmentation tends to leave as
the “essence of artistic presentation [something] that it dissolves in its self-
positing, so that its reality (the work of art) is always preliminary . . . and
never more than a simulacrum” (36). Thus, Schlegel is paradoxically sure of
his uncertainty and consistently certain about indeterminacy.
One might, given the too evident philosophical and ethical animosity
between Hegel and Schlegel, think that they are irreconcilably antagonistic.
But they adhere as body and shadow. Both believe in the totalization
available in their orientations and in the male subject’s general ability to
systemically and abstractly understand in advance all future interactions
between sensation and reason. Thus while Schlegel clearly dislikes the
Hegelian system he does not, in his most famous fragment, #116, eschew
systemization of his via negativa: “Romantic poetry is a progressive, univer-
sal poetry . . . from the greatest systems of art to the sigh . . . [it] hovers at the
midpoint between the portrayed and the portrayer . . . a mirror of the whole
circumambient world, an image of the age” (Fragments 175). Even if Hegel’s
project, to speak precociously for all world history and God, is hubristic in
extreme, he never was this blunt in his expression of supposedly global
comprehension. Still, both philosophers share the concept of totality and
rely on its speculative determination of the future. In this, the two reflect
what Bloch saw as the paradoxical artistic function of the fragment: “to
constitute itself as an anticipatory illumination” (153). Therefore, both can
only see the particular, the sensory, as secondary evidence within the
established bounds of an anticipatory frame.
For Dickinson, to impose a universalizing sense on an occasion’s poten-
tiality is to misconstrue experience in a way typical of prose and antithetical
to poetry:
Perception of an Object costs
Precise the Object’s loss –
Perception in itself a Gain
Replying to it’s price – (Fr1103B)
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The clarity desired by Hegel’s mode renders the object as a commodity of

sense in which its infinity of sensory differences are undone by an identi-
fication that facilitates exchange rather than appreciation. Consistently in
her poetry, Dickinson portrays money as the mathematization of exchange
value, the economy of the abstract that devalues material specificity,
denudes it of its resolute haecceity. Here she jokes with this same tendency
under perception’s “precision,” an exactness that is only possible when the
encounter is rendered under its habitual abstract association, a numerical
identity.
George Berkeley formalized this ideational notion of precision in the
Introduction to A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
(1710): “As the mind frames to itself abstract ideas of qualities or modes, so
does it, by the same precision, or mental separation, attain abstract ideas of
the more compounded beings” (9). To Dickinson the idea that abstracted
knowledge is “precise” seems laughable, as this “precision” is purchased
through reductive representation. Here this philosophically “precise” usage
seems even more comic as the poem’s Ps and Os proliferate to echo and
ambiguate the “Object” and its type. But even this allusion to an alphabetic
iteration is undercut in the manuscript version by her holographic eccen-
tricities. Handwriting resists codification of its occasion, its forced rendition
into type, and the ensuing prostitution of its occasion to an ideal but
debased profit: “Publication – is the Auction / Of the mind of Man –”
(Fr788). The point for her is to process the ontic creatively, not render it
clear and distinct through its expensive changeling, a stable but sterile idea.
In her poem “The Things that never can come back, are several”
Dickinson reverses the promotion of the idea over the thing. Considering
travelers, she writes:
Returning here –
“Here”! There are typic “Heres” –
Foretold Locations –
The Spirit does not stand – (Fr1564B)
These lines suggest that to privilege typic “Heres” over actual “heres” is
spiritually intolerable. In this respect, the poem is quite similar to Hegel’s
concern with the here and now as indicated by the demonstrative “this”:
What is the ‘This?’ If we take the ‘This’ in the twofold of its being, as ‘Now’ and
as ‘Here’, the dialectic it has in it will receive a form as intelligible as the ‘This’
itself is. To the question: “What is Now?”, let us answer, e.g. “Now is Night.”
In order to test the truth of this sense-certainty a simple experiment will suffice.
We write down this truth; a truth cannot lose anything by being written
 Against Mastery: Dickinson Contra Hegel and Schlegel 97
down . . .. If now, this noon, we look again at the written truth we shall have to
say it has become stale. (Phenomenology 59–60)

For Hegel, the symbols of deixis, of referential pointing, endanger the

propositionally consistent character of truth. However, for Dickinson the
opposite value is valorized: the symbolic idealization of truth endangers
the unending differential and ontic encounter with becoming. The spirit
will not tolerate, to “stand” in one sense, being still, to remain stationary:
the fixity of abstraction is not for her the testimony to its virtue but its
liability and nonvitality. Thus, Dickinson’s quotation marks not only iron-
ize her own first usage of “here,” but also do so to challenge the valorization
of immobile truth. The poem wants, as a kind of desirable autoimmune
disorder, to bring into consciousness the reader’s tendency to devalue the
poem’s material occasion, the Platonic usurpation of its own existential
specificity. The phrase “typic ‘Heres’” does not give the writing a pass, as
implicitly in Hegel, to a transcendental plane. Its specific irony draws
attention to the metalanguage’s desire to render as nonspatial and non-
temporal its own instance.
In her respect for the concrete instance of sense, Dickinson was not alone.
Many philosophers of the antienlightenment – Hamann, Herder, Novalis,
and Goethe – imagined a poetry in which the materiality of the text, its actual
particularity, could be conjoined to its universality without the sublation of
the poem into disembodied meaning. However, they felt that such a poetics
was of the future: Schlegel himself wrote “as yet no genre exists that is
fragmentary in form and content, simultaneously completely subjective and
individual, and completely objective and like a necessary part in a system of all
the sciences” (Fragments 170). As the last clause suggests, long before his later
conversion to Catholicism, Schlegel had a paradoxical inconsistency. His
skepticism is holistic. Schlegel wrote in “On Incomprehensibility” (1800):
“I absolutely detest incomprehension, not only the incomprehension of
the uncomprehending but even more the incomprehension of the
comprehending . . . words often understand themselves better than those
who use them . . .. genuine incomprehension emanates precisely from the
science and the arts” (297–8). Between these positions, uncomprehending
and uncomprehending comprehension, there is perhaps room for a position:
comprehending incomprehension, which is Schlegel’s choice. However, it is,
or veers on, being paradoxical and certainly suggests the skeptical dead end to
which Hegel objected, but it is not Dickinson’s position.
Dickinson stresses knowing as a process. One can never understand
becoming completely and simultaneously; one can never attain fixed and
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unchanging circumference. Knowing poetically involves faith in an ecstatic

sight, accepting the new and unsettling demands of seeing existentially. For
her, every term was potentially protean and as such demanded an appreci-
ation of its context by the users who lived within its idiolect environment.
“Morning” – means “Milking” – to the Farmer –
Dawn – to the Teneriffe –
Dice – to the Maid –
Morning means just Risk – to the Lover –
Just Revelation – to the Beloved –
Epicures – date a Breakfast – by it –
Brides – an Apocalypse –
Worlds – a Flood –
Faint-going Lives – Their lapse from Sighing –
Faith – The Experiment of Our Lord (Fr191B)
The initial explicit quotation marks give way to their implicit usage every-
where. They cannot be used consistently since the point is exactly an
appreciation that is always existentially contextual and differential.
Catachresis for Dickinson testifies to the impiety of a foolish consistency.
The only significant misuse is the one that venerates consistency over event,
the hypothesis of homogeneity over variation. Here, and in the poems
already cited, we find an insistent inconsistency: while words are easy to
understand in their first appearance under their quotidian defaults, their
normative or average readings, they quickly enter into play with their
surroundings.
Central to Dickinson’s objections to some German Idealism is her
rejection, in both the progressive dialectic of Hegel and the skepticism of
Schlegel, of a totalizing schema. In this poem, “morning” and its homo-
phone, “mourning,” suggests that all language is time and context sensitive,
that the vitality of material and existential use trumps consistency. The
context chosen is determined both empirically and by linguistic habitua-
tions. This variability is not just that reported here in the poem but also that
which the reader brings perforce to a specific reading. The poem sets about
to undo fixity of response not, as for Schlegel, to illustrate a blanket
relativism but to instigate responsive creativity. Her pervasive humorous
tone does not trivialize the effort to interpret the world but instead presents
as serious an iconoclastic orientation that renders all interpretations
contingent.
Dickinson uses wit in her tiny poems to challenge with specificity the
structural systems that form the tacit, holistic presumptions, the blind faith,
 Against Mastery: Dickinson Contra Hegel and Schlegel 99
of masculine metaphysics. Here is a telling example whose brevity could
lead a casual reader to underestimate its consequence and scope.
“Faith” is a fine invention
For Gentlemen who see!
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency! (Fr202C)
This tiny lyric negotiates the massive complexity at the intersection of
science and religion that was central to enlightenment thought and which
established the tensions that continue as its heritage. The tentative border
between these disciplines appears microscopically as a typographic realiza-
tion of the issues yet to appear. The opening quotation marks suggest
variation in meaning and perhaps intonation before the reader can know
what standards are already being evoked and adulterated. Is this quotation
about attribution? Is it the notification of irony? Is it shifting from the object
language of English to an as yet unspecified metalanguage? Is it a sonic
direction to instill a trochee where an iamb is expected? Is it to bracket its
own holographic materiality? The tiny marks may pass unmarked but can
be recognized retrospectively as establishing the permeability of the know-
able and its instances. These marginal, inaudible, and ephemeral tittles are
the microbes of materiality that the subsequent poem brings into issue.
They show the liminality of seeing, hearing, and intelligibility, the dynamic
border between the attributes of sense and sensation, thought and
extension.
Faith’s nominal arena is that beyond knowledge; science’s field is that of
knowing. However, the initial quotation marks problematize this distinc-
tion. These marks, uncertain and ambiguous as to function and range, act
an ontic punctuation. These unlettered ephemera form diacritics that
expand the poem’s arena of significance. They indicate without conclusion
the irresolvable play behind institutionalized protocols of interpretation, the
defaults of quotidian experience. These traces – like the poem’s eccentric
capitals, italic “see,” and the dash – undo the territorial limits of the literal
and the parodic.
The publication of R.W. Franklin’s The Manuscript Books of Emily
Dickinson in 1981 has instigated a continuing reinterpretation of her output
that incorporates more than syntax, semantics, and sound. Indeed, her
seeming reliance on shape, letter form, spacing, inking, marking, stationery,
and all the other variables of graphemic production appears as vast inter-
vention into the usual paradigms for the reception and interpretation of
texts. What is revealed by her holographic insistence is not extrinsic to
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language but rather is typically unnoticed because of the habituations

codified and standardized in the Enlightenment. As seen in both Hegel
and Schlegel, the instance of language, its material and existential occasion,
is undervalued by a reading protocol that venerates abstract mastery.
Reading and writing under masculine rubrics becomes an almost automatic
procedure for the literate, where the conditioned operant response is under-
stood not as the liability of repetition and its accompanying ennui but as the
apodictic self-evidence of the sign. This is the dominant tradition of
philosophy and still persists. Thus, when Saussure famously dematerializes
the sign, as the conjunction of “sound image” and “associated concept,” he
merely makes formulaic the implicit dismissal of the material instance.
Dickinson’s older version of “This loved Philology” is that of an embodied
language “‘Made Flesh and dwelt among us’” (Fr1715). Ironically, the typical
reading of poetry can forget that its sense is sensual even though the
character of verse is to refresh this recognition of language as incarnate.
Poetry itself is based upon a kind of global synaesthesia that plays the
auditory aspects of speech against the visual form of writing to generate new
senses of the senses. Aside from relatively infrequent forms such as shaped
verse or concrete poetry, many readers receive, if almost subliminally, cues
as to the work’s importance from the quality of paper, the generosity of
margins, and the choice of font. Dickinson’s sensitivity to these aspects is
unsurprising given that the physical production of writing was a central
concern in the American renaissance. In, for example, Melville’s “Tartarus”
and “Bartleby,” Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Poe’s Marginalia, Hawthorne’s
“Custom House,” and Thoreau’s Walden, the political, class, and gender
relations that are resident in the material manufacture and reception of
writing loomed large. Further, some elements of writing show more than
they tell; punctuation, paragraph or stanza breaks, and literal rubrics all
communicate ostensibly. These together with the more provocative markers
that are the focus here – underlining, italics, and quotation marks – serve
idealized sense only to the degree that we allow them to function without
engagement. When our quiescent familiarity is challenged, these adjuncts
to meaning begin to question rather than facilitate abstraction.
Dickinson’s holographic production and epistolary distribution individ-
uate every instantiation of language. She excludes from her corpus the
digitizing effect of print that disembodies and mechanizes, homogenizes
and standardizes sign production. Thus in contrast to the depersonalizing
force of print, jurisprudence accords special status to signature. In “Death
sets a Thing significant,” Dickinson shows that she understood how the
graphite grapheme suggests at once the poignancy of presence and absence:
 Against Mastery: Dickinson Contra Hegel and Schlegel 101

A Book I have – a friend gave –

Whose Pencil – here and there –
Had notched the place that pleased him –
At Rest – His fingers are –
Now – when I read – I read not –
For interrupting Tears –
Obliterate the Etchings
Too Costly for Repairs – (Fr640)
The central image here is of a text whose meaning is made clearer by the
disorder of its material graphemes, by the transparent smear of tears, rather
than by its syntactic and semantic lucidity. This image emphasizes thinking
done not apart from but rather with the encounter of expression. She
implicitly downplays the kind of reading that pretends to transcend its
own material activity as it chases after absent essences, stressing instead an
interactive and present engagement with the incarnation of the page itself.
In “‘Faith’ is a fine invention,” this kind of assault on dematerialization is
constitutive and instantaneous. The opening quotation marks present a
semipermeable margin between the inside and outside of the poem and
between its operational structures. These graphemes disrupt the contra-
puntal organization of faith/science, sense/non-sense, appearance/reality,
and literal/literary. She undoes this ideational binary, and implicitly the
choice between a Hegelian sublation and a Schlegel-like parabasis. In both
“‘Faith’” and “Death sets a Thing significant,” these literally marginal marks
become central to the poem’s narrated conjuncture of life and death, science
and religion, and to the reader’s material and individual interpretation. The
poems demand that we see the punctuation and marginal marks not just as
pictorial portraits of microbes but also as a material exteriority that can enter
the reader. Thus, she wrote, years after “‘Faith’”:
Infection in the sentence breeds
We may inhale Despair
At distances of Centuries
From the Malaria – (Fr1268)
The materiality of the poetic encounter is not inconsequent: the “bad air” or
miasma that conceives of language’s materiality as ephemeral cannot antici-
pate the viral consequences of its duration or render them nugatory by
science or sarcasm.
The tension in “‘Faith’ is a fine invention” foregrounds the battle
between the warring epistemologies of religion and science. Significantly,
it couches this battle in the optical, the traditional locus of contests about
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being in the West in both Greek and Biblical thought. Through the years,
this battle became more pointed through the technologies that extended
sight. In The Essay on Man, Pope belittles the microscope and so Newton’s
Opticks: “To what effect were better optic given / To inspect a mite, not
comprehend the heaven?” Like the church with Galileo’s telescope, Pope
wished to subordinate scientific exploration to spiritual insight, to the end
that it would cause believers to attend to cosmic might and not the “mite.”
For Dickinson though, it is exactly this attention to the tiny and its material
differences that instills wonder. Abstract dependencies on God or on the
masculine totalizations of science are equally “blind faith” because they
eschew engagement with the crux of the smallest entity. As Dickinson
summarizes:
Crisis is a Hair
Toward which forces creep (Fr1067)
“Faith” is always problematic but more so when paradoxically invoked to
displace the responsive engagement with the specific instance that called it
to mind. The gentlemen’s skepticism towards faith is essentially an expres-
sion of faithlessness. The active and particular faith the poem provokes
however is neither a Hegelian belief in a coming totality nor the parodic but
empty mouthing of that totality’s forms but the engagement with possibil-
ity through a violent humility.
The quotation marks and other idiosyncrasies of handwriting she favors
are the material traces that show what the order of rational symbols, having
betrayed itself either to irony and abstraction, can no longer tell. The marks
then seem to offer both Hegel’s sublation of every particular to its comple-
ment and, also, to satirize that modality, as in Schlegel’s pervasive irony.
However, poems like “‘Faith’ is a fine invention” do not allow themselves to
assent to either of the systems they evoke since what emerges is exactly a
playing with the material instance that both systems try to dismiss.
The “here and now” of any given poem or indeed of every instance is
never available to concept directly since it is only under the practiced gaze of
the semiotic that sense can assign meaning to the sensible: “It is the Past’s
supreme italic / Makes the Present mean –” (Fr1518). The italic, like the
quotation mark, suggests the codification of the material and specific
practices of writing even in the homogenization of difference. Writing, as
Derrida always notes, can only be a trace of that physicality that is not itself.
The “present” – and this is central to Derrida’s concepts of différance and
deferral – is always constituted retrospectively or prospectively as hypo-
thetical genesis or telos. The time taken for apprehension means,
 Against Mastery: Dickinson Contra Hegel and Schlegel 103
necessarily, that the apprehended cannot be temporally equal to its living
object: science sees through its method but sees not its method itself any
more than an eye sees its lens. It was for precisely this reason that Hegel
understood that science itself must have an unspoken relation to its prac-
tices, a relation that is itself faith: “Enlightenment does not employ princi-
ples peculiar to itself in its attack on faith, but principles which are implicit
in faith itself” (Phenomenology 344). However, he could not accept science’s
faith in science, its blindness to its blindness, as the insuperable condition of
knowing. For him only time, progressive history, could reveal the absolute.
This was not the case for Dickinson. She wrote to her mentor Higginson
when she belatedly discovered he had gone off to war: “I found you were
gone, by accident, as I find Systems are, or Seasons of the year, and obtain
no cause – but suppose it a treason of Progress – that dissolves as it goes”
(L280). Progress is a central concept of the Enlightenment, which pro-
claimed the secular advance of human history that Dickinson here ironizes.
She implies that the future does not capture the past in a more perfect
concept, as Hegel had posited: the hypothesis of the future only disperses
the present, she suggests, or “dissolves” it. Faith in the future, just as much
as Schlegel’s encompassing skepticism about it, encourages inattention to
the particular in the face of incessant alteration.
Dickinson wrote: “What I see not, I better see / Through Faith –”
(Fr869). This revision of Christ’s observation in Matthew 13:13,"Seeing
they see not,” represents Christ’s words not as reprimanding sinners but
instead as acknowledging the gap between our finite comprehension – our
seeing the world as “this” or “that” – and the infinity of becoming. We never
fully understand what we see before us. However, this untranscendable
horizon of partial comprehension is not for Dickinson a loss without
compensation. Seeing is always seeing as, and the labeling implicit in vision
always reduces the multiplicity of the moment. However, for her, the first
moment of vision, seeing under one inadequate rubric, is part of a serial
poesis, the iterative remaking of how we see what is before us. Poetry’s
function is to constantly refresh our understanding and never to rest in the
prosaic. Recognizing that the conceptual vision’s paucity must actively give
itself over to the world’s unspeakable plenty is central to Dickinson’s version
of Christian sight. It indicates her difference from Schlegel’s negative total-
izations. He believes we can paradoxically master the partiality of under-
standing by ironically bracketing all knowing in advance. But his pyrrhic
mastery stops creative interactivity. For Dickinson, the incompletion of
seeing is an unbounded opportunity, an unending potentiality, and it is the
arena of poetry.
104 FINEMAN

Rationality, whether celebrated for its always yet-to-come triumph or

decried for its inevitable failure, is for Dickinson inadequate to the living
appreciation which her poetry attempts to catalyze. Engagement with life
for Dickinson, as for Spinoza, demands an immersion into a material world
that attempts to be coextensive with the infinite incarnation of divinity. For
her, the responsibilities of becoming demand ongoing attention since the
senses present a mobile multiplicity beyond prose. Thus Dickinson might
well have agreed with Kant’s first critic, Johann Hamann: “Faith is not the
work of reason, and therefore cannot succumb to its attacks, because faith
arises just as little from reason as tasting and seeing do” (Socratic 167–8). In
“‘Faith’ is a fine invention,” the poem’s play with its own material instanc-
ing and the empirical sensations that are the prerequisites of any reading
confront and challenge the masculine metaphysical model of triumph
through abstraction and structural closure.
While opposed in their conclusions, both Hegel and Schlegel sought
mastery over the necessarily fragmentary and incomplete character of
knowing occasions through totalizing judgments of affirmation or denial.
However, what appeared to them as a problem to be either overcome or
accepted forms for Dickinson the basis of her poetic practice. Her lyrics
activate in their own dynamic instances the very material potentialities that
masculine judgment wishes to master in theory and so obviate. Thus her
poems form the catalytic sites for the reader’s potentially interminable and
ongoing creative engagement between sense and sensation. Attending
appreciatively to her lyrics in their material and existential specificity, read-
ers perhaps return to that wonder that is understood as the initial instigation
to philosophy but which cannot be its end.
 chapter 6

“Perfect from the Pod”: Instant Learning in

Dickinson and Kierkegaard
Jim von der Heydt

On one occasion Dickinson put a group of her poems into a cultural

context, on purpose, to be read together. The context was a prospective
student-instructor relationship; the unifying concern of the poems was
epistemological. We are inclined to ignore these two clues about how she
expected to be read. For good reasons we have shifted scholarly attention in
other directions: away from the individual pedagogue, and away from
the ontology of Knowledge. Cultural historians work tenaciously from the
outside in, insisting on larger contexts than individual teaching, seeking to
identify just the right societal lattices to frame and support Dickinson’s
work. Meanwhile, philosophically, Dickinson’s body of work invites but
frustrates the effort to make it cohere. Someone may yet find the key to the
encoded unity within each fascicle; until then, however, we cannot claim
the poet’s own approval for a conceptual analysis of more than one poem at
a time. Sometimes we doubt that any two of these hundreds of untitled
textual objects go together. The philosophical resonances we find between
poems are often little more than slant rhymes, as likely to undermine as
to reinforce each other. Perhaps on every occasion of writing the poet
reinvented her agenda.
In surveying the forest of texts and ideas, looking for patterns, it is easy to
overlook four single trees, a solitary grove clustered by the poet herself as a
gateway to her work. Chosen and presented by Dickinson to exemplify her
lyric writing, these texts constitute the single subset of poems most likely to
share an expressive purpose. In the context of a potential instructional
relationship, she would have expected her teacher to see how the four
poems went together. Their shared theme – learning – is appropriate to
the occasion, for Dickinson was seeking to make herself a student.
A concern with whether learning is possible unites this cluster of poems,
Dickinson’s own sampling, on the occasion of what might be called her first
public reading, in April, 1862.

105
106 VON DER HEYDT

Poems emerged into the social world that month because Dickinson
was looking for a mentor. Out of perhaps four hundred texts, she chose
four poems to represent her writerly identity to a potential instructor. She
folded this miniature self-anthology into an envelope, along with a letter to
T. W. Higginson (L260), who had, in the Atlantic Monthly, offered advice
to, and implicitly invited interchange with, any “Young Contributor” to
literature.1 So much intentionality in grouping her writings for a reader is
rare indeed for this poet. Whereas the fascicles were made for domestic
safekeeping, with no audience or occasion in mind, this sampling of four
small poems was a choice meant to serve the purpose of the mailing:
Dickinson was asking an expert whether her “Verse is alive.” She wanted
to learn to be a better writer.
All four of the initial Higginson poems address the question of how –
and, indeed, whether – learning is possible. “I’ll tell you how the Sun rose”
attempts to cognize a sensory event; “Safe in their Alabaster chambers”
marvels at the inaccessible certainty of the dead; “The nearest Dream
recedes – unrealized” describes the elusiveness of simple percepts; and
“We play at Paste” proposes a model for bridging the gap between ignorance
and expertise. Each expresses in a different way an unspoken anxiety of
Western philosophy, one felt most sharply by autodidacts: exactly how does
anyone move from a state of ignorance to one of new insight? Unlike the
philosophers of her milieu, Dickinson does not see this as a practical
question, a problem of technique, but a categorical challenge. She suspects
strongly that true learning is impossible. Although the awkwardness of the
Higginson correspondence had different contours than she expected,
Dickinson was right to be nervous about the reception of such radical
epistemological thinking in polite company. Tact usually prevents our
commenting on such a scandalously basic question as whether there is, in
truth, any such thing as learning. Higginson was not much of a teacher for
his stubbornly idiosyncratic student, but in any case there was no one
around who could have readily engaged her on the fundamental question
these four poems most prominently ask.

1
Dickinson signed neither the poems nor the letter. To separate her bluestocking identity from the
texts, she enclosed her card in an interior envelope. Inverting the relation we might expect, in a
subsequent letter (L268) she identified her epistolary “Supposed person,” the alter ego presented in the
letters to Higginson, as “A representative of the Verse” – and not the other way around. These four
texts, then, are a self-introduction, a staged début: not of Emily Dickinson, poet, but of the poetry of
Emily Dickinson.
 Instant Learning in Dickinson and Kierkegaard 107

is insight possible?
Dickinson’s own “selected poems,” the four she sent to Higginson, call into
doubt the learning of a mature mind – the learning an adult does, distinct
from indoctrination or the unfurlings of the genome. Dickinson has a very
high standard for what learning should entail. In her most exacting modes,
she demands an excruciating balance between enormous, opposed forces.
There must be reciprocity between the energy of learning and the energy of
teaching. To Dickinson, perfect equipoise is required; the alternatives to it
are unacceptable. If knowledge is an imposition mostly of world on self,
then learning creates a discontinuity between the seeker and the subsequent
knower, a disruption of identity. But if knowledge is an imposition mostly
of self on world, then language threatens to come apart at the seams, and
empirical reality loses its authority. Dickinson explores both possibilities in
her pursuit of a balance that would maximize the vitality both of subject and
of object. The power of a new idea must come from within the self who
generates it, but it must also come from the world where it is true. In the
purest version of insight, the one Dickinson often insists on, the rigorous
learner equally occupies and is occupied by the world around her.
Can such a perfect balance ever be struck? Is it even theoretically
necessary? The philosophical apparatus is stark and disused, since only an
unproductive anxiety would raise the question, and fuss over every imbal-
ance between word and world. But the purist has a point: how can mind and
world engage each other fully, equally, without disrupting the identity of
either? If one gains the advantage, it threatens to erase the other. To ease the
anxiety about reciprocity in the transition from ignorance to knowledge,
Western philosophers have been inclined to posit supernatural bases for the
learning moment – Christians invoking the truth after death, ancient
Greeks the omniscience before birth, and Hegelians the perspective of
History itself. In these established epistemologies, the encounter between
learner and lesson is authorized and tended from above: such faith is
required, because from the time of Socrates, the footing of the learning
self has been dubious. She may trample her object, or a misstep may send
her into the void of nihilism.
The tradition in epistemology was to advert, if pressed, to transhistorical
guarantees of safe passage to new knowledge. They are necessary because
there is something uncanny and dislocating in the very first moment of
learning, when ignorance recognizes itself as such and gives way to some-
thing else. Today, questions about the initial leap of cognition are generally
regarded as best unasked. It is better not to look down at one’s footing.
108 VON DER HEYDT

Healthy historicized pragmatism is the watchword, and as a result philos-

ophy is more robust and muscular than it has ever been. But other kinds of
courage, less dynamic and less rewarding, are involved in Dickinsonian
vertigo. She questions the basis of learning, and when she undertakes it she
watches her every step.
Dickinson belongs, with Søren Kierkegaard, to a small school of dead-
end epistemological thinkers with a proclivity for intense skepticism. Their
epistemological challenge to learning arises from questions that are initially
healthy ones: inquiries that Kant brought into focus about the basic
structures of perception. How much of human insight comes from the
structure of the vigorous mind, and how much is impressed upon it from
outside? What kind of compromises can unite the perceiver with the
percept? And but – what if we are unwilling to compromise, but insist on
preserving the integrity of both? The temperament that might insist on that
last question is apt to raise another one, still more impertinent: unless we
understand the balance between action and reception, insight’s inward and
outward vectors, how can we be sure that learning – in the sense of claiming
new knowledge – is possible at all? It might be mere projection of human
desires, or it might be mere downloading, a jumble of inhuman facts. What
makes us believe both in the continuity of the learning self and in her
fidelity to the teaching world? Seeing no reliable way to reconcile the self-
expression and the attentiveness we believe to co-operate in cognitive acts,
extreme epistemological brooders call into doubt any relation between
experience and ideas. Suspended between experience and theory, they
tend to resemble the Greek Scholastic cited in Hegel, who resolved never
“to go into the water until he had learned how to swim” (Lectures 95).
Thankfully, Hegel helped modern philosophy set aside these paralyzing
doubts, and set to work pragmatically. But with perfect perversity, at the
moment that it became definitively passé, Kierkegaard was there to argue
that epistemology along these lines can never go out of style.
Imaginative writing always has an epistemological component, but it is
usually an implicit one. In narrative texts since the Enlightenment, the basic
potential for cognitive change is taken for granted. Of course people can
change; the only question is how. Like the bellows of a church organ,
epistemology usually operates out of earshot, behind the scenes; we are
just curious how the spirit of knowledge will be channeled and modulated
by the composition at hand. Faced with this genre difficulty, Kierkegaard
chose an ancient case study to bring forward his impertinent doubt about
whether there is, on the biggest issues, any such thing as balanced learning.
In analyzing the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, in 1843, Kierkegaard
 Instant Learning in Dickinson and Kierkegaard 109
insisted that very basic epistemology was called for. He deplored the way his
contemporaries claimed to have ”gone beyond” the old-style problems of
human narrative. Whereas Hegelians were apt to see in Abraham a mini-
aturized version of the progress of the human spirit – through contradiction
and inevitably out the other side – Kierkegaard saw the story as deeply
perplexing. What kind of God would communicate in this way? Dickinson
asked the same question, and answered it glibly by calling Abraham’s God
brutish, a “Mastiff” one can hope only to appease (Fr1317). But Kierkegaard
brooded about the learner: what kind of person could gain insight from
such an experience? The story seems to make nonsense of the very concept
of human development on which modern ideas of storytelling are based.
In his willingness to kill his son, thereby accomplishing nothing,
Abraham moves at right angles to ethics, a decision outwardly indistin-
guishable from sociopathy: “Abraham cannot be mediated; in other words,
he cannot speak” (Fear 60). In the history of narrative genres, Abraham
stands apart: he is “Neither a tragic hero, nor an aesthetic hero” (Fear 113).
His learning is uncategorizable, because the moment of recognition in his
story neither seals his inferiority as a mortal (another tragic Agamemnon)
nor makes him a demigod (another resplendent Odysseus). Transgressing
all cultural norms, he resigns himself to horror, going into the heart of
murderous tragedy to find fatherly love instantly and fully recuperated, in
God and in himself. What happens is imposed upon him, but it also
emerges from him, because of his faith: “While the tragic hero is great
because of his moral virtue, Abraham is great because of a purely personal
virtue” (Fear 59) – namely, obedience to the absurd. What he learns is too
horrible to be taught, and yet in his relation to an arbitrary God Abraham is
the ultimate adult learner: he develops radically without ceasing to be
himself. His insight about God’s love comes from God, but it was also
something he already knew; otherwise he could never have trusted in it.
Such learning fulfills the dignity of the faithful human, and does so precisely
by humiliating him. The paradox is hard to translate into a history of human
Aufhebung, or a mental practice of self-development in the spirit of Isaac
Watts. In general, Kierkegaard suggests a deep humility for the human learner.
Philosophy, he believes, should not advance; instead, classic epistemological
questions should be constantly resharpened: “Whatever one generation learns
from another, no generation learns the essentially human from a previous
one . . .. No generation is able to begin at any other point than the beginning”
(Fear 119). Hegelian philosophizing, Kierkegaard says, although supposedly
the ultimate in intellectual schemes, seems easy to him – but “Thinking about
Abraham is another matter; then I am shattered [by] paradox . . .. I stretch
110 VON DER HEYDT

every muscle to get a perspective, and at the very same instant I am paralyzed”
(FT 33). The epistemological practitioner is less like a commentator – keeping
up with the trends of knowledge – than like a dancer or performer. Developing
the mind is a kind of anaerobic training, and it cannot be expedited or
completed. Describing his self-satisfied modern contemporaries, Kierkegaard
says, suppose that “someone who wanted to learn to dance were to say: one
generation after another has learned the positions, and it is high time I took
advantage of this and promptly begin with the quadrille” (Fear 46). Springing
into motion is overrated. To learn the positions, the dancer must keep still.
And yet stasis seems to be antithetical to learning. Something must happen to
bring the unlearned to a new state. “I cannot dance opon my Toes – / No Man
instructed me” (Fr381), Dickinson wrote in August, 1862, to Higginson.
Without instruction, surely, there can be no progress – at least not as we
usually understand it.
Faced with these two choices – a merciless God demanding absolute
sacrifice, or an empty barre and mirror where the instructor should be – the
writer seeks some third model of knowledge acquisition. Total subjection
to external power is one nightmare; unchecked dominion over unreality (the
sociopathy of Abraham) is the other. Kierkegaard’s response to this quandary
matters to Dickinson’s literary work, because she also vacillates between the
alternatives of intense subjection and unstable self-determination. Moreover,
his work calls for a return to old-fashioned epistemology, and she is her
century’s most epistemologically inclined poet. The resulting model of
learning, for both writers, sets aside temporality to focus on single, excruciat-
ing moments in which insight brings with it triumph as well as desolation.
Since the emergence of the novel, most of our writing is chronological,
without undue focus on the isolated moment of insight; but in certain kinds
of lyric texts to this day, the basic character of learning is the crux.
Epistemological poems, unlike hermeneutic ones, are about the viability
of the very idea of learning. Dismantling the engine of mental progress, its
most rigorous writers examine the shapes of its parts: how can they possibly
all go together? To conceive a way that world and mind might engage each
other, they develop from scratch modes of geography and of geometry:
mapping percepts and theorizing mental objects. For them the wheel is
constantly under reinvention, on the drawing board. Because of its focus on
learning itself, epistemological poetry belongs properly to students, more
than to belletrists or literary-biography aficionados. And nothing better
demonstrates the prominence of Dickinson’s concern about learning than
the four poems of cognition’s “before and after” that she chose to represent
her oeuvre to Higginson.
 Instant Learning in Dickinson and Kierkegaard 111

world meets word

The learning of a poem is done by the hands as much as the brain. Writing
blends creation and reception. The writer’s knowledge, because of the way it
is received, transcends mere data, and bears her mark. On the page, the trace
of such active receptivity is poetic metaphor, which presents the world
faithfully using alien terms chosen by its particular perceiver. In the first half
of one of her Higginson poems, Dickinson demonstrates her skill at over-
laying her own imagery onto external percepts.
I’ll tell you how the Sun rose –
A Ribbon at a time –
The Steeples swam in Amethyst –
The news, like Squirrels, ran –
The Hills untied their Bonnets –
The Bobolinks – begun –
Then I said softly to myself –
“That must have been the Sun”! (Fr204)
As the sun rises in this poem (and with the same inevitability), the elements
of the day come under the sway of perception, and are immediately adapted
into human metaphors. This fusing of phenomenon and language shows
what balanced insight looks like: we are given the sunrise in two equal parts,
one part world and one part poet. In the sunrise mode, Dickinson estab-
lishes her skill as observer and imaginer. Saying all these metaphors, and
knowing what has happened, is as easy here as commenting on the sun by
name. But then, in the fascicle although not in the version sent to
Higginson ,, there is a line across the page, and the poem continues in a
very different register. In the sunset mode, Dickinson presents a scenario in
which skill is not enough to bridge world and word.
Notably, the sunset, like the sunrise, is an event that the speaker has seen
perfectly well. In saying that she “know[s] not” how the sun set, she is not
saying that she lacks data. What she is missing is confidence. The coming of
darkness disrupts metaphor.
But how he set – I know not –
There seemed a purple stile
That little Yellow boys and girls
Were climbing all the while –
Till when they reached the other side –
A Dominie in Gray –
Put gently up the evening Bars –
And led the flock away – (Fr204b)
112 VON DER HEYDT

At sunrise, there was an almost unconscious, effortless transition between the

predawn speaker and the later one, capable of calling the sun by its right
name. Here, however, the power of night is to choke off the naming power of
the observer, to blur distinctions, and, most uncomfortable of all, to prevent
transition itself from operating. There is no moment of summative speech
to conclude the process of sunset, and while it is happening it seems as if it
must always happen: “all the while” the elements of day are crossing over.
Without appropriate nouns, either metaphorical Ribbons or literal Squirrels,
the agency of nightfall is located not in the speaker or in an object but in a
formless power, a “Dominie” – without cruelty, but without motive.
The metaphors of the second stanza are unreliable. The fading of light is
represented by the congregating and departure of a “flock” – and yet the first
act of the ”sheep” in this poem is to climb a stile. This is so bizarre that it must
be purposeful: the very purpose of a stile, after all, is to block livestock while
allowing humans to cross a boundary. Somehow these sheep have been
endowed with a new skill, and made from beasts into innocent “Boys and
Girls”; or perhaps they were children all along, and only transformed into
sheep on reaching the greener grass of the fence’s other side. If they have
learned how to access the world of the twilight, it is because they have been
transformed. Have the children fulfilled their human nature or left it behind?
Are they elements of nature or agents of perception? It is not clear whether
their new dominion comes from the “Dominie,” or from some innate prowess
that makes their surmounting inevitable. Whatever they have achieved or
undergone, though, the speaker is left out of it. A total change has happened,
but the cognizing observer remains the same; she has not learned, and does not
know, what children and beasts seem able to access without thinking.

an absolute break
We hardly need “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers,” the second of the four
poems Dickinson chose to typify her poetic concerns, to recognize the
sunset imagery as eschatological. Such a carefully tended flock – sheep,
not goats – moving transformed away from the world at the close of day,
enact the destiny of the dead. In this second poem, in a different register, the
members of that group, fully grown up, await their final twilit crossing-over.
Again, the poem unfolds in two stanzas; this time the speaker is excluded
from the first one instead of the second.
Safe in their Alabaster chambers –
Untouched by Morning –
 Instant Learning in Dickinson and Kierkegaard 113
And untouched by Noon –
Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection –
Rafter of Satin and Roof of Stone –
Grand go the Years,
In the Crescent above them –
Worlds scoop their Arcs –
And Firmaments – row –
Diadems – drop –
And Doges – surrender –
Soundless as Dots,
On a Disc of Snow. (Fr124f)
Until Judgment Day, in this poem, the elect are separated from the bright
world of weather. Patient, unmoving, but confident of rising, they are
contrasted with even the most powerful among the living (in this
Higginson version), or with the frivolous, unweatherproofed Bee that
“Light[ly] . . . Babbles” aboveground (in the initial version, Fr124b). The
poem, in all of its revisions, fixates on the difference between the world of
phenomena and the plush knowingness of the tomb: “Ah, what Sagacity
perished here!” (Fr124b). If there ever was wisdom, its possessors are gone.
Earthly events are all the same, whether climatic or political, and sealed off
from real wisdom.
Famously, Dickinson revised this poem twice because of her sister-in-law’s
observation that the second stanza did not connect adequately with the first.
The “Alabaster” stanza chilled Sue to the bone, in a way that the exterior
description could not answer. Unifying the poem was inordinately difficult,
precisely because of its central theme: The space of living is locked out from
the realities of eternity, and no thaw aboveground can penetrate the stasis of
eternally authorized “Sagacity.” The elements of sensory experience find
expression only in “ignorant cadence” (Fr124b). In one variant ending,
Dickinson put the lesson directly: “Midnight in Marble – / Refutes – the
Suns –” (Fr124e). Some kinds of truth cannot be unlocked by time; some
modes of knowing, while real, cannot be accessed from where we are.
In the worldview of Christian historiography, no gradual interface can
bridge the eschatological world and the daylit one of earthly vision. Such a
transition requires the suddenness of Revelation, a defeat rather than a
fulfillment of the senses. The frustration of sensory effort is staged in the
Higginson anthology on a smaller scale as well: in the third poem, the sunlit
Bee refuses to reveal secret knowledge, giving no access to the freedom its
flight represents. That dream, close at hand this time, but too light rather
than too heavy for the human, will not serve as an object of study. An
114 VON DER HEYDT

unbridgeable chasm separates the learner from his lesson, no matter how
near it may be.
The nearest Dream recedes – unrealized –
The Heaven we chase –
Like the June Bee – before the School Boy –
Invites the Race –
Stoops – to an Easy Clover –
Dips – evades – teazes – deploys –
Then – to the Royal Clouds
Lifts his light Pinnace –
Heedless of the Boy –
Staring – bewildered – at the mocking sky –
Homesick for steadfast Honey –
Ah – the Bee flies not
That brews that rare variety! (Fr304b)
Rejecting both the georgic and the scholastic modes, Dickinson here presents
a scenario in which cognitive development is not awarded in exchange for any
amount of exertion. Horizontal movement across a landscape can never grant
the human wings.
In each of the Higginson poems, then, there is a troubled connection
between the unknowing self (at what we might call Point A) and the
insightful one (occupying Point B). In “I’ll tell you how the sun rose,”
once dawn has melded world with thought, the onset of night baffles
description, and empties the expressible sensory landscape. In “Safe in
their Alabaster Chambers,” stubbornly discrete stanzas similarly reflect the
divorce of eternal wisdom from the world of events. In “The nearest Dream
recedes – unrealized,” there is no chance for the scrutiny of phenomena that
might bridge ignorance and knowledge. In all three cases, Point B is out of
reach: over the horizon of heaven, in the tomb, or in the sky. In the fourth,
most vexed of the poems, “We play at Paste,” Dickinson attempts to
remedy the dilemma in an orderly way. She asserts what seems a perfectly
reasonable continuity between the inept maker and the one “Qualified for
Pearl.” The failings of this last text force the poet back to what would remain
a central puzzle of her work, the discontinuity of reciprocal learning. How
can it exist, this strange phenomenon: the mind that pierces, and is pierced
by, new insight – yet keeps its identity?
With the first three poems in mind, the overall outlook for the would-be
learner is bleak. Athleticism is fruitless: and if stasis involves Apocalypse or
death, what can be the value of any cognitive attitude? It seems that reliable
insight can be entombed or out of reach, but cannot be brought to hand in
 Instant Learning in Dickinson and Kierkegaard 115
daylit percepts. There are frustrations both in enclosure and openness, both
in stasis and dynamism. No storyline of incremental progress links the
ignorant and the wise, and no amount of exertion can make knowing
happen. Moreover, the circumstances of the dream of knowledge frustrate
communication precisely as they frustrate perception: hence the protago-
nists are unable respectively to describe the fall of night, to hear the
“perished” Sagacity of the saved, or to be “heeded” by the bee. Patient
receptivity to revelation, silent readiness for the dawning of new knowledge
as a gift from God, would be one possible response to this quandary. But
Dickinson insists on human proactivity in cognition: she is a poet of
uncanny new concepts, to whom muscular expression and acts of faithful
attention both matter greatly. Seeking a “preceptor” in Higginson,
Dickinson might seem a “young contributor,” with things to learn – but
her writing is not a schoolgirl exercise. It is adult work.

one model for learning: childhood

In seeking metaphors for energetic, steady learning, poets have a natural
place to start. The curious child – such as Whitman’s “boy astonished” or
Wordsworth’s young alter ego – often becomes the template for ongoing
mental and artistic growth. The vector of childhood learning can then be
seen to continue throughout the Romantic’s life of sensation and thought.
In the mutual engagement of child and Nature, the structure of the curious
mind sets the terms for sensory inputs. Learning, then, is a leading-out of
hardwired skills of insight (rather than something added to a blank slate), a
gradual manifestation of what it is to be human. There is a basis in Plato’s
mythic epistemology to undergird this choice: the child’s self-possession
manifests eternal knowledge, and such manifestations inform all perception
and therefore all insight.
In the most tentative of the four poems initially sent to Higginson, a
failed experiment in gradualism, the poet tried to assert continuity between
the ”before” and ”after” of adult learning. As we have seen, the other three
poems all placed insurmountable obstacles between the two realms. In a
choice that would prove extraordinarily rare in Dickinson’s later work, “We
play at Paste” tries out the metaphor of childhood skill-development,
untainted by adult edicts or loaded terminology. Gradual learning through
apprenticeship would solve the problems of the educational models typified
by the static, saved Christian (who has been rendered mute) and the
scrambling, entomologically inclined “School Boy” (whose efforts are
futile). Concomitantly, there is an active verb and a temporal transition in
116 VON DER HEYDT

the first two lines of this poem. But the analogy falters, because an adult,
before she learns something crucial, is not adorably naïve. In retrospect, she
is just a “fool.”
We play at Paste –
Till qualified, for Pearl –
Then, drop the Paste –
And deem ourself a fool –
The Shapes – though – were similar –
And our new Hands
Learned Gem-Tactics
Practising Sands – (Fr282)
In the second line of this poem, the impossible feat of learning is accom-
plished, in a way that seems to resonate with the best theories of education
since Schiller used the concept of “play” in his proto-Hegelian fusion of
pleasure and rigor: “[Adult] craftsmanship draws on what children learn in
play’s dialogue with physical materials” (Sennett 273). It seems that an
apprenticeship has been completed, and the childish rhinestone-maker
graduates to the immaculate Pearl – an object fit in other places to adorn
a godlike, royal, and/or matrimonially eligible “Earl.” But this accomplish-
ment instantly scorns itself, and the speaker labels as “foolish” the very work
with Paste that seemed to have enabled the new access to Pearls. Was the
“play” true preparation, or only busywork, a parody of accomplishment?
Dickinson expends lines three and four undermining the apparent
project of this poem, which purports to trace continuity between the clumsy
self and the artisan of Pearl. In hamhanded fashion, meanwhile, she rhymes
“Paste” with itself – a rare kind of false note; conversely, the rhyme of
“Pearl” with “fool” is so slanted as to be merely askew. In line five, in the
effort to redeem paste-work and recover the focus on continuity between
“before” and ”after,” Dickinson finds herself interpolating the awkward
word “though, ” and finishes the line with a dactyl. Besides destroying the
poem’s metrical identity, line five also blurs the temporal point of view, by
introducing the past tense. The clumsiness that persists in this text about
dexterity, as it enacts its own self-deprecation as pastework, should put to
rest any idea that Dickinson chose poems for Higginson that would show
her literary skill to best advantage.
If this poem seems tentative and unsuccessful, the reason can be found in
the last two lines: although the protagonists’ hands are said to have learned
by their work with humble objects, they have somehow also been replaced.
The protagonists have not trained their childish muscles but have been
 Instant Learning in Dickinson and Kierkegaard 117
issued “new Hands” entirely. This new flesh embodies the anxiety of
learning in Dickinson: how is one renewed without losing one’s previous
self? How can what practicing hands learned be the same as what new hands
know? Indeed, the formally perfect gems turn out hardly to resemble the
preliminary costume jewelry made from Paste. A pearl, unfaceted, is imper-
vious in its inherent symmetry, and offers no surfaces to orient and engage
the craftsperson. The absolute shift from the fake to the authentic, the
sphericizing of the square, entails a re-incarnation – “new Hands.” And this
in turn calls for a kind of death.
At a minimum, the continuity between preliminary learning and true
knowledge should be guaranteed by the persistence of the body: we recog-
nize ourselves after a great change because our flesh is the same. But to leave
behind an old self one must renounce it. Dickinson believes such
“Renunciation – is a piercing Virtue” (Fr782), meaning not that it is
virtuous, but that it is a force of puncture, destructive to flesh. In the
paste-poem the craftsperson’s expertise does not consist in her becoming
an “old hand” at ornament-work; quite the contrary. Her resurrection in a
qualitatively more powerful form, a fresh body, partakes of a discontinuity,
a moment of breakthrough to Pearl. The crux of the poem is therefore the
moment in which we are pronounced “Qualified,” in the second line. But
this transition emanates from an external authority – not from the internally
enhanced skill of the paste-players. They do not, in the poem’s rendition,
“qualify” for Pearl through adequacy of effort or completion of an appren-
tice’s sojourn. Instead, passively, through the decree of another voice, they
are “qualified.” To the Dickinsonian autodidact, this distinction between
self-advancement and authorized promotion is all the difference in the
world. It does not satisfy. Learning like a child makes her own self, the
learning self, a fool. Instead, in Dickinson’s adult poetic, the writer seeks to
learn in self-respecting ways: through renunciation, awareness of death, and
dignified humility.

the radical newness of learning

If, as the Higginson anthology suggests, Dickinson’s writing concerns itself
centrally with troubling interfaces between ignorance and knowledge,
we need a philosopher who is discontented, as Dickinson is, with the
Hegelian insistence on insight as a ”process,” and yet believes life to be
punctuated with truth. Moreover, we need a philosopher with an interest in
maintaining the learner’s dignity even when she is being radically remade.
Kierkegaard fits the bill.
118 VON DER HEYDT

In Kierkegaard’s epistemological writing one finds the necessary empha-

sis on the decisive moment of teaching: an intervention, rather than fluid
processes of improvement.2 In one instance, he needled the leading Danish
Hegelian of his day, one Johan Heiberg, who had described learning how to
read Hegel through a “sudden inner vision, like a flash of lightning” (Fear
388n152): “Through a miracle [Heiberg] gained an understanding of . . . a
philosophy that (remarkably enough) does not accept miracles” (Fear 324).
Adopting pseudonyms and a pained, ironic style, Kierkegaard chose absurd,
apparently undertheorized premises of knowledge. He refused to postulate,
as he believed Socrates and Hegel both had done, that humanity had all
knowledge within itself. And yet the miraculous decisiveness of the learning
moment allows Kierkegaard to avoid nihilism, and to situate meaning
within experience.
Although its mechanisms are grotesque, Kierkegaard preferred such an
epistemology to the idea that eternal knowledge seeps gradually into societal
reservoirs across the frosty boundary of death. The keys to absolute learning
are instantaneity and passivity. Rejecting the gradualist learning-model she
attempted to describe in “We play at paste,” Dickinson adopts both features
in her strongest poems of new knowledge. The experience of insight in
Dickinson could never be called the self surmounting itself, in the style of
Hegelian learning. In many of her most uncanny poems, nonetheless,
insight does happen, bizarrely, suddenly. The basis for it is not proactive,
steady progress, but the basis that Kierkegaard describes – namely, a
rigorous and tragic absurdity. Without denigrating the learner, such learn-
ing emphasizes passivity as much as human energy, and punctuates the flow
of time with instants of sudden cognitive force. It is profoundly alien to
Hegelian models of learning.

2
In its careful negotiation of the relationship between history and meaning, Hegelian epistemology
addresses the problem of learning by liquefying its terms, and focusing attention on processes rather
than destinies. Kierkegaard felt that the eager contemporary reception of Hegel’s historicism begged
the underlying question: “There is no explanation in our age as to how mediation takes place, whether
it results from the motion of the two factors and in what sense it is already contained in them, or
whether it is something new that is added, and if so, how” (Repetition 149). Socratic thinkers elide the
necessary task of characterizing the linkage between prebirth and learned knowledge; in the same way,
in this critique, Hegelian historicists may fail to characterize the interface between the particulate
knowing self and the swirls of History.
Since Hegel’s day, as Carl Page put it in 1995 in a trenchant critique of the prevailing wisdom among
philosophers of history, the “hydrodynamic” metaphors of the engulfed historical self beg questions
about “the existence and effectiveness of the relations of condition, influence, and constraint”: “There
must be adequate justification of the categories deployed in speaking about the power of [history’s]
contingent limits and boundaries” (7–8, emphasis added). In general, Page, like Kierkegaard, refuses to
concede “that historicity entails the necessary parochiality of understanding or, obversely, the
impossibility of insight” (8). But like most people he lacks Kierkegaard’s taste for tragedy.
 Instant Learning in Dickinson and Kierkegaard 119
In the absence of an all-powerful teacher, the epistemological poet’s
alternative to childhood metaphors is an awkward one: when adult learning
is not like childhood insight, it turns out to resemble instead the revelations
involved in dying. In Christianity as in the poetic romance of death, the
dying person undergoes a transition into eternal perspective. The wholeness
underwriting human insight is found not before one’s life begins (as
Socrates or Wordsworth would have it), but instead in the fulfillment of
ultimate arrival elsewhere.
Platonists, Romantics, and heaven-oriented Protestants all believe that
learning involves a maneuver (albeit an eternally supervised one) across the
platform of Time. In Western epistemological schemes of this type, learning
just means finding access to another version of the self: an earlier one, or a
later one.3 The chamber of sapience – womb or tomb – is seen as fully
furnished, and we seek its portals within ourselves. Spiritual knowledge thus
belongs to the curious self, not to a higher authority, and is guaranteed by
healthy, eternally authorized epistemologies: “The truth is not introduced
into him but was in him” (Fragments 9). By contrast, Kierkegaard’s project
is called existential because it is premised on the contrary idea: life changes
us radically. This premise entails a different kind of learning, in which the
teacher truly adds something new to the student’s world rather than draw-
ing out insights that were already there.
In the act of writing to Higginson to seek a “Preceptor” (L265),
Dickinson evidenced her concern about her internal adequacy for new
knowledge. What she was seeking was not merely poetic manners, but an
essential change in her encounter with the phenomena of the world: “An
ignorance, not of Customs, but if caught with the Dawn – or the Sunset see
me – Myself the only Kangaroo among the Beauty, Sir, if you please, it
afflicts me, and I thought that instruction would take it away” (L268,
emphasis added). The Dickinsonian mind feels the lack of harmony in its
cognitive efforts. It needs help changing its very nature (in this case, a
marsupial one) to something less ungainly. Kierkegaard’s epistemological
project likewise presupposes the need for some instruction. For both the
philosopher and the poet, doubts about the possibility of self-development
will lead to the same teacher.

3
Kierkegaard asserts the similarity of these Hellenic and Hegelian schemes by pointing out that they use
similar dynamics to allow earthly knowledge to ‘approximate’ eternal knowledge: “This Greek idea [of
recollection] is repeated in ancient and modern speculation. . .. The eternal ‘pre’s’ of that approximat-
ing thinking are similar to the eternal ‘post’s’ of the corresponding approximation” (Fragments 10n).
120 VON DER HEYDT

a second model for learning: death

Unifying the Higginson anthology under the rubric of learning, and taking it
as representative, allows us to recast certain Dickinsonian themes in a new
light. One might start to discern, for example, that Dickinson is fascinated
with death not for itself, but because she believes that it resembles the move-
ment into new knowledge. Like death, poetic insight is sudden and absolute:
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
....
And then a Plank in Reason, broke –
And I dropped down, and down –
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing – then – (Fr340)
If death is primarily the template for learning experience, Dickinson’s many
poems involving a dead lyric speaker take on new resonance: they are
attempts to create continuity between “before” and ”after,” to account for
the transition involved in a radical insight.
This Consciousness that is aware
Of Neighbors and the Sun
Will be the one aware of Death
And that itself alone
Is traversing the interval
Experience between
And most profound experiment
Appointed unto Men – . . . (Fr817)
The premise of this poem, in the first few lines, is that selfhood should
not be essentially altered by the entrance into eternity. One should, in the
Christian schema, be able to leave behind the world without leaving behind
one’s sense of self. In another place God’s “weight” and the Brain’s are
paired with “Sound” and “Syllable” (Fr598) – respectively, what the senses
experience and what the communicator creates. Here we are told, likewise,
that earthly life and afterlife differ as “Experience” and “Experiment.”
Proactively, like a scientist, the solitary consciousness after death seems
to be devising the terms by which it learns about the new world. The
percepts that she received passively from the neighborhood or the environ-
ment are succeeded by weightier elements she herself discovers. Hegel’s
Phenomenology can be seen to address the mechanism by which active
Experiment arises out of passive Experience, and vice versa: the “stance of
Science in relation to appearing knowledge” (1977, 139). At the start of this
 Instant Learning in Dickinson and Kierkegaard 121
poem, though, it seems that leaving behind daily percepts (while retaining
the consciousness that encountered them) initiates true scientific knowing.
The “scientific” mind, like the child’s, creates the terms of its reality, but
such an experiment can be conducted only in death.
Death in this poem seems at first to be a self-fulfillment, enabling one to
undertake proactive experiments in the “Science of the Grave” (Fr659) –
except that this “Most profound Experiment” is not self-designed, but
“Appointed,” from an outside authority. Worse yet, for a poet: its mecha-
nisms cannot be expressed.
How adequate unto itself
It’s properties shall be
Itself unto itself and None
Shall make discovery –
Adventure most unto itself
The Soul condemned to be –
Attended by a single Hound
It’s own identity. (Fr817)
The themes of the Higginson anthology throw into sharp relief this poem’s
central dichotomy between the passive perception of sunlight, in the first
stanza, and active adventure in the second. “This Consciousness” seems
both to undergo and to create the conditions for radical learning. The
problem of relating her perceptions before death with her discoveries after-
ward seems to be dissolved in the muddle of the third stanza’s ambiguous
pronouns (“itself unto itself,” for example). But in the last two lines,
brilliantly, Dickinson resolves the problem of “before and after” differently,
by extracting from the protagonist a canine sidekick, representing the
earthly “identity” she cannot imagine herself losing (or, to be more precise,
cannot imagine her self having lost). The isolation of the third stanza is
redeemed by this reincarnation of the earthly self – albeit in the form of a
dog. And in the shadow of the word “condemned” and the ambiguity of the
word “attended,” it is hard to be confident that the Hound is a faithful
companion rather than a baying pursuer into madness. In either case, the
loping, grinning avatar of self-awareness, an earthly identity extracted from
the soul to purify it, can hardly be the teacher humanity needs.

learning without progress

Kierkegaard’s objection to the Hegelian transactions of sane, historicized
education was that they relied on the principle of intrinsic self-surmounting.
122 VON DER HEYDT

The Hegelian mind is indeed “Adventure most unto itself,” and the influen-
tial American thinkers of Dickinson’s day believed exercising the mind was
the key to expanding insight (see, for example, Deppman 70). Higginson
believed we could be comfortable at the new frontiers philosophy might open
up: he wrote at the end of his “Young Contributor” essay, “In some other
realm of existence we may look back with some kind interest on this scene of
our earlier life, and say to one another, ‘Do you remember yonder planet,
where once we went to school?’” But both Kierkegaard and Dickinson find
the idea of self-alienation horrifyingly uncanny.4
For Kierkegaard, the process-oriented model of learning actually incor-
porated, and glossed over, the troubled premises of Hellenic mythic epis-
temology. Talk about outer space, or Hegel’s Weltgeist, was just an updated
placeholder for the Platonic Realm of Forms, or for Heaven. The secret of
Hegel, under Kierkegaard’s critique, is that there is no real teaching in the
system except in emanations from a deus ex machina, the spirit of History,
which is itself suspended between reality and fiction. Kierkegaard, perhaps
unfairly, saw the summoning of this entity as hand-waving, and saw the
learning thereby enabled as superficial. Without significant intervention
from a teacher – some person – Kierkegaard believed that the learner could
not be changed by her learning to the extent required. Such a model,
ultimately, leaves the epistemologist clinging to the Socratic idea of knowl-
edge as mere self-discovery.
In Dickinson the radical leap between cognitive states simply, absurdly
happens to the individual, without mediating transitional processes. The
fullness of time is now, or never. Hence, in bizarre single lines of many
Dickinson poems totally new insight is just asserted as fact, without
appropriate preliminaries. The speaker says, “There came a Day” (Fr325);
or “I got my Eye put out” (Fr336); or “I’m ceded – I’ve stopped being
Their’s” (Fr353); or “I touched the Universe” (Fr633); or “I heard a Fly
Buzz – when I died” (Fr591); or “No Notice gave She, but a Change”
(Fr860); and then it is the task of the poem to account for the earlier self
(what happened to her?) and situate the new one. Undergone cold turkey,
learning is a reality for Dickinson – but it is not much of a story. Its
abruptness means there are no hydraulics that a dialectical blueprint
might schematize.
These learning-poems, unlike “We play at Paste,” are full of power but
not of promise. The Dickinson poem about dancing-skill leaps unjustifiably

4
In many of his modes of thinking, R. W. Emerson shares their fascination and unease. See von der
Heydt, chapters 1–3.
 Instant Learning in Dickinson and Kierkegaard 123
from ignorance to expertise, even though it is premised on the inability to
do so. “I cannot dance opon my Toes – / No Man instructed me” (Fr381),
she writes, without mincing words – and yet, without any transitional
narrative, she goes on in this poem to describe in detail the dance she
cannot, and does not, do.
And though I had no Gown of Gauze –
No Ringlet, to my Hair,
Nor hopped to Audiences – like Birds,
One Claw opon the Air –
Nor tossed my shape in Eider Balls,
Nor rolled on wheels of .snow
Till I was out of sight, in sound,
The House encore me so –
Nor any know I know the Art
I mention – easy – Here –
For this unperformed performance, she says absurdly, she is roundly
celebrated with the applause of unaware society. Skill happens, in this
poem, in the fact that it does not happen: it occurs in the infinitesimal
moment of “Glee” in which its impossibility is forgotten. The people of
society, applauding her without knowing it, do not “know I know the Art,”
and for good reason she can never teach them otherwise. Her dance is
unteachable, because it was unlearnable.

writing passively and instantly

Dickinson’s poetry, in making a space for itself between bizarrerie and
superfluity, struggles to propound a model of nongradualist learning:
revelation that is punched through, violently and suddenly, into the self
from beyond. Lacking a companionable teacher, or even a precursor, for the
kind of writing that she does, Dickinson might be expected to have
produced many more poems of cognitive frustration, like those first four
she sent to Higginson. Instead, repeatedly, with impatient or missing verbs,
she skips the educational process and shows extraordinary intensity, mental
and linguistic, in single lyric moments. In order to claim such insights,
Dickinson must address the two problems with Kierkegaardian knowledge.
The first problem is the strong component of passivity in the human
learner; the second is the instantaneous character of the event. Such learning
cannot be self-affirming or gradual; it punctuates a career, disruptively,
rather than guiding it.
124 VON DER HEYDT

Like her unskilled ballet prima donna, the protagonists in Dickinsonian

poems of knowledge very often strain very hard to do nothing. The moments
of perfection therefore draw on neither the myth of blossoming nor that of
apocalypse: each poem of cognition is too painful to be innocent, and too full
of exertion to be just an unveiling. Found in single poems rather than larger
contexts, Dickinsonian truth is stitched (paradoxically) into the whole cloth of
sensory experience, under the sign of a violent – perhaps inhumane – epis-
temology of loss. To make it less of an infliction, if not less sudden, Dickinson
must find ways to recuperate the human consciousness within it. The imping-
ing education must also respect the dignity of human self-expression.
A Weight with Needles on the pounds –
To push, and pierce, besides –
That if the Flesh resist the Heft –
The puncture – Coolly tries –
That not a pore be overlooked
Of all this Compound Frame –
As manifold for Anguish –
As Species – be – for name. (Fr294)
The inexorable force exerted on the senses here leaves no aspect of the poet
unmarked – but is itself marked by her voice. The last line, far from being
opaque, is a remarkable reaffirmation of the agency of the human under
absolute pressure. The scientific mind, like Adam, assigns names to all
animal species: in the first seven lines, the world exerts a counter-pressure
that matches, but does not exceed, such acts of cognition. The passivity that
infuses this poem is so great that the poet cannot even assign a main verb to
this “Weight.” “Compound” power presses inward, to impinge on the
sacrificial flesh – but then it also surges outward. This poem moves a step
beyond its tragically destructive scenario, to enact what Kierkegaard calls
the movement beyond infinite resignation (see Fragments 78). After suc-
cumbing absolutely to the world’s piercing, the experimental mind is
absurdly resurrected, with the empty verb “Be,” to encounter Nature
vigorously with manifold skills of human naming: Logos with a vengeance.
Such prowess, though it may correspond with linguistic skills that
develop over time, must reckon constantly with the counter-movement of
new input entailed in fresh encounter. Although it is surely true that
Dickinson develops as a writer, this fact is less interesting to her than the
constant return of passion, from expert to pupil.
We learned the Whole of Love –
The Alphabet – the Words –
 Instant Learning in Dickinson and Kierkegaard 125
A Chapter – then the mighty Book –
Then – Revelation closed –
But in each Other’s eyes
An Ignorance beheld –
Diviner than the Childhood’s
And each to each, a Child –
Attempted to expound –
What neither – understood –
Alas, that Wisdom is so large –
And Truth – so manifold! (Fr531)
Whatever progress the mind might make over time dwindles to nothing in
the constant refreshing of beautiful ignorance. The power of human
unknowing in such poems, like the dancing-skill of the uninstructed
ballerina, corresponds with epistemological respect for individual human
dignity. Kierkegaard’s primal teacher must not hand down knowledge to a
passive student, then pronounce the student “Qualified” by some external
standard. The result, even in the best case, would be a humiliation of the
previous self: we must then retrospectively “deem Ourself a fool.” Instead,
paradoxically, teaching must honor the learner as she was before.5

identifying the teacher

Kierkegaard maintains that truly fresh insight must, logically, come from
elsewhere: “If a human being is to come truly to know something about the
unknown (the god), he must first come to know that it is different from
him, absolutely different from him. The understanding cannot come to
know this by itself” (Fragments 46). There must be some kind of teacher,
even if it is impossible that any finite being could “teach” the absolute.
Learning must have a passive element, which means a sapient outside
agency. This is why Dickinson’s protagonist, in hoping to be dignified by
her learning, hopes for the impossible. Many skills can be inculcated by

5
Epistemological poetry is not about ethics, but it is worth pointing out that the paradoxes of teaching
in Dickinson apply to everyone in a position of cognitive privilege stemming from institutions, leisure,
and money. David Ellerman has written in the context of developing societies: “The basic problem,
across the whole range of the human helping relationships (like aid) between what might be called the
‘helper’ and the ‘doer,’ is that success lies in achieving more autonomy on the part of the doers, and
autonomy is precisely the sort of thing that cannot be externally supplied or provided by the would-be
helpers. This is the fundamental conundrum of all human helping relations, and it is the basic reason,
not complexity, why engineering approaches and the like don’t work” (http://tinyurl.com/4ly89x5,
accessed January 21, 2011). Technocracy has inherent limits, against which it is for us to strain.
126 VON DER HEYDT

instruction and practice, but nothing can erase the original fact of
ignorance.
You taught me Waiting with Myself –
Appointment strictly kept –
You taught Me fortitude of Fate –
This – also – I have learnt –
An Altitude of Death, that could
No bitterer debar
Than Life – had done – before it –
Yet – there is a Science more –
The Heaven you know – to understand
That you be not ashamed
Of Me – in Christ’s bright Audience
Opon the further Hand – P 774)
This poem of instruction returns at the end to the problem of learning’s
“before and after.” Any awareness of the previous state of ignorance is
shameful before the eternal gaze, and no Pygmalion, even one who
“knows Heaven,” can prevent the speaker’s originary faux pas. The
instructed self must always be abashed by the memory of the learning
one. By the same token, as Kierkegaard puts it, even a benevolently tran-
scendent God cannot teach anything to the visionary without instilling
shame: “The god’s concern is to bring about equality. If this cannot be
brought about, the love becomes unhappy and the instruction meaningless”
(Fragments 28). However much one might learn, there is always still the
problem of reconciling the previous self with the new one: “there is a
Science more.” The teacher, to bridge that gap, must partake of both
modes of being, must be suspended between two worlds, hung mid-leap
between the truth of developed spirit and the ignorance with which the
learner begins. Such an overlap of the eternal and the finite, in the moment
of engaging the student in transition, is impossible either for the human or
for the divine alone.
In the last two lines, at once describing and resolving this paradox,
Dickinson suddenly invokes the teacher who resolves the epistemological
nightmares of both writers. Recourse to the uniqueness of Christ, the single
pedagogue who heals the ontology of Knowledge, is the philosophically
unfashionable resolution of learning’s contradictions for both writers: “In
order for the teacher to be able to give the condition [of readiness to learn],
he must be the god, and in order to put the learner in possession of it” –
giving her, as we now say, ‘ownership’ – “he must be man . . .. If this is not
 Instant Learning in Dickinson and Kierkegaard 127
the structure, then we are left with Socratic recollection [that is, no true
learning]” (Fragments 62). This is why, having learned all she can from her
fellow human, the speaker of the poem undergoes the attention of Christ,
both particular and general, both human and divine. In receiving an
Audience from him, one is, by etymological necessity, heard – and therefore
is not a shy attendant at revelation, but a speaking presence.
For these writers, Christ is the only teacher who can bridge the world of
ignorance with that of savoir faire. Suffused with paradox, the Christic
teacher instills knowledge magisterially while humbly educing speech. As
Kierkegaard has it, “This is the boundlessness of love, that in earnestness
and truth and not in jest it wills to be the equal of the beloved” (Fragments
32). Learning and self-expression are identical in this moment, which is not
a personal narrative but a lyric rupture in sequence itself.
In poem after poem Dickinson invokes the paradoxical power of such
acquiescence using a word that she associates directly with Christ,
“Compound” (see for example Fr670, Fr815, Fr830). As Dickinson’s poetic
developed, she found fewer and fewer occasions to posit the continuity
of learning, developing “Gem-Tactics” through “practising Sands.”
Discontinuity predominates in the later poems, which increasingly find
their insights in explosive moments rather than gradual development. In the
special sense in which she used it, much of Dickinson’s poetry is indeed
compound. Though the poem’s speaker cannot always access it directly
herself, Dickinson associates the beauty of instant development with the
paradoxes of Christ.
He gave away his Life –
To Us – Gigantic Sum –
A trifle – in his own esteem –
But magnified – by Fame –
Until it burst the Hearts
That fancied they could hold –
When swift it slipped it’s limit –
And on the Heavens – unrolled –
Tis Our’s – to wince – and weep –
And wonder – and decay
By Blossom’s gradual process –
He chose – Maturity –
And quickening – as we sowed –
Just obviated Bud –
And when We turned to note the Growth –
Broke – perfect – from the Pod – (Fr530)
128 VON DER HEYDT

Like this instant blossom, Dickinson says the true learner does not “qualify”
for expansions of mind by gradual self-surmounting. Instead, each insight is
fully earned on the spot, through a ”quickening” that is also sacrificial. The
obviation of “Bud” is not just an acceleration of the blossoming process; it is
a cancellation of the word itself – a defiance of all expectations of “Growth.”
To follow this example, we would have to reap immediately as we sow.
Such a compound teacher rejects the Hegelian concepts of incipience,
emergence, and progress. No instructional project can lead up to, or follow
up on, a learning moment of such decisive impact. It is hard to overstate
the difficulty of this scheme, compared to its alternatives. If teaching were
only the activation of intrinsic knowledge, then epistemology would center
on the individual and her predilections. If we could plan on cowering before
the truth at the Last Judgment, epistemology would be just a matter of
patience, and would center on God alone. But Kierkegaard and Dickinson
compress these two alternatives, Socratic and Christian historiography, into
the Now of insight. Thus they choose pain.
Inflicting on themselves ancient uncertainties about the moment of
learning, these two writers posit an agonizingly tight bond between expe-
rience and sacrificial death. At once wielding the knife and wincing under its
stroke, such a learner knows the deathliness traversing the flash of insight,
“Slaying the present with the thought of eternity and yet preserving its fresh
life” (Fragments 143). Such instantaneous sacrifice and rebirth, uninterested
in the future, makes a mockery of education. The Kierkegaardian lyric, like
the central moment of the story of Abraham, turns learning inside out: it
corresponds not with action but with paralysis, not with founding cove-
nants but with absurd whimsy. It does not occur to the innocent mind.
Cultivated in the adult understanding, new knowledge ruptures the vessel
that should contain it. Many of Dickinson’s poems, utterly failing to
analyze, succeed in catalyzing this paradox.
 part ii
Dickinson and Modern Philosophy
 chapter 7

Truth and Lie in Emily Dickinson

and Friedrich Nietzsche
Shira Wolosky

Friedrich Nietzsche has long been associated with Emerson, but the rup-
tures he opens in Western philosophical culture find surprising echoes in
another of his contemporaries, Emily Dickinson. Nietzsche and Dickinson
are contrasting figures in many ways, including place (although not time),
language, and religion; Nietzsche’s background is Lutheran, in a period
of increasing positivism, while Dickinson lived in the intense period of
the Second Great Awakening and its wrestling match with Calvinism.
Nietzsche was an intellectual trained in German and Swiss cultural centers;
Dickinson spent her life in a small town in Western Massachusetts,
although she benefited there from new educational opportunities for
women. Indeed, not least, is their difference in gender and of attitudes
towards it: Dickinson’s work has emerged as a major voice exploring
women’s identities in nineteenth-century America, while in Nietzsche,
“woman” remains a complex and highly equivocal figure.1
Yet there are likenesses. Neither married, although in Dickinson’s case
this is seen as eccentric deviation while for Nietzsche it is a philosophical
self-affirmation (as he said in The Gay Science: “What great philosopher has
ever been married?” III: 7). Dickinson lived reclusively with her family in
her Amherst home. Nietzsche’s life was one of illness and isolation until
his collapse into mental breakdown in 1889, which left him an invalid in
the care of his sister and mother. In both cases, the posthumous writings
(for Dickinson, almost all of her poetry) suffered delayed and disjunctive
publication – Dickinson’s in the context of family feuds and Nietzsche’s
due to his sister’s ideological interferences.
Above all, both register a severe crisis in metaphysics: a break, long in
preparation but increasingly explosive through the nineteenth century,
that challenged not only religious faith but metaphysical structures. For

1
For gender in Nietzsche see especially Derrida’s Spurs.

131
132 WOLOSKY

both Dickinson and Nietzsche, the phenomenal world of change and time,
materiality and multiplicity, was pressing to displace metaphysical worlds of
eternal, immutable truths. The earthly world of becoming was no longer
the mere shadow of eternal truths; eternity instead was coming to seem the
shadow. And in both writers, as cracks in metaphysical structures are
opening, this world is left as the first realm, both in its displacements and
instability, but also in its productivity and invention.
Dickinson and Nietzsche both emphasized the temporality and incon-
stancy of immediate experience. One of the first aphorisms in Will to Power
declares man’s “smallness and accidental occurrence in the flux of becoming
and passing away” (Will 4, 9). Both question, in Nietzsche’s words, meta-
physical “unity, Being, aim” as governing earthly existence (Will 12, 13). For
Dickinson, this at times opens into an abyss, a “Pit,” looking into which is
“to drop” (Fr508). In complex negations such as Nietzsche deploys, she calls
metaphysical collapse “The Crash of nothing but of All,” and cries: “I cling
to nowhere till I fall” (Fr1532).
But at other times Dickinson, like Nietzsche, seeks to transfer value from the
next world to this one, from eternity to time, being to becoming. She then
reaches out to embrace the world of phenomena as the true and exhilarating
arena. The poem “To be Alive is Power,” for example, is strikingly Nietzschean:
To be alive – is Power –
Existence – in itself –
Without a further function –
Omnipotence – Enough –
In this text, Dickinson goes far towards a Nietzschean declaration of
allegiance not to any “further” world beyond this one, but to “Existence –
in itself – / Without a further function.” This world becomes a scene of
“Power” which, as a mode of earthly life, is imminent, and therefore limited
and conditional: yet is “Omnipotence – Enough.” Yoking together the
absolute term “Omnipotence” with the limiting “Enough” verges on oxy-
moron and breaks open metaphysical meanings in ways Nietzsche persis-
tently does. “Omnipotence,” rather than marking the divine, is both
granted and sized to the human.
As almost always happens in Dickinson, however, the concluding lines
complicate rather than clarify.
To be alive – and will! –
‘Tis able as a God –
The Maker – of Ourselves – be what –
Such being Finitude! (Fr876B)
 Truth and Lie in Emily Dickinson and Friedrich Nietzsche 133
As in Nietzsche, we are alive in the world as the arena of our “will,” where the
human is “able as a God.” With its interrupted, incomplete phrasing
and unclear references, the poem leaves obscure who is the “Maker” of
“what” and in what sphere. It seems, though, Dickinson is celebrating a
creative power that displaces, even as it imitates, God’s. It is we who are the
“Maker – of Ourselves.” “Such being Finitude” again approaches philosoph-
ical oxymoron. “Finitude” and “being” are in traditional metaphysics contra-
dictory terms, but here they are linked. The conditional, finite world is
the space in which we are “alive” and “will,” the realm of “Power” where
we undertake self-definition and creativity.
Both Dickinson and Nietzsche balance on a volatile edge of metaphysics.
Neither wrote in philosophically systematic ways – Nietzsche’s aphoristic
style is another tie linking him to Dickinson2 – but each critiques traditional
metaphysical premises: in Nietzsche as direct philosophical assault; in
Dickinson, often in veiled and strenuous ambivalence. Both cast doubt
on metaontological structures and values. Both face the possible nihilistic
consequences of such doubt, but also possibilities of revaluing the world of
time and change – possibilities centrally tied to language. Given the world’s
multiplicity, the problem becomes for Dickinson, as for Nietzsche, how to
account for experience as meaningful in human terms. And this, for both,
increasingly turns on language and interpretation itself. For each, reality in
its multiplicity and transfiguration ultimately becomes constituted not by
metaphysical principles but by representation, interpretation, and the
words we use in their undertaking.

linguistic perspectives
Despite the dispersions of language both within texts and in her opus as a
whole, Dickinson’s work projects a metaphysical critique in which the prem-
ises and promises of a higher world are, as in Nietzsche, exposed as faulty:
For Death – or rather
For the Things ‘twould buy –
This – put away
Life’s Opportunity –
The Things that Death will buy
Are Room –
Escape from Circumstances –
And a Name

2
For discussion of Nietzsche’s aphoristic style, see Blanchot.
134 WOLOSKY

With Gifts of Life

How Death’s Gifts may compare –
We know not –
For the Rates – lie Here – (Fr644B)
“Death” here is entry into traditional immortality. As such it offers a series of
metaphysical promises. “Room” evokes eternal and infinite place. “Escape from
Circumstances” suggests essence as against accident, absolute design as against
conditions. A “Name” promises fixed identity. But, as Nietzsche summarizes in
Twilight of the Idols, in a passage that Heidegger cites as the core of Nietzsche’s
metaphysical critique (Nietzsche I, 202), such promises of the afterworld do not
reflect metaphysical reality but simply reverse the conditions we dislike in this
world: time, mutability, mortality. As Nietzsche writes:
The true world has been constructed out of contradiction to the actual
world. To invent fables about a world “other” than this one has no meaning
at all, unless an instinct of slander, detraction, and suspicion . . . We avenge
ourselves against life with a phantasmagoria of “another” a “better” life.
(Twilight 484)

“Room,” “Escape from Circumstances,” and “A Name” grant us the abso-

lute time and space that we lack in our earthly lives. But these are “con-
structed out of contradiction to the actual world.” And the attractiveness of
this compensatory “phantasmagoria” does not guarantee its truthfulness.
Indeed, Nietzsche says that the contrary is the case:
The reasons for which this world has been characterized as “apparent” are
the very reasons which indicate its reality; any other kind of reality is
indemonstrable. . .
The true world – unattainable, indemonstrable, unpromisable . . . also
unknown. Consequently not consoling, redeeming, or obligating.
The true world – we have abolished. What world has remained? The
apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have abolished the
apparent one. (Twilight 485)

There is a fatal weakness to claims about “any other kind of reality”: our
position, viewpoint, understanding, and experience remain earthly, so that
any notion of another world is based upon and ultimately situated in this
one, not the other way around. The other world in fact looks suspiciously
like an inversion, as Nietzsche insists, of the conditions most dreaded in
this one. And, as “unattainable, indemonstrable, unpromisable,” the other
world is not the measure of this one. Rather it is a lie, projected out of our
dark fears. As Dickinson writes, “The Rates lie here.” This unmasks the lie,
 Truth and Lie in Emily Dickinson and Friedrich Nietzsche 135
insisting on earthly experience as the site of judgment. The pun on “Rates”
invokes at once temporality and value judgment. The measure of value
in actuality is “here,” in time, not in some other world posited against
this one. In Dickinson, the “Room” and “Name” death offers strangely
reduce to tomb and tombstone itself, which do promise “Escape from
Circumstances,” but not as positive release into another life. The poem
thus ultimately insists on earthly “Gifts of Life,” the world that metaphysics,
according to Nietzsche, treats as merely “apparent” and thus as lie, but
which the Dickinson text accepts instead as truth, in fact the only truth we
experience. To deny metaphysical reality is thus to accept the reality of the
earthly world: “With the true world we have abolished the apparent one.”
Nietzsche raises such questions of truth and lie in Twilight of the Idols and
the nachlass variously collected as The Will to Power; but they occupied him
from the beginning of his philosophical writings, as seen in his early essay
“Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense.” This essay opens by framing truth
and lie in terms that he later calls “perspectivism” – the sense, as he writes in
a Will to Power aphorism, that reality “has no meaning behind it, but
countless meanings” (Will 481, 267). This variability and partiality of
perspective opens “Truth and Lie” as warning and chastisement:
If we and the gnat could understand each other we should learn that even the
gnat swims through the air with the same pathos, and feels within itself the
flying center of the world. . . . So too the proudest man of all, the philoso-
pher, believes he sees the eyes of the universe focused telescopically from all
directions upon his actions and thoughts. (Truth 246)
Just as Nietzsche intuits the power of perspective to frame understanding,
Dickinson devotes many poems to how “We see – Comparatively” (Fr580).
But the greatest distortion of perspective is its denial of its own partiality.
The biggest delusion, that is, is for perspective to mistake itself as an
absolute comprehension or general truth, rather than one version among
many – an error each viewpoint characteristically makes.
In a poem such as “Who Giants Know, with lesser Men,” Dickinson
reflects on viewpoint in imagery similar to Nietzsche’s. As often in
Dickinson, terms of measure – lesser and greater – are difficult to assign
and gauge:
Who Giants know, with lesser Men
Are incomplete, and shy –
For Greatness, that is ill at ease
In minor Company –
A Smaller, could not be perturbed –
136 WOLOSKY

The “Giants” here are those who in fact know that they know less, the
“lesser men” those who do not know that they do not know. The “lesser
Men” mistake their own viewpoint for the whole world’s, paradoxically
thinking their vision is larger, while the “Giants” see in ways that are
more penetrating because they know their understanding is limited.
Such mistaking of “lesser” perspective for more is epitomized in “the
Summer Gnat”:
The Summer Gnat displays –
Unconscious that his single Fleet
Do not comprise the skies – (Fr848)
Like Nietzsche’s “gnat” in “Truth and Lie” who “feels within itself the flying
center of the world,” so Dickinson’s “Summer Gnat” wrongly takes “his
single Fleet” – that is, his own group, or his own flight, or his own temporal
fleetingness – as if he comprised the whole “skies” at large.
But perspectivism in Dickinson and Nietzsche take shape not only in
terms of vision, but also of language. At issue is not only how people see, but
how they say. Wallace Stevens writes in one of his aphorisms, “The Tongue
is an Eye.” (Opus 167). This move from eye to speech emerges in Nietzsche,
and it is deeply consequential. As Richard Rorty argues in Philosophy and the
Mirror of Nature, the very act of positing knowledge in visual terms is itself
metaphysical. It assumes the mind to have some reflective power whereby
man can perceive an ideal Form to which phenomena refer. Yet conceiving
of understanding in visual terms also raises problems of communication
and solipsism, problems that become severe once metaphysical Ideas have
been questioned. The trope of seeing promises each mind access to a
contemplative truth, but these prove unverifiable by others, since their
interior experience remains inaccessible to anyone outside themselves.
Vision becomes a self-enclosed subjectivity from which there is no exit.
But language, as twentieth-century philosophers from Saussure through
Wittgenstein and Habermas have variously claimed, is by definition social.
Nietzsche in his notion of perspectivism, and Dickinson in her rhetoric and
imagery, do retain a visual grid as structuring and organizing apprehension;
but they also point ever more consciously to the grid of language as it charts
and orders experience: one which evades some of the problems that Rorty
raises regarding subjectivism. To move the model of apprehension from a
visual grasp to a linguistic exchange would relocate formulation from
interior space to an interconnecting web among humans. Language only
takes place between and among people. It can never be, or be an image of,
pure interiority. In Dickinson, language emerges alongside vision, but
 Truth and Lie in Emily Dickinson and Friedrich Nietzsche 137
emphasizes the way constructing experience breaks through the closed circle
of subjectivity.3
In Dickinson’s work, forms of language emerge as themselves command-
ing a primary role and impact in shaping, and not only expressing, experi-
ence. In the poem “Talk not to me of Summer Trees,” for example, nature
does not find expression or reflection in “Talk” but rather is produced by it:
Talk not to me of Summer Trees
The foliage of the mind
A Tabernacle is for Birds
Of no corporeal kind
And winds do go that way at noon
To their Etherial Homes
Whose Bugles call the least of us
To undepicted Realms (Fr1655)
Nietzsche writes in “Truth and Lie”:
When we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers, we believe we know
something about the things themselves, although what we have are just
metaphors of things which do not correspond to the original entities. (249)

In Dickinson’s text, the “foliage of the mind” rivals, indeed precedes, that of
“Summer Trees,” which emerge as its reflection. The world is made in the
image of mind, if also mind images world, the emphasis being on how such
imaging is highly rhetorized, a matter of language and its arrangements. The
poem appeals to Romantic notions of imagination’s grandeur, which will
always point beyond what is there: the “foliage” of the mind always exceeds
any actual “Summer Trees.” But at issue is not only imagination, but how
paradigms that govern it are tied to language. Language itself creates
connections, through histories of usage, grammatical construction, etymol-
ogies, figures. In this text, for example, the Romance of nature is both
confirmed and contested through the religious language that so persists in
Dickinson. Here religion emerges less as a direct topic than as a play on
words. The “foliage” becomes “Tabernacle,” “Birds” are of “no corporeal
kind,” winds are “Etherial,” and “Bugles” − resonant of Biblical trumpets −
call to “undepicted Realms.” But in each case, other-worldly meanings are
recast as another dimension within this world. “Undepicted Realms” are,
here, not apocalyptic, but further poetic ventures.
The result is not an autotelic linguistic world, but exploration of how
language acts as interpretive frame or grid for experience. In this regard, it is
3
Emerson also reassesses power and linguistic order, Wolosky “Emerson’s Figural Religion.”
138 WOLOSKY

highly significant that the poem is cast as dialogue: an act of address. It limits
even as it launches language, shifting speech from external reference to the
realm of language itself, as interchange where our sense of the world is
enacted. The images that follow are themselves linguistic ones. “[F]oliage”
as leaves is a traditional trope for pages or texts. The bugles “call.”
“Undepicted Realms” collapses the distinction between vision and language,
since depiction can be both visual and verbal. In this complex trope, the
religious yields to the aesthetic, for while the sublime realm of God remains
undepicted – highlighting the limits of representation – in another sense, the
trope foregrounds the possibilities of further and renewed depictions in poetic
and linguistic ventures. The insufficiency of language to experience means
that no depiction is ever final: ultimate finality is not attainable or even
desirable. Instead, ever-changing language delineates the world that humans
inhabit. It is within linguistic realms that we depict, and then depict again,
while also always leaving and facing what remains undepicted

personification and its limits

The most famous passage in “Truth and Lie” declares truth to be no more
than a question of rhetoric:
What therefore is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthro-
pomorphisms: in short a sum of human relations which were poetically and
rhetorically heightened, transferred, and adorned (250).
Linguistic forms do not record but rather shape human understanding, and
they do so through “anthropomorphisms,” which render the world in
human terms. Words not only produce the very “truth” they are said to
transmit; the truths they produce are inevitably human ones, reflecting not
a pregiven world, but human interests, orders, presuppositions, desires.
Language is not mirror, but trope.
Nietzschean perspectivism underscores the force of viewpoint, that each
person sees from within a context and according to a perspective that locates
him or her. But viewpoint in another sense is itself a figure – a visual image
for what is also a linguistic praxis. It is ultimately the forms of language –
grammatical, rhetorical, philological – that articulate categories of human
understanding, which thus prove to be projected from and within human
experience, not perceived or received by us. Truth itself emerges as “rhetori-
cally heightened,” the rhetoric being that of personification.
Personification is often treated as a subcategory of metaphor or simile.
As such, it is defined as a kind of comparison in which some aspect of the
 Truth and Lie in Emily Dickinson and Friedrich Nietzsche 139
human is likened or transferred to something nonhuman. Such trans-
ference, however, is not in fact restricted to metaphor, simile, or other
overtly analogical structures. Personification can be constructed through a
range of other rhetorical forms and topoi, including micro-macrocosmic
correspondences, mythological figures, apostrophe, prosopopeia, and
other tropes of linguistic address or ascription. Personification thus is
larger than any single rhetorical category. But Nietzsche implies still
more: that personification is in fact the governing mode of all language,
the paradigm for all human construction. For language, as spoken by
humans, necessarily and ineradicably humanizes. The categories of lan-
guage are human categories. Our very grammar, our linguistic structures −
which is to say every verb, adjective, noun, word order − themselves reflect
human interests, even as they shape them. Every definition, Nietzsche
writes in “Truth and Lie,” is “anthropomorphic through and through and
does not contain one single point which is ‘true in itself,’ real and
universally valid apart from man.” Humans do not experience the world
“in itself” but only in human terms, as a “human-like thing.” The
structure is ultimately circular: “truth in the form of tautology” (248).
Reality does not correlate to language; rather it is “language which has
worked originally at the construction of ideas.” If the world seems to
correspond to human understanding, this is because humans find in the
world what we ourselves have put there, like someone who “hides an
object behind a bush and then seeks and finds it there” (251).
The poem “The Tint I cannot take – is best –” works within this circularity
of personification, of human language recording not a world “in itself” but
the world for and as humans imagine it, which is to say, put it into words. But
this circularity becomes a positive gesture in Dickinson, by both confirming
its own limitations while also pointing beyond itself.
The Tint I cannot take – is best –
The Color too remote
That I could show it in Bazaar –
A Guinea at the sight –
The fine – impalpable Array –
That swaggers on the eye
Like Cleopatra’s Company –
Repeated − in the sky –
The Moments of Dominion
That happen on the Soul
And leave it with a Discontent
Too exquisite – to tell –
140 WOLOSKY

The eager look – on Landscapes –

As if they just repressed
Some secret – that was pushing
Like Chariots – in the Vest –
The Pleading of the Summer –
That other Prank – of Snow –
That Cushions Mystery with Tulle,
For fear the Squirrels – know.
Their Graspless manners – mock us –
Until the Cheated Eye
Shuts arrogantly – in the Grave –
Another way – to see – (Fr696)
Harold Bloom calls this a “poem besieged by perspectivism” within the
context of a Nietzschean affirmation in “our faith [in] the existing world.”
As an “authentic American Sublime,” the poem opens with a characteristic
Dickinsonian gesture towards the sublime as standing beyond any actuality –
a romance structure where what is not always exceeds what is, with
the imagined ever hovering before and beyond whatever concretely exists
(304–9). This is to recognize the realm of imagination as always surpassing
what is actual. Yet, as Bloom has theorized, such surpassing entails an element
of negation. The imagination doesn’t simply fuse or reciprocate with nature
but must counter it in order to open space for its own ventures. Negation is
thus imaginatively liberating and positive.
But negation also has a limiting function that works across the sublime.
The sublime can imply some endless reach of mind into ever greater extents.
But it also signals, as Kant describes it, a confrontation with the unbounded
in which the imagination experiences its own limits.4 This sense of negation
points to what is beyond as something unreachable, never to be attained.
The poem in fact traces not only the power of language to define and direct
human understanding, but also ways to limit the claims of this power – and
above all the need to do so.
This is accomplished, in one strategy, by an interesting contestation in the
poem between visual and linguistic construction and the implications of
each. “Tint,” “Color,” and “sight” all underscore the question of vision
and perspective as situating the speaker. But the next stanza’s “impalpable
Array – / That swaggers on the eye” at once asserts and cancels the visual
dimension: an “Array” can be seen by the “eye,” but the “impalpable” cannot.

4
For Kant the sublime involves “a representation which makes us remark its inadequacy,” showing “the
whole power of the imagination [as] inadequate to its ideas,” Judgment II. 26. See Kevin Hill.
 Truth and Lie in Emily Dickinson and Friedrich Nietzsche 141
This second stanza moves in other ways into a sense of language rather than
vision as the structure of experience. “Swaggers on the eye” as a personification
is an image which cannot be seen but only said. With “Repeated – in the sky,”
the poem offers a directly linguistic image. In “Truth and Lie,” Nietzsche had
described the human image of nature “as the infinitely protracted echo of an
original sound, as the reproduction and copy of an archetype, man” (251). In
similar fashion, in the poem, the sky repeats the poet, with the image of
language both establishing and describing their relation.
The third stanza is followed by a quite Nietzschean gesture involving, as in
the poem “To be alive – is power,” the question of domination and will. Yet
“The Moments of Dominion” here “happen on the soul” rather than being
fully controlled or initiated by it. Moreover, as an experience of power,
“Dominion” lasts but “Moments.” And it reaches not only towards command
of nature, but also to “Discontent,” since nature never in fact fully corresponds
with human desire. A second negation then follows. “Too exquisite – to tell”
makes the experience at once linguistic and not so, since in all tropes of
inexpressibility there is a complex paradoxicality of language that declares
the inability to name something beyond language. Dickinson is balanced on
a boundary of linguistic power that involves both assertion and its limit.
This process of personifying nature while also indicting the insufficiency of
human categories to name the nonhuman persists. In stanzas four and five,
“Landscapes” are said to “look” – a play between seeing and being seen;
“Snow” plays “Prank,” “Squirrels” “know.” These transferences of the human
again ascribe subjectivity to the nonhuman while also acknowledging the
limits of such subjective ascription. The landscape’s “eager Look” finally turns
out to signal something not seen, a “secret” that is “repressed.” The image of
vision then turns to linguistic imagery. The “Summer” is described as
“Pleading,” an act of speech, but one that beckons rather than commands.
In the final stanza, the poem again invokes an “Eye,” but as “Cheated”
and finally as shutting. The desire to see absolutely is rebuked as arrogant.
Instead, its mortality is confirmed. The eye’s vista shrinks to the “Grave.” If
there is “Another way – to see,” it is at best some ambiguous faculty located
somewhere between further vision and irony at the desire to gain it.
Alongside this chastened visual imagery persists an imagery of language,
which is similarly bounded. Our efforts to know what the summer pleads
and the “secret” that snow keeps “mock” us.5

5
As Harold Bloom writes, the poem figures the “limits of her art,” “an ungraspable secret, a trope or
metaphor not to be expressed.” This contrasts with Sharon Cameron’s reading that “the poem indeed
if paradoxically grasps what it claims cannot be grasped,” 164–5.
142 WOLOSKY

Since we never know nature directly but always through linguistic acts
that inevitably entail ourselves, personification emerges as an inevitable
structure of language shaping the world. But although we cannot step
outside the circle of language, Dickinson shows that we can expose its
boundaries, through negation in a variety of forms, including oxymoron,
retraction, and negatives themselves, as a way to offset and contain knowl-
edge claims.6 Through such delimitations, even as “The Tint I cannot take”
points inward to a linguistic circle of experience, it marks its own borders, in
this sense also pointing outward toward, although never grasping, what is
beyond it. Against the desire to grasp the world-in-itself, final reality
remains, as the poem asserts, “Graspless.”

positive negation
Nietzsche’s discourses of perspectivism, and of language itself as a perspec-
tive that remakes the world in man’s image, raises questions of nihilism that
philosophy has still not fully answered. In “Truth and Lie,” he denies a
correspondence theory according to which language would be seen to refer
to an external reality established before and without words: words do not
“coincide with things,” nor “is language the adequate expression of all
realities” (248). Rather, “language has worked originally at the construction
of ideas.” As against positivist claims, description itself is exposed as shaped
by paradigms, expectations, interests, presumptions, and indeed the very
words in which these are conducted. But this seems to point to a relativism
in which interpretations proliferate without any stable reference to anchor
or adjudicate between them. All that would remain are projections and
assertions – indeed, assertions as projections. But if meaning is not fixed and
pregiven, what guarantees it? And what would regulate the claims of
language so that they are not merely arbitrary or imposed, both on nature
and, crucially, on other human beings? Challenging the notion that lan-
guage correlates with a pregiven reality external and prior to it destablilizes
fixed meaning as such. If there is nothing given to which to refer, then what
regulates meaning?
There are readings of Nietzsche’s “Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral
Sense” that see in its denial of a signified truth outside of language a self-

6
I have discussed self-limiting “depersonification” in “Robert Frost and the Limits of Rhetoric.” Cf.
Lacoue-Labouche’s discussion of “defigurisation,” 436.
 Truth and Lie in Emily Dickinson and Friedrich Nietzsche 143
undoing that traces a collapse of all meaning.7 What remains is language as
an unanchored proliferation of signs, where “each sign,” as Foucault puts it,
“is in itself not the thing that offers itself to interpretation but an inter-
pretation of other signs,” making interpretation, in his view, “as much a
relationship of violence as of elucidation.”8 In such interpretations,
Nietzsche is seen to launch postmodernism, summarized by Cornel
West as antifoundationalist, antirealist, detranscendentalizing the subject,
and relativist. But there are possibilities other than sheer relativism
implicit in Nietzsche. West himself suggests that “Nietzsche believed
such moves lead to a paralyzing nihilism and skepticism unless they are
supplemented with a new world view, a new ‘countermovement’ to over-
come such nihilism and skepticism,” although West sees Nietzsche, and
contemporary philosophy in his wake, as having failed as yet to achieve
such a countermovement (West 241, 243, 264).
These nihilist possibilities arise throughout Nietzsche’s writings.9 In some
cases they seem secondary, a consequence of the collapse of metaphysics. But
more characteristic for Nietzsche is to locate nihilism as intrinsic to meta-
physics itself. Nihilism emerges with a loss of belief in an intelligible or divine
world that had been thought to provide an eternal, unchanging unity, truth,
and value. Denying these certitudes threatens to leave the world without
apparent anchor or stable reference. But for Nietzsche, this collapse is a
consequence of failures intrinsic in metaphysics, which he regards as itself
nihilistic because it removes value and meaning from this world and places it
in another. “The ‘meaninglessness of events’ that metaphysical writers fear, he
writes, is the “consequence of an insight into the falsity of previous interpre-
tations, a generalization of discouragement and weakness” (Will 599, 325). It is
this primary nihilism, intrinsic to metaphysics,that causes its collapse, when
metaphysics is recognized as a faulty and devaluing system.
Dickinson is more caught up in the fear of nihilism that the collapse of
metaphysics implies than is Nietzsche. Like Nietzsche’s madman who
proclaims the death of God in the Gay Science, crying that we have
“unchained this earth from its sun,” and are thus left “straying, as through
an infinite nothing,” so Dickinson writes that “No Man can compass a
Despair” if he runs “round a Goalless Road” (Fr714).

7
This is De Man’s reading in “Rhetoric of Tropes (Nietzsche), 103–118, who argues that Nietzschean
language is “rhetorical” rather than “representational,” dissolving the “literal” and hence any truth,
pp. 106,112. J. Hillis Miller reads language in Nietzsche as an irresolvable “entangling net,” in which he
is caught in an “impasse he is attempting to describe,” 42.
8
For Foucault on Nietzsche, see Alan Schrift, 340.
9
Deleuze distinguishes between active and reactive nihilism, xx.
144 WOLOSKY

To have no goal is for Dickinson itself a form of despair. For Dickinson, the
death of God, which denies goals, is therefore fearsome, something she
hesitates to embrace. Instead, she vacillates between skepticism and retreat
from it. But Dickinson also moves towards relocating value within imminent
and linguistic worlds. Even if validity, norms, and certainty lose reference to
eternal and pregiven forms, they can through linguistic ventures be recast as
formulated and validated from within the world of change and multiplicity.
Language would formulate meaningful, if not absolute experience. Meanings
would not subsist external to the linguistic forms through which we experience
them; yet neither would this leave signifiers arbitrarily unanchored or coer-
cively projected, as Nietzsche’s writings are often taken to imply.
Indeed, nihilism, Nietzsche also writes, is not “a necessary belief” (Will 599,
325). Nietzsche’s critique of traditional metaphysics denies claims to absolute
knowledge, or to a signified truth pre-established outside of language. To
dismiss eternal metaphysical truths, however, need not entail relativism as
imposition of subjective versions, nor chaotic collapse of all meaning. It may
instead point to newly directed structures or modes of signification. These
would abandon originary forms of “Truth” and claim instead that the only
shape our world has for us is that of figuration, conducted in language – not as
“lie,” but as the only truth we have. Meaning is not then merely arbitrary or
imposed, nor are signifiers simply free. They are instead fundamentally, one
might say foundationally, linked to one another in chains or networks or, as
Nietzsche repeatedly insists in “Truth and Lie,” in relationships.
The “thing in itself” (which would be pure, disinterested truth) is also
absolutely incomprehensible to the creator of language and not worth
seeking. He designates only the relations of things to men, and to express
these relations he uses the boldest metaphors. (Truth 248)
Meaning is relational, but this is not to say it is merely relativist. The fact
that we do not know nature “in itself” does not mean we don’t know it at all,
or that we just make up whatever we please. There may be regulatory modes
of meaning other than metaphysically anchored ones: that is, through the
“relations of things to men” in the patterns that we weave in and through
our language, articulating what Nietzsche calls “sums of relations.” “These
relations,” he argues, “refer only to one another and are absolutely incom-
prehensible to us in their essence” (Truth 253). They therefore do not point
to absolute noumena; chains of relation may weave meanings only for us,
but they are nonetheless valid and even necessary:
All these relations always refer again to others and are thoroughly incom-
prehensible to us in their essence. All that we actually know about these laws
 Truth and Lie in Emily Dickinson and Friedrich Nietzsche 145
of nature is what we ourselves bring to them-time and space, and therefore
relationships of succession and number. . . . But we produce these represen-
tations in and from ourselves with the same necessity with which the spider
spins its web. If we are forced to comprehend all things only under these
forms, then it ceases to be amazing that in all things we actually comprehend
nothing but these forms. (Truth 253)

The relations that structure our experience are produced “within ourselves
and out of ourselves with the same necessity as a spider spins its web.” Indeed,
to say that “we are compelled to grasp all things only under these forms (Truth
253) is both to affirm that we do “grasp things” – not absolutely, but effectively
and creatively, through these forms and in terms of them. Nor is there unity.
Relations remain multiple. Yet this very multiplicity also prevents them from
being merely willful. As Saussure wrote about linguistic signs, despite their
lack of essential reference to things outside themselves, their very multiplicity
stabilizes a system which, in order to operate at all, cannot shift terms and
usages randomly or at will. This multiplicity and its regulatory force applies to
Nietzsche’s language theory. Denying any tie to a signifier that is prior to
linguistic formulation does not release the signifier into wanton assertion.
While the signifier is untied to a signified independent of it, the signifier is
retied to other signifiers within experience. In this net of relationships humans
live, think, and speak.
In “The Tint I Cannot Take,” language neither reflects nor echoes
external reality. Rather, experience is woven out of relationships that
language structures. Personification and other tropes inevitably shape the
human experience of the world, not least through images of language itself.
These relational networks carry positive Nietzschean energy. Dickinson
enacts Nietzsche’s arguments for the multiplicity of nonfixed meaning as
generative and fertile rather than nihilistic. Experience is never final, it is
always inviting and undergoing reformulation. Although no longer fixed
and pregiven, meaning does not then collapse, but multiplies in trans-
formative ways. Such a positive interpretation of Nietzsche has been
offered, for example, by Jean Granier, who sees in Nietzschean “perspecti-
vism” neither solipsism nor nihilism, but “the impossibility of a definitive
interpretation that would exhaust the richness of reality” (197).
Towards the conclusion of “Truth and Lie,” Nietzsche names the
“impulse towards the formation of metaphors” as the “fundamental impulse
of man,” in which “new figures of speech, metaphors, metonymies . . .
constantly show [the] passionate longing for shaping the existing world of
waking man,” an “impulse [that] seeks for itself a new realm of action . . . in
Art” (Truth 254). Creative language impels and conducts an endless human
146 WOLOSKY

making of “new” realms to inhabit. This constitutes art, but in Nietzsche,

aesthetic creation is fundamental to all human experience. It is the creative
power that comes alive in Dickinson, in both its impulse to order and its
refusal of final shape or absolute claim. If experience is to be conceived as a
continuing creative venture, it also resists final formulation. Such resistance
is integral to generativity, making possible ever new forms of articulation
and defining both their limits and their claims.
This regulatory linguistic perspectivism recasts the Will to Power not as a
self- aggrandizing imposition on others but rather as a partiality of any
power. Indeed Wille zur Macht may imply not the will to sheer force it is
taken to mean, but rather a will to machen as making. Multiple versions may
compete, but, especially when cast in terms of language rather than vision,
they do so in forms and forums of negotiation. The denial of a single truth
would become the ground for new interpretive creation, while paying
homage to the limitation of each before the versions of others and the
greater mystery of the world. Ever renewed language would generate
formulations while also constraining the power and claims of any. In
Nietzsche, this competition among perspectives emerges in the trope and
structure of negation, especially of Being as fixed and eternal. In Philosophy
in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, Nietzsche posits the “essential character of
primal being as coming-to-be.”
This “indefinite,” the womb of all things, can, it is true, be designated by
human speech only as a negative, as something to which the existent world of
coming-to-be can give no predicate. We may look upon it as the equal of the
Kantian Ding an sich.” (47)

In place of an established “thing in itself,” Nietzsche proposes the “indef-

inite,” which remains a “negative” designation. There is no pre-established
signified that can be given a “predicate.” But this negation is a necessary
factor in creation itself. Not only does it make room for new forms by
refusing final ones, but also (or in this) limits the claims that any given
formulation can make.
In Dickinson, such negation as regulating limitation is a recurrent
structure.
The opening declaration “The Tint I cannot Take” dramatically launches
the poem through what it “cannot” claim. It insists on its own negative
achievement as the impossibility of any final or absolute vision. “Tint” itself
suggests a kind of coloring in how we see, acknowledging it to be partial,
which in turn leaves open further viewpoints. Notably, “tint” is also a form
of engraving: “tint block” is a term in printing for a “lightly colored
 Truth and Lie in Emily Dickinson and Friedrich Nietzsche 147
background upon which an illustration or the like is to be printed” (OED).
Connecting visual imagery to imagery of printing moves the poem’s for-
mulations from interior perception, which can never be either contested or
affirmed, toward language as a shared world of exchange. Signifiers link
together in a network of language that different selves participate in. The
move from vision to language redirects the poem from subjectivism to
negotiated, mutual, and common understanding. Such understanding is
never absolute. The poem concludes in the defeat of any “Eye” that
“arrogantly” tries to see absolutely. In its place, the poem declares the
world to be a “Mystery” beyond our reach. The phrase “Graspless manners”
demands that we acknowledge and respect what cannot be grasped. Like
Nietzsche, Dickinson agrees that “we are compelled to grasp all things only
under these forms” of linguistic relation (Truth 253). This is to say that there
are things we grasp, and also those that remain beyond our grasp –
“Graspless,” resisting our attempts to comprehend them. As the poem
concludes, the “Graspless manners – mock us.”
In “Truth and Lie,” Nietzsche describes “truth” as tautological, not as
linguistic correlation with external reality but as “anthropomorphic truth
which contains not a single point which would be ‘true in itself’ or really and
universally valid apart from man.” Truth is constructed within the circle of
language, not established as a ground outside it. But language’s tautological
circularity is not necessarily self-defeating or self-emptying. It rather defines
the parameters within which human experience takes place as conditioned
and finite, as partial and changing. This question of the circularity of
language emerges as a core Dickinson trope as well, governing one of her
most famous texts:
Tell all the truth but tell it slant
Success in circuit lies (Fr1150).
Is “Truth” here a pre-established idea that resists expression into partial and
inadequate language? If truth, as the poem goes on to say, “must dazzle
gradually / Or every man be blind,” does this mean it requires circum-
locution to mediate its overwhelming presence? Or does “Truth” only
emerge, exist, as “slant,” indeed only as told, as the repeated “Tell” of the
first line suggests? “Circuit” then would be not a detour, but the only path
for telling a “Truth” that only emerges within the tropes and images of its
representation. “Success in Circuit lies” itself plays on lie and truth, making
them difficult to tell apart: does linguistic circuit lie, or is it the only form of
truth we ever experience? Does “Circuit” mark a boundary to be protested
and transcended, or a limit to be embraced as both necessary and generative?
148 WOLOSKY

In the poem, truth only appears, only happens in the world, as slant, as
figure. Indeed, the pull of the poem brings truth into the process of
language. Any attempt to strip away figuration is to try to penetrate to
what the poem finally declares is “Too bright for our Infirm Delight” –
where “Delight” itself inheres in our infirmity, our human imperfection. As
Wallace Stevens writes: “The imperfect is our paradise” (Poems 193).
This linguistic power, with the limitations that restrict and yet also launch
creativity, informs what is perhaps Dickinson’s most haunting trope of
circularity, “Circumference.” Circumference has been largely interpreted in
Dickinson as ultimately transcending boundaries into infinity. Jane Donahue
Eberwein, who treats the image extensively, sees it as an aspect of Dickinson’s
“strategies of limitation” but ultimately in order to “explode beyond them”
(199). Albert Gelpi describes circumference as an emblem of the absolute self,
“more infinite than infinity” (Mind, 97). In his discussion of Dickinson and
Nietzsche in terms of “The Rites of Dionysus,” Dwight Eddins focuses on
“the dialectic between boundlessness and limitation” which circumference
evokes. Yet he, too, ultimately sees Dickinson’s as a drive to a Dionysian
boundlessness, tracing an “all inclusive circle with the ultimate unity of
Dionysian affirmation. There is nothing left outside the circle, no ‘otherness’
anywhere in nature . . . in an ecstasy of omnipotence” (101).10 Yet many of
Dickinson’s images of “circumference” are highly equivocal. Rather than
affirming the transcendence of boundaries, they also question that possibility.
In the poem “I Saw No Way, the Heavens were Stitched,” the self is figured as
deeply disoriented. Going out “upon Circumference / Beyond the Dip of
Bell” may signal ecstatic transcendence, but it also – or thereby – leaves the
self precariously suspended (Fr633). The poem “Time feels so vast” (Fr858)
has been read as affirming continuity between the smaller circle of the self and
an infinite circumference (Gelpi, Tenth Muse, 269). But this poem also
registers tension, contest, and discontinuity between smaller and larger, as
Time’s vastness presents a “Circumference” that threatens to exclude
“Eternity.” Circumference then is not only a verge into the beyond, but
also marks a limit needed to sustain selfhood at all. This is strongly registered
in the poem “His mind of man, a secret makes.” There Dickinson describes
each self as a “circumference / In which I have no part . . . Impregnable to
inquest” (Fr1730). Circumference thus marks an edge between boundlessness
and boundary, but one that also points back into the world of limitation. In
this it acts like negation itself, refusing the desire to exceed into absolute
realms.
10
Frye associates Circumference with ecstasy, 212.
 Truth and Lie in Emily Dickinson and Friedrich Nietzsche 149
Affirmations and limitations of the circumference of linguistic power are
traced in one of a series of Dickinson’s poems of dawn, through the arc of
presence and then disappearance of bird’s song.
At Half past Three, a single Bird
Unto a silent Sky
Propounded but a single term
Of cautious melody.
At Half past Four, experiment
Had subjugated test
And lo, Her silver Principle
Supplanted all the rest –
At Half past Seven, element
Nor implement – be seen –
And Place, was where the Presence was
Circumference between – (Fr1099A)11
The scene of this poem is radically temporal and radically linguistic. The
circles of clock measure – “Half past,” “Half past,” “Half past” – intensify
and indeed insist on the partial nature of the conditional experience of time
and change. That experience itself is represented as one of linguistic
activism. Against a “Sky” that is “silent,” the “Bird” introduces a “melody”
figured as a “term” that is “Propounded” – that is, as language. (Compare
this to Fr504). The relation of the bird to the sky is one almost of address or
dialogue; yet it remains “cautious,” even modest, with the bird explicitly
feminized as “Her” in the next stanza.
This Dickinsonian caution ultimately distinguishes her from Nietzsche’s
aggressive style, and may mark their difference in gender. Yet Nietzsche in one
passage himself describes nihilism as a form of “the immodesty of man: to
deny meaning where he sees none” (Will 599). Against such immodest
insistence on absolute vision, even one of nothingness, Nietzsche urges a
“plurality of interpretations [as] a sign of strength. Not to desire to deprive the
world of its disturbing and enigmatic character!” (Will 600, 326; See also Will
605, 327). Here, like Dickinson, Nietzsche acknowledges a mystery beyond
possession in any final form. Beyond any account man gives, the world
retains, he writes, its “disturbing and enigmatic character” – an enigma that
generates our linguistic energy, as both a creative and a conditional force.
Such interplay between creativity and conditionality, linguistic assertion
and retraction, defines the terrain of “At Half past Three.” The second

11
Paul Celan translated this poem, Wolosky “Metaphysics”.
150 WOLOSKY

stanza breaks into power. “Experiment” subjugates “test,” supplanting “all

the rest.” The song here asserts what Nietzsche calls the “impulse towards
the formation of metaphors,” one that is not only inescapable, but also
defining of human existence in the world. Dickinson positions herself
within the mutable temporal experiences that Nietzsche insists on and
observes the fragile yet forceful resources of language with which we
negotiate them. These ever prove but a moment in an ongoing course
that the poem also traces. So here, the projection of voice in time dissolves
into empty space. “Place, was where the Presence was.” “Circumference
between” then marks division as much as inclusion, circumspection as
much as circumnavigation. Language is balanced on the edge of itself, of
what it can, and cannot, offer and accomplish. The art of song is celebrated,
but it is also retracted, limited in its power to shape or govern or command a
world that is ever changing, ever escaping from it. In Dickinson’s writing
language emerges at a boundary that both generates power and defines its
extent – both as to its reach and what it cannot reach beyond.
 chapter 8

Emily Dickinson, Pragmatism,

and the Conquests of Mind
Renée Tursi

When William James published his Pragmatism in 1907, he caused some-

thing of a philosophical stir. By presenting a philosophy that based our
intellectual and moral epistemology wholly in human experience, he was
turning against some of the most influential theories of the day. To him, the
world or “reality” did not reveal itself to us, as “spectator-theory” rationalists
(like Herbert Spencer) had been claiming. Our minds were not simply
mirrors reflecting back a completed, predetermined picture. Rather, in his
view, thinking was adaptive in nature, not revelatory. Through the internal
processes of our mind in tandem with external social agreement, we build
truth out of our perceptions and sensations, James believed. So for him, the
whole of the matter is about how those perceptions and sensations prepare
us to react and act. As he wrote in his first essay on the subject of
pragmatism, “the tangible fact at the root of all our thought-distinctions,
however subtle, is that there is no one of them so fine as to consist in
anything but a possible difference of practice” (Pragmatism 259). As James
intended it, such a philosophical stance not only retained within it a form of
moral reasoning, but also allowed our inexperience to lie in wait for new
sensations. Those, in turn, we could shape even into metaphysical or
religious truth.
By mid-century, however, as analytic philosophy began to prevail and
despite the important legacy of John Dewey and his progressive pragma-
tism, we hear little of pragmatism itself in the Anglo-American tradition. It
was really not until the language theorists of the 1990s rediscovered prag-
matism for their own purposes that it came back into full bloom. Such well-
received pragmatists as Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish have focused on
language systems alone, as separate from experience. As Rorty writes, “there
is nothing beyond vocabularies which serves as a criterion of choice between
them” (80). In other words, for this kind of thinker, pragmatism is simply a
form of postmodernism, and the quest for “truth” is off the map. Morality
has been replaced by ethics, and spiritual inquiry finds less pragmatic basis
151
152 TURSI

here. As Fish suggests, “like it or not, interpretation is the only game in

town” (265). To be sure, some current-day pragmatists – Richard
J. Bernstein and Hilary Putnam, to name two – have continued to shape
a Jamesian/Deweyan pragmatism for the twenty-first century. Their work
keeps a connection to “experience” and moral agency remains at the fore.
Given the postmodern pragmatists’ preoccupation with discourse, it is
no surprise that poets have been central to the revival of pragmatism.
Why, then, has Emily Dickinson been missing from the conversation?
After all, she emphasizes linguistic contingency, a notion at the heart of
contemporary pragmatic theorists. Then again, since it is impossible to
divorce Dickinson’s ways of seeing, knowing, and making meaning from
a moral temperament, perhaps that aspect of her work is the sticky
wicket. Yet because the poet’s form of skeptical inquiry links to a way
of being in the world that fits with James’s pragmatism – namely,
retaining systems of metaphysical and social interconnectivity within
epistemological uncertainty – she deserves to be a recognized part of its
intellectual history.
Whether Dickinson can be regarded as a pragmatist or not ends up being,
ironically, an antipragmatic question. The more useful project would be to
explore what comes of our reading Dickinson’s poetry as pragmatists
ourselves. As James would have us ask the question: What difference does
it make for us, one way or the other, to find pragmatism reverberating in her
working out the kinds of uninscribed desires that pragmatic quests invite?
We catch her addressing forms of interiority pragmatically in this letter-
fragment:
there is a June when Corn is cut,
whose option is within.
That is why I prefer the Power, for Power is Glory, when it likes,
and Dominion, too – (Fr811A)
Both versions of the poem turn entirely on the notion of prospect. Nothing is
finished. The mind can continue to explore – to “cut” into experience – to
find worlds within worlds. What comes from within may hold the greatest
force, an idea that leads her to echo the Lord’s Prayer version of a favorite
passage from the Book of Daniel. So dwelling in the possibility that can
emerge from the core of oneself allows one a monarchical power – discovery,
grandeur, and total authority. Such a view manifests one of James’s primary
pragmatic tenets – that “the knower is an actor” (Essays in Philosophy 21). What
the philosopher means is that knowing is a process of shaping the experiential
flow of sensations in useful, meaningful ways. From birth, the mind is “in the
 Emily Dickinson, Pragmatism, and the Conquests of Mind 153
game,” he tells us. Furthermore, the manifestations or multifarious “repre-
sentations” of consciousness are nothing less than socially agreed upon terms
and classifications. Consciousness itself has no such “content” per se to be
mined; “it” is a process, one of ongoing testing and discovery and self-
reflective verification. The world, in other words, waits for us to write truths
upon it and not the other way around. The way we communicate those truths
principally is through words; though again, as distinct from some contempo-
rary pragmatisms, James’s pragmatism would insist that communication is
only a part of what is significant, as we’ll see below.
The philosopher most certainly took his cues in this respect from
Emerson. In “Nature,” Emerson famously speaks to the relationship
between things “out there” and our mind’s conception of them, finding
the world to be nothing less than purely “emblematic” of ourselves:
Whilst we see that [nature] always stands ready to clothe what we would say,
we cannot avoid the question, whether the characters are not significant of
themselves. Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what
we consciously give them, when we employ them as emblems of our
thoughts? The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors because
the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind. (Selected Essays 53)
James seeks to explain this same human-centered relationship between our
consciousness and the external world:
Metaphysics has usually followed a very primitive kind of quest. You know
how men have always hankered after unlawful magic, and you know what a
great part, in magic, words have always played. If you have his name, or the
formula of incantation that binds him, you can control the spirit, genie,
afrite, or whatever the power may be. . . . So the universe has always appeared
to the natural mind as a kind of enigma, of which the key must be sought in
the shape of some illuminating or power-bringing word or name. . . . ‘God,’
‘Matter,’ ‘Reason,’ ‘the Absolute,’ ‘Energy,’ are so many solving names. You
can rest when you have them. You are at the end of your metaphysical quest.
But if you follow the pragmatic method, you cannot look on any such word
as closing your quest. You must bring out of each word its practical cash-
value, set it at work within the stream of your experience. It appears less as a
solution, then, than as a program for more work, and more particularly as
an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed.
(Pragmatism 31–2)
The philosophical search for “truth” thus becomes a futile exploration; the
only useful way at it, says James, is to ask what the human consequences are
for one form of truth over another. The pragmatic method suggests that in
our relation to the world that feels external – a quality James certainly
154 TURSI

doesn’t deny – we should not be asking what we make of it. Instead, we

should understand that we are at all times engaged in a self-spun process by
which we are the source that is actively populating everything we aver – the
feeling we have when we claim to see or to know, the feeling we have when
we claim we don’t know, and everything in between. Most importantly, we
are deciding how to behave in response. That is the truth. “Our minds
are not here simply to copy a reality that is already complete,” he explained
in 1907. “They are here to complete it, to add to its importance by their
own remodeling of it, to decant its contents over, so to speak, into a more
significant shape” (Perry 2:479).
James’s famous metaphor for the mind as a “stream” or flux of sensations
that we take in through our senses was first set out in his 1890 Principles of
Psychology. We usually can attend to only a small part of that stream, James
explains, and it is in such moments of alighting upon a particular of it that
we construct an association or idea or thought. A great deal of his life’s work
centered on accounting for this human negotiation between the flux of a
world of experience pluralistic in nature (and thus not unified, as Emerson
held), and a consciousness concerned with only its own interests. As he
describes it in Principles, the human system of language has falsely created a
separation between what he calls the “substantive” and “transitive” aspects
of experience (1:238). The feelings in between “things” that we represent
in language as conjunctions, such as “and,” “if,” or “but,” are as real as the
nouns. Yet we relegate them to the background of our present moment.
James took a decidedly Modernist lead by calling for a “reinstatement of
the vague to its proper place in our mental life” (1:246). Dickinson’s way
is likewise to find experience’s truth in the indirect: “The thought beneath
so slight a film – / Is more distinctly seen – / As laces just reveal the surge – /
Or Mists – the Appenine –” (Fr203).
James later radicalizes his earlier concepts of consciousness into an
empiricism that eliminates any sense of mind-body dualism. It presumes
anything that is “real” has been experienced and anything “experienced” is
real: “Our fields of experience have no more definite boundaries than have
our fields of view. Both are fringed forever by a more that continuously
develops, and that continuously supersedes them as life proceeds. The
relations, generally speaking, are as real here as the terms are . . .” (Essays
35).What we descriptively impose from the outside as “tendencies” should
be more accurately seen as “feelings of tendency” too nebulous and inde-
terminate to name. When we compare two qualities, for instance, James
says that it is not their composition that we measure, but rather, our sense of
their relations and distances.
 Emily Dickinson, Pragmatism, and the Conquests of Mind 155
Spiritually, the same conditions hold. Our universe of concrete expres-
sible objects “swims” in a wider universe of abstract, deeper ideas whose
“essential” goodness, beauty, significance, and the like we can recognize
because of their practical results within us – much like the effects of a
magnet whose force we can feel but not grab onto (Varieties 53). Dickinson
seems to offer a similar arrangement when she writes: “No dreaming
can compare with reality, for Reality itself is a dream from which but a
portion of Mankind have yet waked and part of us is a not familiar
Peninsula” (L PF2). James writes that while “we can never look directly
at” the ideas of the deeper universe extending beyond our own experience,
for they are “bodiless and featureless and footless,” we can still
grasp all other things by their means, and in handling the real world we
should be stricken with helplessness in just so far forth as we might lose these
mental objects, these adjectives and adverbs and predicates and heads of
classification and conception. (Varieties 54)

Such notions should begin to feel somewhat in line with Dickinson’s

familiar loosening of things from inherited moorings, her going at experi-
ence from a slant, and her general need to stand firm in the face of the
unfinishedness or at least insufficiency of spiritual understanding. In her
work, religion and consciousness often appear indistinguishable. That out-
come would thus suit any Jamesian pragmatist, for it implies lived, practical,
and most important, personally meaningful results. Like James, Dickinson
recognized that “[t]is a dangerous moment for any one when the meaning
goes out of things and life stands straight – and punctual – and yet no
content signal comes. Yet such moments are. If we survive them they
expand us, if we do not, but that is Death, whose if is everlasting” (L PF49).
Yet with such a view, which turns away from predeterminism and builds
the world out as we go, comes uncertainty. Chance and contingency
abound in this negotiation between the human mind and the experiential
flow. Such a scheme was intolerable to James’s detractors. Surely the cosmos
could not just be working out an indeterminate destiny, as the pragmatists’
experiential world appeared to be doing. Indeed, James’s pragmatism, in his
words, could offer only “a pluralistic, restless universe, in which no single
point of view can ever take in the whole scene” (Will to Believe 136). His
“multiverse” cannot satisfy “a mind possessed of the love of unity at any
cost.” The notion of this kind of unsettled universe actually made a friend
sick, James reports, affecting him “like the sight of the horrible motion of
a mass of maggots in their carrion bed.” The philosopher acknowledges
that the incertitude of his infinite drama invites a natural aversion. But the
156 TURSI

alternatives produced in him an abhorrence far more severe, violating what

he called his sense of “moral” reality. A macrocosm with at least one
“chance” in it that carries with it the possibility of goodness, even if that
chance is never exactly realized, was better to James than a world that denies
chance altogether. What he clung to with more than philosophic desper-
ation was the gamble that “in moral respects the future may be other and
better than the past has been” (137). In a spiritual context, the same holds
true, he contends, for to him “no fact in human nature is more characteristic
than its willingness to live on a chance” (Varieties 414). Therefore, “the
chance of salvation is enough.” Religious experience produced such real
effects in people that for James its validity could not be ignored.
The notion of contingency imbued with a moral hue is a good place to
begin to set Dickinson alongside James. She addresses forms of unsettling
contingency in many moods. For instance, in the early 1870s, she gives a
dark report of a universe coursing along the rails of chance. Her speaker
ruminates on the outcome of seemingly random human choices: in one
instance, a death is avoided, and in the other, a love not pursued. The
person involved in each circumstance remains unaware of how, because of
outwardly small decisions made, his or her life would have been different:
How many schemes may die
In one short Afternoon
Entirely unknown
To those they most concern –
The man that was not lost
Because by accident
He varied by a Ribbon’s width
From his accustomed route –
The Love that would not try
Because beside the Door
Some unsuspecting Horse was tied
Surveying his Despair (Fr1326)
The seat of agency belongs to the human element of making one decision over
another, whether it be taking a step an inch from one’s hodiernal path that
saves a life, or deciding that the horse tethered outside a beloved’s home
necessarily belongs to a rival. No predetermined fate charts these slivers of
choice. Nothing here could be predicted. But it is human attention to this or
that detail and the resulting decision that shapes all. This human power carries
no triumph or joy or quiet satisfaction, not even when it saves a life. Also
absent is the optimism that could accompany the sense that anything is
possible. Rather, while it is difficult to say whether the speaker views this
 Emily Dickinson, Pragmatism, and the Conquests of Mind 157
universe as indifferent, the schemes themselves have a leveled equality,
underscored by the relatively even length and weight of each line. Yet
Dickinson does not implicate the universe. The saving of a life does not
outrank the loss of a love; both are simply designs that, because of human
thought, fail to come to pass. By beginning this poem with a line about
possible death and ending with one about despair, she would seem to be
giving the underbelly of pragmatic contingency, the maggot-infested-carrion-
bed version, an unflinching look. The moral quality here is up to us. If there is
free will, then we are responsible; however blindly, we must proceed.
Dickinson likewise could be said to be assessing, or attempting to assess,
pragmatically, the value of a world of chance in the following poem. It
considers the gains and losses that would come had one particular day not
occurred:
Had this one Day not been,
Or could it cease to be
How smitten, how superfluous,
Were every other Day!
Lest Love should value less
What Loss would value more
Had it the stricken privilege,
It cherishes before. (Fr1281)
The poem’s speaker offers no details about this day other than it must have
brought some exceptional quality with it. Having experienced the extra-
ordinary day, he or she can now know, had it not occurred, its difference
from ordinary days. While the Romantic trope of loss making experience
more sweet certainly structures the poem’s theme, the second stanza’s
ambiguous pronoun references can leave us almost dizzy from a multitude
of “what ifs.” Perhaps the speaker is saying that “Love” takes pain to cherish,
in hindsight, the “before” of this day. If so, then a kind of competition
ensues between “Love” and “Loss.” Love understands that loss, were it
allowed to know the day and then somehow lose that experience in advance
of the day occurring, would end up being able to value such a day more than
love. What the poem certainly showcases is the human ability to seize and
color contingency. One’s existence can change in a moment, and it is the
randomness that comes with such infinite possibility, in being able to
measure a “what if” and “a before and after,” that enriches our sense of
life. To Dickinson, one extraordinary day gives meaning to all other days in
this economy of imagination. The mind steers our own course, and there is
a sense of obligation there as to how we are to narrate that course.
158 TURSI

The thought of not knowing what comes, if anything, upon death, leads
the poet to question, spiritually, what such contingency brings to existence.
In “We see – Comparatively – ” doubt transforms a world of surety and
leads to the poem’s dark mood. Here chance and the certainty of a God
engage in a kind of dance. Whatever ground we may gain in “knowing”
loses proportion in the advance:
We see – Comparatively –
The Thing so towering high
We Could not grasp it’s segment
Unaided – Yesterday –
This Morning’s finer Verdict –
Makes scarcely worth the toil –
A furrow – Our Cordillera –
Our Appenine – a knoll –
Perhaps ‘tis kindly – done us –
The Anguish – and the loss –
The wrenching – for His Firmament
The Thing belonged to us –
To spare these striding spirits
Some Morning of Chagrin –
The waking in a Gnat’s – embrace –
Our Giants – further on – (Fr580)
The poem explores how a fuller knowledge or understanding of things
has a flattening effect, reducing the roll of unknown experience that
looms large in front of us to unfolded irrelevancy. Yesterday’s majestic,
seemingly insurmountable Alp is today, upon familiarity, a mere knoll.
As we advance we are a bit like the children of “Tell all the truth but tell it
slant,” where we are possibly being sheltered through our ignorance
(“Perhaps ’tis kindly – done us”) from a form of knowing we are not
yet ready for. What lies ahead may be nothingness, so to have “the Thing
belonged to us” wrenched from us bit by bit – loss by loss through death
(“for His Firmament”) and doubt – conditions us for uncertainties.
Dickinson makes this journey a difficult one, stilted by her dashes and
conveyed through bursts of arduous human effort. While she leaves the
door open for “Giants ahead,” our awakening in a “Gnat’s embrace” in
effect leaves us with the same qualms as the fly that inserts itself between
the speaker and heaven in “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –.” Perhaps
there is a life after death. Perhaps there isn’t. It all may be kindly done.
Or it all may just be material indifference. Yet the poem’s emphasis
 Emily Dickinson, Pragmatism, and the Conquests of Mind 159
through its opening on “seeing” keeps the ethics of this uncertainty
within us. It issues specifically from our internal powers of attention to
and of knowledge-making from the external scene.
Rather than sojourn solely in this kind of deflating contingency, how-
ever, she also has many poems that linger over what peace and calmness a
sense of certainty about one’s own thinking could bring:
On a Columnar Self –
How ample to rely
In Tumult – or Extremity –
How good the Certainty
That Lever cannot pry –
And Wedge cannot divide
Conviction – That Granitic Base –
Though none be on our side –
Suffice Us – for a Crowd –
Ourself – and Rectitude
And that Assembly – not far off
From furthest Spirit – God – (Fr740)
Dickinson imagines one’s convictions as a sturdy base, as though a pedestal
upon which our ideas and beliefs might be solidly secured. This rare surety
is not often a shared thing. Hence the cylinder metaphor, rising singly
not collectively towards “Assembly” with God. The link here to Jamesian
pragmatism cannot be overstated. Our process of arriving at a sure idea,
which is simply another word for a belief, is for James akin to a feeling of at-
homeness. As he suggests, we feel our thoughts to be ours alone because
they answer us with their uses and thus feel agreeable. They carry with them
“warmth and intimacy and immediacy” (Principles 1: 232) and thus omit
any feeling of privation or irritation in the form of doubt. This quality is
the “practical” aspect of pragmatism that is so often misunderstood.
The process of finding one’s own convictions is personally opportunistic,
yes, but it is infused wholly with moral significance. Pragmatism is “selfish”
only in ways that allow our deepest questions to be answered. With only
“Rectitude” and “God” as companions, belief can be a lonely business.
Dickinson’s way of knowing communicates that condition: “Suffice Us –
for a Crowd – / Ourself.” We should not forget, however, that in the process
of producing a poem to be read by others Dickinson participates in the
collective enterprise of knowledge-making. “On a Columnar Self” conveys
a sense that its speaker voices what each of us may experience and thus
it becomes a shared experience.
160 TURSI

Her wry poems on religious doubt express the dark and bright colors that
come of incertitude. In “What we see we know somewhat,” the speaker
humorously claims “I shall vote for Lands with Locks / Granted I can pick
‘em – / Transport’s doubtful Dividend / Patented by Adam” (Fr1272). In
other words, if given the choice, she’ll live with unknowing as long as she can
be guaranteed the “key” to unlocking their mysteries. Also, there is that “fine
invention” called “‘Faith,’” which in her poem she props up like a straw man
by quotation marks. It will do “For Gentlemen who see! ” but “Microscopes”
become the instrument of choice for an “Emergency” (Fr202C). Some of us
could use a little empirical certainty to believe in God, she implies. What’s
clear in all these poems is that these speakers advocate negotiating the flow of
experiential sensation ourselves and drawing our own conclusions through
pragmatic methods. The “microscope” is a stand-in for our own powers of
perspective, discovery, and conclusion-drawing. This approach certainly has
its origins for both James and Dickinson in Emersonian self-reliance. Doubt,
in other words, is not necessarily despair – and indeed, may lead to new forms
of understanding or meaning.
It is along such Emersonian-Jamesian lines of possibility and renewal that
Dickinson’s own thoughts seem to travel. It is clear that the philosopher’s
ideas had uncorked sources of possibility for her as far back as the 1840s.
That was when one of her father’s young protégés, Benjamin Franklin
Newton, had what biographer Alfred Habegger calls a “formative influence
on her mental and spiritual growth” (217). He not only gave her a copy of
Emerson’s poems, but she credited him with teaching her “Immortality”
during that period. Previously she had understood immortality only as a
state of “Eternity,” a condition that to her seemed “dreadful” and “so dark”
for its endlessness (L10). In her poems, this important distinction between
immortality and eternity becomes the imaginative difference for her
between really living and just existing. It is her clinging to such active
ways of being, ways that include an infinitude of possibility, that allows
her views, in a primary sense, to have such agreement with those of a
Jamesian pragmatist. Emerson’s influence on James likewise seeps into
almost every corner of the philosopher’s writings. Even if those two thinkers
could not agree on the nature of the universe, they could both agree with
Emerson that establishing an original relationship to it was vital.
Pragmatism found fertile ground in the United States at a time when, as
Richard Hofstadter writes, “men were thinking of manipulation and con-
trol. Spencerianism had been the philosophy of inevitability; pragmatism
became the philosophy of possibility” (123). The pragmatists were trans-
forming a rigid field into an enthusiastic scrutiny of how to use a universe
 Emily Dickinson, Pragmatism, and the Conquests of Mind 161
still in the making. James’s own claims, optimistic as they could be, required
energy and vigor to put into practice. Succumbing to the lassitude of
incertitude could be overwhelming, as he personally had experienced as a
young man. Such feelings had led to his life-saving proclamation that free
will was in itself a choice one could seize. Dickinson would seem to have
shared the need to stave off passivity. Her poem summoning the sixteenth-
century explorer Hernando De Soto points to this pragmatic need to
generate one’s own perspectives and beliefs:
Soto! Explore thyself!
Therein thyself shalt find
The “Undiscovered Continent” –
No Settler had the Mind. (Fr814C)
An earlier version of the poem was sent to her brother, Austin, in 1864. Its
commanding-correcting voice is striking as it claims that the source of true
power lies not without but within. Power is the very thing she tells editor
and friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson that in the Bible she preferred
before she even knew that “‘Kingdom’ and ‘Glory’ were included” (L330).
In “Soto! Explore thyself!” the speaker is quite sure that we, as thinkers, are
going about the exploratory process all backwards. Reminiscent of
Emerson’s line “I unsettle all things” from “Circles” (Selected Essays 236),
this poem’s final declarative statement – “No Settler had the Mind” – keeps
thinking deployed in an ongoing process of discovery. The mind within will
engender a continent to surpass any De Soto could wrest from another.
That power includes the ability to find within one’s own mind Hamlet’s
“undiscovered country” or the question of life after death. If there is to be
such a place, it is not a “country” that could be reached across solid ground.
Instead, Dickinson makes the possibility of a next life a “continent” unto
itself, reachable perhaps only by uncharted waters. No one else’s map can
show the way or tell us what we might find there upon arrival. It is a journey
necessarily personal. Among this poem’s many strengths is its pragmatic
tone of certainty about uncertainty. Its imperative voice shouts a veritable
wake-up call to all explorers of the mind.
Like the speaker in “Soto! Explore thyself!,” the Jamesian pragmatist, or
the radical empiricist, to be more exact, accepts no reality outside of some
human experience of it – an experience that produces real effects of one sort
or another. Faith, for instance, has validity for James not because it proves
the existence of a god, but because it produces real effects in human beings:
There are all sorts of ways of having to do with a thing. To know it, we must
mean that thing, and not another thing; we must be able to portray or copy
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its inherent nature; and we must know innumerable things about it and its
relations to other things. To know it rightly, moreover, we must not go astray
among all these many ways of knowing it, but select the way that fits in with
our momentary interest, be the latter practical or theoretical, and select the
way that will work . . . Mind engenders truth upon reality . . . (Perry 2:479)

In this sense, every way of seeing, of believing, of behaving has the potential
to stand, in feeling and thought, as an “‘undiscovered continent.’” The way
in which “Soto! Explore Thyself!” suggests that the human element inex-
tricably authorizes the inner patterns of our experience thus goes beyond the
Platonic “know thyself.” It leans more towards this pragmatic way of
understanding how the world and its import is not a completed picture
in advance of our arrival. Again, “No Settler had the Mind” pronounces
Dickinson. Instead, the mind settles things for itself. For the Jamesian
pragmatist, experience of things internal and external to ourselves is an
organization of human sensation completely of our own making: a drawing
round of Dickinsonian “circumference,” if you will. Not to form the kind of
transcendent unity with nature aspired to by the Romantics, but simply to
delimit the chaos into some kind of personally or socially agreed upon line
in the sand as a first stop to a program of action – a conquest by way of the
mind’s own authority.
When James explains in Pragmatism that our problem-solving system of
language presents itself “less as a solution” and more “as an indication of the
ways in which existing realities may be changed,” he introduces the notion of
a pluralistic world, one in which contingency and uncertainty necessarily
remain its surest qualities. These attributes are the very ones that make
embracing the pragmatic method such a disconcerting task for understand-
ing human experience. The axiom issuing from predeterminism that
“everything happens for a reason” doesn’t disappear, but it certainly points
to quite different causes and explanations.
For example, in Dickinson’s poem “These tested Our Horizon,” the
inability to fix “these,” whatever “these” may be, remains all we say about
them in advance of our experiencing them:
These tested Our Horizon –
Then disappeared
As Birds before achieving
A Latitude.
Our Retrospection of Them
A fixed Delight
But Our Anticipation
A Dice – a Doubt – (Fr934)
 Emily Dickinson, Pragmatism, and the Conquests of Mind 163
Certainty comes only in the temporal moment that follows the experience
itself. Dickinson’s choice to put anticipation after hindsight thus pragmati-
cally underscores the self-referential nature of experience and its quality of
unpredictability, or a roll of the “Dice.” Horizon, like circumference, is as
movable as Emerson’s widening circles: “The life of man is a self-evolving
circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards
to new and larger circles, and that without end” (Selected Essays 227). But
what remains constant is “Our Horizon,” or our point of view. It deter-
mines the gauge against which experience can be measured: its before, its
after, and its duration. The world of this poem, then, is a world of pure
human experience.
Dickinson would seem to be toying with this same notion in the second
and third stanzas of her poem “The Outer – from the Inner”:
The fine – unvarying Axis
That regulates the Wheel –
Though Spokes – spin – more conspicuous
And fling a dust – the while.
The Inner – paints the Outer –
The Brush without the Hand –
It’s Picture publishes – precise –
As is the inner Brand – (Fr450)
Each of the metaphors she devises here – the wheel and the brush – suggests
inner powers in a form that differs from what we might be inclined to
describe as imaginative powers or mere sight of things. Dickinson gives us a
tool of interiority – the “Brush without the Hand” – that we come upon in
the midstream of a process. What is important appears to be its function
and not some kind of content upon which it is engaging. No external
Romantic idealism here. In fact, as a whole, this poem has a somewhat
inverted Romantic structure. Instead of beginning with an interiority that
moves into nature or into the world and returns either having changed it or
been changed by it through an aesthetic process of transcendent fusion with
it, Dickinson starts with the outer, moves to the inner, and then returns
to the outer. Thus, for her, the “Inner” is the true origin of all that
transpires. It acts upon the outer, not the other way around. But not as a
changer; the inner pragmatically creates the outer. The outer forces “fling a
dust” or provide the raw sensory materials, but we compose the picture. The
result is “precise” for being the real thing of the seer – “the inner Brand.”
The transformation comes in the form of a world being shaped through
minute-by-minute attentions, decisions, and actions. The agency here is the
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“I” of the “eye,” the result of which is a picture that emerges or is personally
built up, not one that is recorded. This is a form of what James called the
“workshop of being,” where consciousness shapes the raw materials of our
sensory flow and “we catch fact in the making” (Pragmatism 138).
In the final stanza of the “The Outer – from the Inner,” Dickinson
returns to the Outer effects in a continuation of what the brush produces:
On fine – Arterial Canvas –
A Cheek – perchance a Brow –
The Star’s whole secret – in the Lake –
Eyes were not meant to know.
The eyes here would require indirection to know. Or, to put it pragmati-
cally, we come to know or understand what we know through a series of
choices about this moment or that one. There is a chance that a tran-
scendental whole does indeed exist, but if so, it will do so only because we
experience it as a result of a need for it – and not because we have accepted it
or taken its abstractions impersonally as truths. Hence the precision of
“the inner Brand.” This gets at James’s “sentiment of rationality,” inspired
by the whole European tradition of aesthetics. James contends that thinking
comes by way of a feeling of rightness from within – again, an aesthetic
privation of irritation or doubt.
Dickinson presents this negotiation between the powers of consciousness
and the experiential flux as two players of equal force in the following poem:
I make His Crescent fill or lack –
His Nature is at Full
Or Quarter – as I signify –
His Tides – do I control –
He holds superior in the Sky
Or gropes, at my Command
Behind inferior Clouds – or round
A Mist’s slow Colonnade –
But since We hold a Mutual Disc –
And front a Mutual Day –
Which is the Despot, neither knows –
Nor Whose – the Tyranny – (Fr837)
The speaker describes command over how to narrate the night sky, and
likewise, the command that some other force, be it gravity or God, has
equally. We can hold sway over the powers of the moon, for instance, by
naming them more or less – a crescent full or a crescent lacking – and
appoint the tides our soldiers in duty to our charge at the moon. Likewise,
 Emily Dickinson, Pragmatism, and the Conquests of Mind 165
that other force can command the moon to its wishes. It can hold “superior”
over us. Either way we both have the raw materials of the universe at our
command. Yet the introduction of such coercive forces as “Tyranny” and
despotism speaks to the strength of the human mind Dickinson is willing to
entertain. In effect, she suggests we might be equal to whatever a “God” can
effect, which, on the one hand, could be read as moral defiance. In Calvinist
schemes, seizing command of such a notion is wholly subversive. Yet in a
pragmatic scheme, personal agency loses that color and simply posits a
world of pure experience. When we are the maker, however, moral exigency
is shifted wholly onto us.
The inner gyroscope in so many of Dickinson’s poems, like the brush,
proceeds unrevealed because, pragmatically speaking, she is describing a
consciousness in process. As such, there are qualities and stages that pre-
figure words. In the poem “The joy that has no stem nor core,” a world of
experience occurs that is not yet accessible to language:
The joy that has no stem nor core,
Nor seed that we can sow,
Is edible to longing,
But ablative to show.
By fundamental palates
Those products are preferred
Impregnable to transit
And patented by pod. (Fr1762)
Certain feelings are like tastes, fully knowable but inexpressible: “Impregnable
to transit” and “ablative to show,” or cut off grammatically to ordinary palates.
Just because we don’t yet have language for an experience does not make
that experience any less valid or real. Indeed, she suggests in this poem that
perhaps those yet-unexpressed experiences, because they reflect unfulfilled
desires, so to speak, are more sought after for their flavors of sui generis truths
“patented by pod.”
Similarly, in “The mob within the heart,” she intuits James’s description
of how language is quite often insufficient or underdeveloped in relation to
experience. The “riot” of human incident often remains “Uncertified of
scene / Or signified of sound,” but has “hurricane”-force power nonetheless
(1763). It is clear James deeply feels such a sentiment when he writes that
“[p]hilosophers are after all like poets” (Pragmatism 257). Both are, he
writes, “so many spots, or blazes, – blazes made by the axe of the human
intellect on the trees of the otherwise trackless forest of human experience.
They give you somewhere to go from.” Continuing his simile, he writes:
166 TURSI

No one like the path-finder himself feels the immensity of the forest, or
knows the accidentality of his own trails. Columbus, dreaming of the ancient
East, is stopped by pure pristine simple America, and gets no farther on that
day; and the poets and philosophers themselves know as no one else knows
that what their formulas express leaves unexpressed almost everything that
they organically divine and feel. . . .
Of such postponed achievements do the lives of all philosophers consist.
Truth’s fullness is elusive; ever not quite, not quite! So we fall back on the
preliminary blazes – a few formulas, a few technical conceptions, a few verbal
pointers – which at least define the initial direction of the trail. (258)
If we posit language as a kind of Jamesian “axe,” it will possibly do damage
to experience by falsely chopping it up into categories when its “truth” lies
somewhere closer together. In “The Brain – is wider than the Sky –,”
Dickinson presents no reality beyond the mind’s conception of it,
and that conception seems to have its communicative desires foiled by
language’s insufficiencies. Even spirituality may be simply another form
of human experience incorrectly classified as concrete difference rather than
as more subtle metonym:
The Brain – is wider than the Sky –
For – put them side by side –
The one the other will contain
With ease – and You – beside –
The Brain is deeper than the sea –
For – hold them – Blue to Blue –
The one the other will absorb –
As Sponges – Buckets – do –
The Brain is just the weight of God –
For – Heft them – Pound for Pound –
And they will differ – if they do –
As Syllable from Sound – (Fr598)
The speaker here inductively tests the mind’s measure against the visible
world and finds that the mind can always go further. For that reason
the speaker concludes that if we hold God to be the maker, then perhaps
we, too, are creators in our way. James writes that the names we give to
experiential qualities often push those expressions further apart than
they feel to us. (Our experience of two different wines may be driven further
apart by their names than were we to drink them blind.) If only we could
find adequate language to convey our real experience of all the in-
betweenness of life, the transitional states signified by “although” or “if”
or “with,” then we could represent the seamless quality of our whole
 Emily Dickinson, Pragmatism, and the Conquests of Mind 167
perceptional-conceptual processes. Thus the distinction Dickinson makes
between “Syllable” and “Sound,” in other words, might be more visual than
aesthetic, she seems to suggest. Taken metaphysically, we may already
“know” God but just in unanticipated forms.
In these ways, Dickinson’s decision to eschew the structure of linguistic
authority in her poems – her lack of titles, her infinite formulations about
names and naming, her pressing upon words to perform in new ways – all
indicate that we can find pragmatic truths in her approaches: “No message is
the utmost message, for what we tell is done” (L PF11). Considered in this
light, “The most important population,” points to a realm of experience
missed by “ordinary” ways of seeing and believing:
The most important population
Unnoticed dwell.
They have a heaven each instant
Not any hell.
Their names, unless you know them,
‘Twere useless tell.
Of bumble bees and other nations
The grass is full. (Fr1764)
Dickinson posits a pluralistic universe in this poem. It is one filled with
nations of beings who follow ontological and spiritual structures we can
only begin to understand (though never fully) by opening our schemes of
experiential description to include them. Moreover, she relates the useless-
ness of prescribed identification through naming as a form of knowledge on
its own. If one is to know, one must experience. To know “bumble bees” by
name is to know little indeed of them or their way of being. What
Dickinson brings together in this poem and others like it is an intrinsically
social quality to her conceptualizing process. Populations and nations build
up where we might least expect them, emphasizing that if we are somehow
always able to communicate experience, to feel its warmth and intimacies,
we would know about knowing in a truer way. Bees, of course, serve as her
model in many poems; she remains a steady observer of their collective
enterprise, their uncharted movement, their contentment in the task at
hand. These ideas are in concert with James’s argument that knowing is
ultimately a social or multifarious communicative process. Pragmatically
considered, this view also supports Margaret Dickie’s contention that
Dickinson’s poems are less about the transfer of information or a descriptive
download than they are about the exchange process itself, be it between
one’s sensibility and one’s self, or between sender and receiver, writer and
168 TURSI

reader. Dickie argues that words, for the poet, serve as “effective links
between people rather than as links to some ultimate reality” (401). Thus
the “I” of a Dickinson poem is always experienced in terms of something
else, she contends, and remains unrevealed.
A letter-poem from the 1860s sent to her sister-in-law shows Dickinson
using this kind of tautology that exceeds metaphor:
One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted –
One need not be a House –
The Brain has Corridors – surpassing
Material Place –
Far safer, of a midnight meeting
External Ghost
Than it’s interior confronting –
That cooler Host –
Far safer, through an Abbey gallop,
The Stones a’chase –
Than unarmed, one’s a’self encounter –
In lonesome Place –
Ourself behind ourself, concealed –
Should startle most –
Assassin hid in our Apartment
Be Horror’s least –
The Body – borrows a Revolver –
He bolts the Door –
O’erlooking a superior spectre –
Or More – (Fr407B)
This appears to be a poem about a mind assessing itself. It is not a sunny place,
but one filled with dark corridors capable of concealing a host of horrors. To
be caught unawares not knowing one’s self or denying the personal agency
of consciousness is precarious. While presented here in alarmist fashion, the
relationships between “me” and “mine” are pertinent to the way James speaks
of the familiarizing qualities of thinking. When a thought comes to feel like
“my thought,” he suggests, it is because it carries with it an amiability and
closeness that comes from it being of “use.” (Principles 1:232). Paul Ricoeur’s
argument that “recognizing oneself in contributes to recognizing oneself by”
is simply a reformulation of James’s thinking here (121). James intends “use” –
the pragmatic aspect of pragmatism – as a quality that answers a call within
us of profound need. This summoning is the ethical and favorable opportun-
ism of Jamesian pragmatism. When we are ready to know something, he
 Emily Dickinson, Pragmatism, and the Conquests of Mind 169
argues, it is because we need to know it. And the process of coming to know
invokes a somewhat socializing aspect. Hence Dickinson’s experience of the
world shutting her up in prose puts her in stealth mode – “Ourself behind
ourself, concealed – . . . Assassin hid” – in relation to thinking. That poem’s
long, sinewy, slithering form emphasizes its treachery. She knows that a world
handed us ready-made without our say is child’s play compared to the
potential horrors one’s own mind can create.
An equally dark version of this epistemological sociability emerges for
Dickinson in “Facts by our side are never sudden”:
Facts by our side are never sudden
Until they look around
And then they scare us like a spectre
Protruding from the Ground –
The height of our portentous Neighbor
We never know –
Till summoned to his recognition
By an Adieu –
Adieu for whence the sage cannot Conjecture
The bravest die
As ignorant of their resumption
As you or I – (Fr1530)
These lines describe the kind of inner communicability between the flux of
experience and the shaping of it from within, whereby a happening is not
fully formed until seen in retrospect. That she colors this experience in
forms of death and tombstone-like measure intimates that knowledge is
known only after its death, so to speak, like memories lined up in the
graveyard of hindsight: “To be Susan / is Imagination / To have been /
Susan, a Dream –” she writes to her sister-in-law (Hart 242). Life is
temporally based, and builds out from this back and forth between
Emersonian becoming and having been. To Dickinson, our powers of
consciousness are invariably fallible, in other words. The building of our
knowing something, in general, is a slow process. Absence or loss, on the
other hand, coalesces the “fact” quickly, as we can see its full measure
outlined by what still is. In that sense “Facts by our side are never sudden”
is a parallel to “Had this one Day not been.”
Arguably, however, as poems such as “One need not be a Chamber – to
be Haunted –” may reveal, the poet found a world of possibility less
melioristic than did the philosopher. For one, her gender and disposition
allowed for fewer realizable possibilities than James could entertain. The
170 TURSI

utter contingency of selfhood would certainly feel more perilous – or at least

more limited – though James himself suffered from it to a large extent,
especially as a young man, through ongoing bouts of ontological crisis. It is
from a position of prescribed limitation that the following Dickinson poem
would seem to emerge:
Impossibility, like Wine
Exhilirates the Man
Who tastes it; Possibility
Is flavorless – Combine
A Chance’s faintest tincture
And in the former Dram
Enchantment makes ingredient
As certainly as Doom – (Fr939)
The poem suggests that seeing and marking one’s furthest circumference is
not what intoxicates the will. Rather, it is testing those limits – the pushing
beyond the known that colors life, the thrill of risk-taking. “The shore is
safer,” Dickinson wrote to her childhood friend Abiah Root in the 1850s,
“but I love to buffet the sea – I can count the bitter wrecks here in these
pleasant waters, and hear the murmuring winds, but oh, I love the
danger!”(L39). In “Impossibility, like Wine” we also hear, in contrast,
the echo of an idea from the earlier “I dwell in Possibility –” that leads
the speaker “to gather Paradise” from the possible within the impossible
(Fr466). These wavering moods could issue from the sense of a less
realizable personal agency, whatever the cause.
In such mysteries Dickinson’s unflinching poetry conquers the scene
around and within her poetic “I.” Her poems tell the cautionary tale that
while attention to the “outer” effects alone can be problematic, so much dust
raised by the spokes of the wheel – the consequences of inattention to how the
outer is driven by the “inner” can be hazardous. This kind of dangerous
carelessness plays out in “Who Court Obtain within Himself”:
Who Court obtain within Himself
Sees every Man a King –
And Poverty of Monarchy
Is an interior thing –
No Man depose
Whom Fate Ordain –
And Who can add a Crown
To Him who doth continual
Conspire against His Own (Fr859)
 Emily Dickinson, Pragmatism, and the Conquests of Mind 171
An unpragmatic mind, in this sense, becomes one that is self-defeating. Yet,
despite the peril, it is always the impress of human-carved behavings along
which Dickinson’s poetics of instrumentation seem to ride. “The Brain,
within it’s Groove / Runs evenly – and true,” she writes, describing how our
epistemological processes quietly make the unfamiliar familiar (Fr563).
What we know we can only know because we have experienced it twice;
first as the not-me, then as the me: “To make Routine a Stimulus /
Remember it can cease – / Capacity to terminate / Is a specific Grace – ”
(Fr1238). As James writes in Pragmatism, “Our acts, our turning-places,
where we seem to ourselves to make ourselves and grow, are the parts of the
world to which we are closest, the parts of which our knowledge is the most
intimate and complete. . . . Why may they not be the actual turning-places
and growing-places which they seem to be, of the world . . .?” (138). This is
again Dickinson’s sense of “the inner Brand.” When Dickinson writes to an
acquaintance that she “cannot depict a friend to my mind till I know what
he is doing,” this reveals a pragmatic approach to thinking, memory, and
visualization as a process that allows “action” to be just such a “growing-
place” (L969). All the more reason Dickinson’s absence from the critical
conversation about pragmatism is so puzzling. When Cynthia Griffin
Wolff, for example, speaks to the Emersonian aspects of her poetry, she is
just one step away from presenting Dickinson as a pragmatic thinker. “In
Dickinson’s poetry,” Wolff writes:
“landscape” always echoes Emerson’s usage here: not the natural world as
material entity, but an individual’s integrated, coherent understanding of the
meaning of the “seen” world and of one’s experiences in it. Yet, far from
allowing this “vision” of the landscape to uplift her “into infinite space” where
“all . . . egotism vanishes,” Dickinson clung to “egotism” and posited her vision
against God’s attempts to force meaning upon us. Far from being “nothing . . .
part or parcel of God,” Dickinson wrestled in her world to individuate self
from God and to counter His power to blind humankind. (225)

Wollf struggles here to account for Dickinson’s self-authority as a counterplot

to Transcendental schemes, when a simple shifting of the poet into a pragmatic
framework would allow the poet to be emergent rather than only reactive.
When in such a mood, Dickinson herself has little such difficulty resist-
ing the lure of externally imposed meaning, allowing import to build out
like Emersonian rings from an unassigned center. A poem that takes on
unusual qualities in this vein when read pragmatically is “Four Trees – opon
a solitary Acre –.” It is eerie for its seeming quiet and motionlessness, yet
slowly advancing like a tide nonetheless:
172 TURSI

Four Trees – opon a solitary Acre –

Without Design
Or Order, or Apparent Action –
Maintain –
The Sun – opon a Morning meets them –
The Wind –
No nearer Neighbor – have they –
But God –
The Acre gives them – Place –
They – Him – Attention of Passer by –
Of Shadow, or of Squirrel, haply –
Or Boy –
What Deed is Their’s unto the General Nature –
What Plan
They severally – retard – or further –
Unknown – (Fr778)
The speaker would appear to focus us on the four trees as rooted central
fixtures of this seemingly stark scene. The various parts of “General Nature”
come to the tree – the sun, the wind, a passerby, a shadow, a squirrel, a boy,
perhaps even God. And the poem’s core vagueness, concerning the trees’
collective purpose, seems designed to foil our craving for “Design / Or
Order, or Apparent Action.” The speaker counts on our inveterate habit to
demand that plan and deed – signs of will – be at play in some form. Read
Romantically, the poem invites us to come away in a Melvillean rage at such
a cruelly enigmatic God and universe, whose hazy gauze of “Unknown”
covers the scene like a scrim. If we read the poem pragmatically, however,
our attention can shift in interesting ways to the Acre’s role in this still life.
By focusing on the “life” in that term, Dickinson’s ambiguous line con-
structions allow the Acre to be the thing “Without Design.” For it is the
Acre that gives them all “Place,” she writes, a comment followed by what
“all” consists of: the trees (“They”), God (“Him”), and so forth.
The poem can proceed in this way to show one of James’s basic pragmatic
tenets that “life is in the transitions as much as in the terms connected” –
that “Experience itself, taken at large, can grow by its edges” (Essays 42). In
Dickinson’s poem, if a pragmatic speaker is allowed, it is she or he that
provides any relation or coherence, however unclear, to this scene simply by
giving it Dickinsonian circumference in the form of the “Acre.” By drawing
the limits of the “solitary Acre,” the speaker disrupts the irrefutable general
experiential flow of sensory perception. James writes of this flow: “That one
 Emily Dickinson, Pragmatism, and the Conquests of Mind 173
moment of it proliferates into the next by transitions which, whether
conjunctive or disjunctive, continue the experiential tissue, can not, I
contend, be denied” (42). The poem, as a result, becomes clearer as a
moment in time that is both still but ongoing; it is not a representation of
what “is” so much as “becoming,” whose perimeter can advance or recede
according to the angle of view. Thus it puts all decision, discernment, sense
of form, intention, and mood on the speaker/perceiver. In effect this
positions Dickinson closer to Wallace Stevens, for instance, than to
Wordsworth. It is the difference between the “universal spectacle” of the
1805 Prelude’s Book Thirteen – “shaped for admiration and delight” and
housing the “blue chasm” of a river torrent into which “Nature lodged / The
soul, the imagination of the whole” (460)– and the “eye of the blackbird” in
Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” the “only moving
thing” among the wintry stillness of “twenty snowy mountains” (74). In the
one we are poured into a bath of meaning and spiritual satisfaction, whereas
in the other any import must be self-generated, leaving us riveted like a
compass point to draw transitory circles in the loam around our own center.
How one attends to the stuff of life coursing around us becomes the
program for a “robust,” Jamesean way of being in the world. Dickinson’s
questing through her poems never appears to confuse doubt with hope-
lessness. “Interrogation must be fed,” as she wrote to her nephew in 1885, is
as forceful a declaration of pragmatic possibility as any of her near-bursting
poetic volleys such as “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun –” (L1000). She
was incapable of not claiming experience as her own, voicing conquest upon
conquest of self-spun veracity. A letter from1883 speaks to the inexorable
quality she evinces through such a pragmatic way of seeing:
You speak of “disillusion.” That is one of the few subjects on which I am an
infidel. Life is so strong a vision, not one of it shall fail.
Not what the stars have done, but what they are to do, is what detains the
sky. (L860)
Dickinson suggests that what gives life, gives us, meaning is its/our forward-
going powers. Looking back on the already-completed is not her preferred
activity. Instead, she must, she will look forward – to continue to “illusion” or
fill out the view ahead with a believer’s fervor. That was her reality and her
pragmatic program of action. The value is not in what we have accom-
plished – “what the stars have done” – but always in what lies ahead for us to
do and to bring into being. Like a listener to Scheherazade’s tales, we
keep riveted to our own never-ending story and detain our skies,
Dickinson implies. For James as well, reality issued entirely from this kind
174 TURSI

of thought-making in relation to the raw materials of pure existence:

“Sensations are forced upon us, coming we know not whence. Over their
nature, order and quantity we have as good as no control. They are neither
true nor false; they simply are. It is only what we say about them, only the
names we give them, our theories of their source and nature and remote
relations, that may be true or not” (Pragmatism 117). The equally vital part of
such a reality, James insists, comes not only with taking account of “the
relations that obtain between our sensations” in our mind, but the moral
actions to which they direct us (118). This was James’s Dickinsonian “strong”
vision of life.
To read Dickinson pragmatically, then, is to enable her to contribute to
such a conviction about reality – to see that “Forever – is composed of
Nows” in a continuum whose breaks into this moment or that are alto-
gether human-made, and all the more morally crucial for being in our power
(Fr690). This is the difference it makes to read her through pragmatism.
Therefore, to the extent that we can diminish the ineffectual outcomes of
our collective histories by immersing ourselves in pragmatic potentialities, it
is what her vision can teach us. “True conquest,” Emerson writes in
“Circles,” is causing a calamitous past “to fade and disappear as an early
cloud of insignificant result in a history so large and advancing” (Selected
Essays 238). Dickinson finds just such dominion. Her forward-moving mind
seizes and conquers, shaping the continents of her own unwritten worlds as
she goes.
 chapter 9

Dickinson and Sartre on Facing the Brutality

of Brute Existence
Farhang Erfani

In Choosing Not Choosing, Sharon Cameron argues against those, such as

Geoffrey Hartman, who have been puzzled by Emily Dickinson’s simplic-
ity, by the “leanness” of her poetry. Hartman wonders “if she can be a great
poet with so small a voice, so unvaried a pattern, so contained a form
of experience” (130). And other literary scholars are troubled, as Jed
Deppman summarizes, by Dickinson’s “ecstatic assertions . . . verging on
mental unbalance” (84–5). Cameron, however, maintains that Dickinson’s
work is not “small,” not unbalanced but rather is marked by excess, “too
much meaning determined too many ways” (43). This overdetermination of
meaning is valuable in that it opens up space for a meaningful literary
experience. At first blush, this style of writing would seem to be bad news
for philosophy, which prefers to defend clear positions with leanness and
rigid lines of argument. But not all philosophies are unreceptive to all excess,
not all ambivalence is unphilosophical, and Dickinson’s writing is condu-
cive to existentialist philosophy. My goal is to read her in light of it,
especially the form developed by Jean-Paul Sartre.
So what is existentialism? This is a difficult question since the term did
not exist during Kierkegaard’s or Nietzsche’s time and Heidegger, who is
often associated with it, refused his membership. It was mostly Sartre and
Simone de Beauvoir who used the term, a usage that justified the ex post
facto grouping of the renowned “existentialists.” Dissatisfied by his own
philosophical training, his discovery of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenol-
ogy ignited Sartre’s work. It was by accident, through his friend Raymond
Aron, that Sartre came to discover phenomenology. Aron had studied
under Husserl in Germany and told Sartre, in a nutshell, that phenom-
enology takes existence, life as it is, quite seriously. As the story goes,
Aron told Sartre that the beer Sartre was holding (de Beauvoir says it was
an apricot cocktail) was philosophically valuable to the phenomenologists.
Simple objects of everyday life are invitations to thought for phenomen-
ologists (Cohen-Solal 90).
175
176 ERFANI

Husserl’s approach to philosophy was new and radical. Of course earlier

philosophers had considered everyday objects worthy of analysis – René
Descartes famously analyzed objects in his room as he wrote his
Meditations – but broadly speaking the philosophical tradition up to
Husserl had been divided into idealists and empiricists. One could also
think of the opposition in terms of transcendence vs. immanence, or ration-
alism vs. materialism, but regardless of nomenclature the idealists posited
that reality is essentially in the mind, or at least that the mind participates
in or appropriates the nonphysical truths of the world. By contrast,
the empiricists or materialists located reality in the object, in the world,
with the mind as a receiver, a sort of semiactive mirror that reflects truth.
Against this dualism, Husserl began with the very nature of consciousness. He
maintained that instead of being a separate entity from the world or a receiver
of the signals sent by surrounding objects, consciousness is always directed, or
in phenomenological parlance, intentional, that is, conscious of something. Its
nature is such that it cannot be defined without the object of its focus. For
instance, there is no pure consciousness; there is only being conscious of a tree.
Sartre took this notion and ran with it. While Husserl primarily addressed
consciousness as the basis of understanding reality (a very Cartesian enter-
prise), Sartre sought to widen the scope of phenomenology and apply it to
existence through and through. Husserl had overcome the duality of idealism
and realism, yet this did not mean – to Sartre – that consciousness was at ease
or at home. He felt that when consciousness approaches the world, it is
somehow aware of a burden. Even when I look at a tree, without really
actively paying attention to it, I am giving meaning to this tree. The tree has
no absolute atemporal value (the idealist position), nor does it contain its own
secrets, in itself (the realist or empiricist position). My consciousness makes
the tree meaningful.
What becomes quite maddening to Sartre (and existentialists in general)
is that the world does not seem endowed with its own meaning. Of course
there are things and objects out there. But their way of being out there is
self-enclosed and indifferent. To be human, or better yet to exist as a
human, is to be condemned to care about the world. To make the matter
even more complicated, even though the nature of human consciousness is
always already related to the world, there is nonetheless a gap that exists, a
sort of nothingness as Sartre puts it, between me and the outside. As long as
my way of being is responsible for giving meaning, I cannot wash my hands
and be a mere recipient; even in passivity I am taking a stand to be passive.
I project meaning onto the world; I respond to the world freely because the
world’s inherent meaning is undefined. The world comes to us with
 Dickinson and Sartre on Facing the Brutality of Brute Existence 177
ambiguity and excess. Its brute existence, no matter how hard we look,
cannot provide its secret, and all meanings derive from us. Existentialism, as
we shall see, becomes a search for authenticity within such conditions, a way
of life that is true to the groundlessness of existence.
Existentialism, as I have described it so far, is a twentieth-century
thought; it is a movement within phenomenology. But some nineteenth-
century thinkers, such as Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, are considered
existentialists avant la lettre; they had the right concepts, the right intu-
itions, but their ontology or methodology was rather weak. They were
adamantly opposed to systematic thinking, believing that systems fail to
do justice to the singularity of existence, the particularity of the lived
experience. Both wrote “fragments” or “reflections,” refusing to do philos-
ophy in the classical – that is, systematic – way. Their overlap with the
phenomenologists is thematic, not methodological. Emily Dickinson is also
an existentialist avant la lettre, but her existentialism is not merely thematic.
More so than Kierkegaard or Nietzsche, she was already doing phenomen-
ology, which is to say, developing a method of reflection on lived experience
that took into account an awareness that existence comes to us in a brute
form, devoid of inherent meaning, and facing this brute existence is a task
that each conscious being must face.

dickinson’s existentialism
Emily Dickinson’s life was quite private. Scholars emphasize that “for
Dickinson, interiority was not only a matter of physical enclosure.
Interiority was a complicated conceptual problem, continually posited
and reexamined in a body of writing that relies heavily on spatial metaphors
to advance the recurrent themes of joy, despair, death, time and immortal-
ity” (Fuss 5). However, no phenomenology can be self-enclosed. In solitude,
phenomenology has argued, we are always already caught up in a world that
includes others. Dickinson’s choice – her existential project – of focusing on
the meaning of (her) life was a choice for intimacy. By referring to her
phenomenology of intimacy, I do not mean to insinuate that she attempts
to cut herself off from life or the world. She deeply cared about how she
related to the world, meaning how her consciousness was aware of the
world. Even though she wrote from her personal perspective, her reflections
are not narcissistic; she was not obsessed with her own self, but how a self
gives meaning. Narcissism is a failed project precisely because it refuses to
face the world. The narcissist is obsessed with his own image, not because it
is perfect, but because he longs for a self that is not present. The presence of
178 ERFANI

others is a constant threat that shatters this illusion. Dickinson is not a party
to such dysfunctional games. The term “intimacy” refers to her authentic
task of figuring her own self out. It is an intimate project because it is about
her selfhood, but since the phenomenological self is porous and is open to
the world, it is inescapably tied to the outside.
In an early and whimsical poem, she wrote, “Surgeons must be very
careful / When they take the knife! / Underneath their fine incisions / Stirs
the Culprit – Life!” (Fr156). The thing that causes us unease or disease is a
“culprit,” but the source of our dis-ease is quite simply, our life. If life were
to present itself in a clear-cut manner, it would be no mystery; if it came
with a user’s manual, it would require little attention. We cannot eradicate
our uneasiness in this world without eradicating our being. To be is to be
ill at ease. Precisely because it is lived individually and uniquely, life requires
constant examination. This Dickinson knew perfectly well. “Experiment
to me / Is every one I meet / If it contain a Kernel? / The Figure of a nut //
Presents opon a Tree / Equally plausibly / But meat within is requisite /
To Squirrels and to me” (Fr1081). This poem displaces any illusion of
narcissism, emphasizing that each life – not just hers – is a mystery.
While remaining intimate – focused on her own self-understanding –
Dickinson’s poems are nonetheless widely open to the outside, particularly
to others with their own projects. A parallel exists between the way my
consciousness seeks meaning and the consciousness of the other.
The following poem is a good example of how Dickinson anticipates the
existential project of self-creation, as opposed to self-discovery.
Each Life converges to some Centre –
Expressed – or still –
Exists in every Human Nature
A Goal –
Embodied scarcely to itself – it may be –
Too fair
For Credibility’s presumption
To mar –
Adored with caution – as a Brittle Heaven –
To reach
Were hopeless, as the Rainbow’s Raiment
To touch –
Yet persevered toward – surer – for the Distance –
How high –
Unto the Saints’ slow diligence –
The Sky –
 Dickinson and Sartre on Facing the Brutality of Brute Existence 179
Ungained – it may be – by a Life’s low Venture –
But then –
Eternity enable the endeavoring
Again. (Fr724)
Even in the afterlife, the self is more of a verb – a principle of action –
rather than an essence. The existentialist idea in this poem is that each life
converges to “some” center, not the same center for all. According to
Sartre, the pursuit of one’s own goal, the uniqueness of one’s own project,
is a difficult task, one that most people happily choose to ignore. In order
to avoid facing their own individual lives, most people choose to objectify
themselves, to resort to essentialism. The celebrated existentialist motto,
“existence precedes essence,” (568) is a catchy way of responding to this
problem. Unlike the being of objects, the being of human beings entails
making sense of existence. Objects are self-contained because they are not
open to the world and their presence in the world is marked by indif-
ference. Whatever human beings do become – our so-called essence or
identity – derives from the world of possibilities that is offered by
existence in the first place. Those who choose not to pursue meaningful
lives are in “bad faith” according to Sartre because they know – even if this
is “Admitted scarcely” to themselves – that they are in denial of their
responsibility. Against bad faith – the inauthentic life – existentialists call
for authenticity, which is taking over the possibilities of one’s own
existence.
Not all pretensions to a meaningful life are existentialist though. Many
people – Christians or Nazis, for example – may feel that they are
pursuing a meaningful life. But they lack the commitment to self-
understanding, to taking ownership, and instead let their understandings
be determined by the crowd. The existentialists, like Dickinson, are
suspicious of the knowledge crowds hold because it unburdens the self
of its responsibility. Dickinson conveys this concern when she writes:
“I’m Nobody! Who are you? / Are you – Nobody – too? / Then there’s a
pair of us! / Dont tell! they’d advertise – you know! // How dreary – to
be – Somebody! / How public – like a Frog – / To tell one’s name – the
livelong June – / To an admiring Bog!” (Fr260). Those “nobodies” who
refuse to go along, who lack a public image, are marginalized. But that
form of suffering is less “dreary” than is the condition of being somebody,
having a title and an official place. An existence oriented toward the
masses, spent in pursuit of recognition, exhausts life but bears no fruit;
it does not end the need for self-understanding. It is true that society at
180 ERFANI

large, the anonymous crowd, provides us with an identity. But this

seeming gift robs the recipient of the pressure of intimate self-reflection;
it provides shallow self-confidence that bars further inquiry.
Nowhere did Dickinson feel this pressure better than in her refusal to
be a wife. “I’m ‘wife’ – I’ve finished that – / That other state – / I’m Czar,
I’m ‘Woman’ now – / It’s safer so – // How odd the Girl’s life looks / Behind
this soft Eclipse – / I think that Earth feels so / To folks in Heaven – now –
// This being comfort – then / That other kind – was pain – / But Why
compare? / I’m ‘Wife’! Stop there!” (Fr225). This imagined wife appreciates
the “safety” and the “soft Eclipse” that comes with the social position of
“Wife.” We can also hear, however, Dickinson’s outrage at the “pain”
caused by society’s diminution of the “Girl’s life” of nonmarried women.
In fact, from the perspective of Sartrean existentialism, to speak of being a
“Wife” is grammatically misleading to the extent that it implies a state of
coincidence with an essence, precisely what existentialists resist. In the
language of Sartrean phenomenological ontology, to exist is to be separated
from Being by “nothingness.” We can not “be” anything construed as an
essence – a wife, a waiter – because being any of those things necessarily
involves an existential choice, not a commitment to some putative, perma-
nent self-identical state. Dickinson’s poem registers the awareness that
being a wife is a choice, one so transformative that it is risky or useless to
compare the different “states.”
Indeed the question of choosing one’s roles is a serious one for an
existentialist. The gap that exists between human consciousness and the
world, the fact that we are condemned to make sense of the world, each on
our own, means that we must play roles: even choosing not to choose entails
a role. This gap necessitates role-play because we do not inherit a definite
way of being; what we “are” is always only a performance, a taking up of a
certain role. Not being anything essentially, not being destined to be, say, a
wife, means that when we take on a particular identity we act it out.
Existentially speaking, to be a wife means to perform that role, to be a
teacher means to play at being a teacher. It is play not because it is fake – to
be fake one must falsely assume that there exists a deeper, more fundamen-
tal reality – but because any undertaking is for us an occasion to play.
There are important implications and limitations to this emphasis on
role-play. Contrary to popular misconception, existentialists do not main-
tain that a self can choose any role to play. That is yet another form of
escapism, bad faith, and inauthenticity. It is this existence, the given
situation in which we find ourselves, here and now, that offers us a world
of possibilities. Faced with this inescapable contingency, one may be
 Dickinson and Sartre on Facing the Brutality of Brute Existence 181
tempted to imagine that “anything is possible” but that is a poor under-
standing of the world. To put it in Sartre’s most concise formula, existen-
tialism does not say that you are free to do anything; it insists that you can
always make something of what you have been made into (45). Believing we
can do anything is another form of bad faith, but most of us usually avoid
our responsibility to engage the world, to take responsibility for our world,
by believing in deep essential identities. In such cases, people all too happily
accept a social label – say, wife – and in the words of the Dickinson poem,
“stop there.” They behave as though this was the missing piece, the one clue
that made them fundamentally at home. More importantly, hiding behind
the gift of a title – which they believe refers to something fixed – they stop
comparing, stop reflecting, and thereby refuse freedom and the responsi-
bility to make sense of life.
Dickinson was perfectly aware of this escapism when she wrote “Title
divine, is mine. / The Wife without the Sign – / Acute Degree – conferred
on me – / Empress of Calvary – / Royal, all but the Crown _” (Fr194). To
my mind this poem aligns with Sartre’s analysis. Dickinson does not reject
altogether a given title – again “Wife” – but neither does she embrace it as
though it gave final meaning to her life. The poem registers the existential
view that we engage the world and encounter others through titles and roles;
according to phenomenology this is how consciousness operates. Dickinson
is aware that any role – even a great one, such as being a royal “Empress” – is
empty of substance; there is no real crown to go with that metaphorical title.
The same poem ends with her asking: “‘My Husband’ – Women say – /
Stroking the Melody – / Is this the way –” To ask if this is “the way” can be
read as checking on one’s performance. Is this the right way to say “My
Husband”? Is this the right way to fit the role? In a deeper sense it also
radically questions whether this activity of playing the wife is the right way
to be. Arguably, for Dickinson, it cannot be the way precisely because it is a
limiting role, because it forbids her from pursuing her intimate search, in
her way, for self-understanding in the world of possibilities. The role of wife
would reduce her potentiality. It is worth comparing the wife option with
that of being (playing) a poet: “I dwell in Possibility – / A fairer House than
Prose – / More numerous of Windows – / Superior – for Doors –” (Fr466).
Because poetry is the world of possibilities, it is the domain of surplus,
allowing for multiple identifications and roles. Prose, literal meaning,
dictated by social monism and univocity, for her means an unwelcome
end of her search: “They shut me up in Prose – / As when a little Girl / They
put me in the Closet – / Because they liked me ‘still’ –” (Fr445). But the
poem goes on to suggest that a life correctly lived is nothing but movement
182 ERFANI

and becoming, provided one is willing to look. She demands the right to
find her own voice in the world of becoming.
Dickinson’s search for authenticity, couched in her intimate phenomen-
ology of the self, has so far in this analysis been close to that of existentialists.
Before further investigating her approach, I must open an important paren-
thesis. Dickinson’s attachment to nature and God might seem to put her at
odds with the rest of the existentialist thinkers. As mentioned before, even
though faith and God have been part of some existentialist works, notably
in the case of Kierkegaard, in general one can say that existentialists are
suspicious of divinity and also of nature. To existentialists, who all in one
way or another believe that each existence is a personal task to make sense
of, neither God nor nature can save us.
So is Dickinson’s attachment to God and nature existentialist, since
existentialism is typically opposed to essences, natural or divine? In “Each
Life converges to some Centre,” cited above as proof of her existentialist
appreciation of life as a project, the ending is hopeful: “Ungained – it
may be – by a Life’s low Venture – / But then – / Eternity enable the
endeavoring / Again” (Fr724). Many existentialists might not believe in
the possibility of eternal existence. However, the sense that “eternity” is a
state of perpetual striving does suggest an antiessentialist notion of the life
project, even if Dickinson imagines that state in perpetuity. Dickinson’s
attachment to nature and God can be deceptive if one reads her in a hurry.
Even if nature and God have a somewhat ontological and epistemic
privilege, they do not guide us as much as Plato had hoped. In a remark-
able poem, she admits “Nature and God – I neither knew / Yet Both so
well knew Me / They startled, like Executors / Of My identity –” (Fr803).
It becomes clear not only that she deeply experiences a gap between her
own self and Nature and God, but also that the latter are not particularly
helpful; at best they are “executors” of her identity. More importantly, she
immediately adds, “Yet Neither told – that I could learn – / My Secret as
secure / As Herschel’s private interest / Or Mercury’s Affair –” Nothing is
said, and if it is said, it is in a language that we do not understand. This gap
between us and the divine world, which includes nature, is unbridgeable.
When it comes to God, the same estrangement persists. “Is Heaven a
Physician? / They say that He can heal – / But Medicine Posthumous / Is
unavailable –” (Fr1260). What good does it do us if in Heaven we are healed
since medicine is about the here and now? She adds, “Is Heaven an
Exchequer? / They speak of what we owe – / But that negotiation / I’m
not a Party to –” (Fr1260). While she does ask otherworldly questions, as
many existentialists do not, her questioning always comes from a position
 Dickinson and Sartre on Facing the Brutality of Brute Existence 183
of investment in this world and from a refusal to reiterate the sacred answers
intoned by the social herd. Indeed, she questions what God could do for her
anyway. In one poem she hopes against hope that prayer will help her find a
“hospitable” face and in another, “Father – I bring thee – not myself –,” she
knows that her generic self or existence is trivial before God’s eyes, a “little
load” (Fr689, Fr295). But what if she were to bring something more
personal – her heart, the depths of her life; would that merit a response?
“The Heart I cherished in my own / Till mine – too heavy grew – / Yet –
strangest – heavier – since it went – / Is it too large for you?” An existentialist
perspective may underpin this speaker’s feigned or genuine worry over
whether her heart, the burden of her singular life, is too heavy even for
God: ultimately her life is hers to choose, to live, and to understand. In what
seems to be a classical phenomenological move that assigns meaning only
from the perspective of consciousness, she comes to realize that not even
God can unburden her heart.
This existentialist edge can be seen characterizing even her most trusting
poems. “Prayer is the little implement / Through which Men reach / Where
Presence – is denied them – / They fling their Speech // By means of it – in
God’s ear – / If then He hear – / This sums the Apparatus / Comprised
in Prayer –” (Fr623). This definition of prayer is troubling as it is couched in
“if.” The poem does not say, as the speaker admits, that prayers may not
only go unanswered, they may not even be heard. This “if” is not reserved
for God alone either. Nature, which surrounds us with her presence, also
does not meet our demand for absolute. Dickinson detects an uncomfort-
able contingency: “When they come back – if Blossoms do – / I always feel a
doubt / If Blossoms can be born again” (Fr1042). Undoubtedly nature is
more stable than we are, more at home, and less a mystery to itself: “The
reticent volcano keeps / His never slumbering plan; / Confided are his
projects pink / To no precarious man” (Fr1776). Nature has her plans, her
path. Unlike our precarious selves, the volcano knows what to do. We
cannot know whether or not the volcano and nature are also subject to
contingency, but we can be sure that the volcano does not relieve us of ours.
Bluntly put, since nature – as in the case of the volcano – knows its place in
the world, human beings become somewhat unnatural since our nature is
nothing but an open-ended, indeterminate question.
Dickinson is clearly not one more atheist existentialist, but her faith in
nature and God, fluctuating and hard to discern as it is, never relieves her of
her finitude and her own contingent search for meaning. Speaking of faith
she wrote, “To lose One’s faith – surpass / The loss of an Estate – / Because
Estates can be / Replenished – faith cannot –” (Fr632). This seems to be a
184 ERFANI

genuine concern for her, but is it all or nothing? If the choice is whether
Dickinson had faith or not, it would be senseless to argue that she didn’t,
especially since she seems to think in terms of absolute Either/Or. But it is
equally clear that she at least did not have a certain type of faith, the type
that surrenders her subjectivity, the burden of her life and her search for
authenticity to God. God, it seems to me, stands for Dickinson as the ideal
though impossible project of harmonized being, something that we seek to
replicate but are incapable of achieving. Without going as far as to doubt the
very notion of divinity, she does admit to the particularity of the human
existence – the unnatural nature of our lives – that is not blessed by divine
communion. Consider this very short instance: “One of the ones that Midas
touched / Who failed to touch us all / Was that confiding Prodigal / / The
reeling Oriole” (Fr1488). According to one of the variants, the oriole is
“blissful,” unlike Dickinson (and us). The oriole is no mystery to herself; in
fact she is like the volcano – aware of her own meaning. To Dickinson, there
is this privileged space of nature, touched by divinity. Tragically though, it
is also clear to her that divinity “failed to touch us all.” We, the untouched,
have to find our own way.
Another appearance of an oriole in Dickinson’s poetry foregrounds the
existentialist conviction that it is we who confer meaning upon the world;
meanings do not reside in the “in itself” but only in the “for itself”:
To hear an Oriole sing
May be a common thing –
Or only a divine.
It is not of the Bird
Who sings the same, unheard,
As unto Crowd –
The Fashion of the Ear
Attireth that it hear
In Dun, or fair –
So whether it be Rune –
Or whether it be none
Is of within.
The “Tune is in the Tree –”
The Skeptic – showeth me –
“No Sir! In Thee!” (Fr402)
This poem emphasizes the gap between us and nature. There may be a true
and transcendent form of hearing an oriole sing, but such is available only to
the divine. At the human level, the “Skeptic,” like the phenomenological
 Dickinson and Sartre on Facing the Brutality of Brute Existence 185
existentialist, is right that the meaning of the tune, like all other meaning, is
“of within.” To the classic question of whether a bird makes a song in the
absence of a hearer, the proper phenomenological answer is yes but the sound
is meaningless without a consciousness, a “fashion of the ear,” to hear it.
Sound becomes “tune” not “in the tree” but “in thee.”
We might say that Dickinson did not abdicate her search for authenticity
through faith, but that through her faith, she took her life to be hers to live
and refused to let anyone else solve her life’s quest. This refusal was not a
denial of the importance of the world, other people, objects, and even
nature or God. Like existentialists, Dickinson believed that the fundamen-
tal philosophical question was no longer what I am (or what we are) but
instead who I am. The “what” tends to classify us among objects; the “who”
is a much harder and individuated task.
The existentialists understand “the other” to be unknown to us, but also
intimately intertwined with our self-definition. Indeed, we co-author our-
selves in shared endeavors that tie us to one another, not in a way of
objectification but in a way of love. The encounter with the other is always
rich with possibilities and paths to choose. Even the ones closest to us, such
as friends, are puzzling to us; they intrigue us with the way they have
coordinated their existence: “My friend must be a Bird – / Because it flies!
/ Mortal, my friend must be – / Because it dies! / Barbs has it, like a Bee! /
Ah, curious friend! / Thou puzzlest me!” (Fr71). This puzzle or gap between
oneself and one’s friend necessitates a choice, a commitment that is ground-
less because it could always be otherwise. Beyond the inauthentic choice of
ignoring others or of engaging in a commerce of objectification, the
authentic self comes to terms with human contingency: “Meeting by
Accident, / We hovered by design – / As often as a Century / An error so
divine // Is ratified by Destiny, / But Destiny is old / And economical of
Bliss / As Midas is of Gold –” (Fr1578). In this poem, life is characterized by
contingency. However, Dickinson interprets this particular accident as
invitation and not obstacle; the gap between ourselves and the world can
existentially be bridged; being out of sync with nature or divine destiny is no
longer a source of concern. Accidental meetings afford us the chance to turn
accident into design, as though it had to be. This poem refuses the bad faith
lovers sometimes display, when they seek to reverse contingency and speak
in absolute terms, as though they were meant to meet. For Dickinson, it is a
mistake to make this meeting too metaphysical; metaphysical necessity –
“Destiny” here – is “old” and is as “economical” in doling out “bliss” as the
famous miser Midas was of giving away gold. She invites us to recognize the
fragility of the choice with which friends and lovers choose one another and
186 ERFANI

the courage it takes to do it. There is no absolute destiny since we could

always have loved another person. The choice is a human mandate and
must stay true to its limitations and fragility. What matters is that here and
now we meet and take up this meeting as our work, not waiting for a Midas
to bless or ratify us.
Crucially, for both Dickinson and Sartre, “an accidental meeting” can
only proceed provided that each party has earned an existential self-reliance
by choosing to be not a what but a who. Such a self has grown independent
of others’ approval and less susceptible to jealousy. If I refused to face my
own life – including the sense of my mortality that brings me back to this
life – then I would wander and be deceived by each “Door just opened on a
street” (Fr914). I would hope for an invitation to share the “Warmth
disclosed,” but until I have come to terms with who I am, in my own
intimate and unique way, I can be neither guest nor host. Finding a home
can only happen once I have abandoned hope that a God or nature or Midas
(or anything else) can relieve me of this brutal task of facing the brute life,
which is sheer meaningless existence. Once I am at home with the fact that
“I have no Life but this – / To lead it here – / Nor any Death – but lest /
Dispelled from there – // Nor tie to Earths to come, – / Nor Action new –”
then I can finally allow for tying down a knot, for creating ties through “The
love of you” (Fr1432C). It is crucial to emphasize that the “love of you,” or
“Realm of you,” as a variant offers, comes after the existential commitment
to this life and to one’s own intimate moral life. Once the facts of onto-
logical freedom are embraced even the “title” of housewife can meaningful.
This existential reading of Dickinson suggests that we ought to embrace
the ambivalence, the polysemic richness, and the overdetermination of
meaning in her poems. It would be a grave mistake to simply do away
with her multiplicity, for it testifies to her careful phenomenology of
intimacy, to her laboring effort to be a who and not a what. “All men say
what to me,” she said in a letter. She refuses to answer. The task of
authenticity is fraught with doubts and swings between hope and despair,
much like any self-aware lived existence, and there is both despair and hope
in her work. When she hesitates to “live with You” and insists that “we must
meet apart,” it is not out of fear of commitment or a festishization of despair
(Fr706). It is because living with others can be an existential trap, a way of
avoiding facing our very own selves.
While Dickinson’s existentialism does center upon her individual quest
for authenticity, it also opens out into an ethical imperative of care of and
for living this precarious brutal existence: “If I can stop one Heart from
breaking / I shall not live in vain / If I can ease one Life the Aching / Or cool
 Dickinson and Sartre on Facing the Brutality of Brute Existence 187
one Pain // Or help one fainting Robin / Unto his Nest again / I shall not
live in vain.” (Fr982). If read in isolation from the rest of her oeuvre, this
poem could sound like a trite reiteration of conventional sentimental
truisms according to which the value of a woman’s life lies entirely in self-
effacingly serving others. But read in the context of her existentialism, it
becomes a far more interesting and challenging poem, one that embraces
contingency – fundamental indeterminacy – and finds in the randomness of
our encounters an invitation for authentic choice. Her life will not be vain if
she can alleviate the distress of another fellow mortal, whoever he or she
might be. The meaning resides less in the importance of the person she saves
or the magnitude of change she effects than it does in her decision in favor of
other-orientation.
For Dickinson, as for existentialists, intimacy – the close pursuit of a life
of authenticity – involves love because one’s personal quest is pursued in
the context of a world of others. That is not to say that one must lose or
divert one’s selfhood into others. As brute existence becomes meaningfully
narrated and plotted, the intimate self cannot help but realize that narrating
and giving meaning is a project of co-authorship with others. The notion
of “love” is a way of affirming this shared creative endeavor. Thus, while
Dickinson wrote “my business is to love” in a letter to her friend Elizabeth
Holland, she also (pretending to quote a bird from her garden) used
practically the same phrase to say “My business is to sing” (L269). And in
another letter she famously insisted: “My Business is Circumference”
(L268). In a sense these are all the same business: to encompass what one
knows authentically in an act of love, engaged in freely. Singing as the
expression of that love, self-creation in poetry as co-creation – such might be
Dickinson’s existential phenomenology of intimacy.
 chapter 10

Dickinson on Perception and Consciousness:

A Dialogue with Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Marianne Noble

Can you find Figure 1 within Figure 2 below?

Figure 1 Figure 2

(Phenomenology, 22)
I find it with difficulty. It helps to lay paper over the surrounding lines in
order to recognize that the identical hexagon is in fact there. It is difficult to
keep it in my mind’s eye. I know, objectively, that it is there. But my
experience of Figure 2 is that it is not.
So, is the hexagon in Figure 2 the same as the one in Figure 1? To answer
that question, the early twentieth-century French philosopher Maurice
Merleau-Ponty would say that it depends upon what you’re trying to achieve
in posing the question. Are you trying to perform some kind of mathematical
calculation? If so, then yes. But if you are trying to understand something
about the truth of objects, then the answer is no. To understand reality, we do
not need to detach objects in the world from the partial and subjective
perspectives that the minds of perceivers bring to them. Such detachment
can be useful, but objectivity is not necessary for accurate perception.
188
 Dickinson on Perception and Consciousness 189
Likewise, truth does not require that we sever objects from their contexts.
The lines that I must cover up in order to perceive the hexagon in Figure 2
are part of the hexagon. It is not, then, identical to the one in Figure 1. As
theorized by Gestalt psychology, an important influence on Merleau-Ponty,
objects exist in a gestalt, a lived context, and we identify forms within that
Gestalt by foregrounding some parts and backgrounding others. The forms
that result both have independent existence from us (one cannot find circles
in Figure 2, for example), and they do not (our minds create the form that
emerges from the gestalt). Context is part of an object. As Merleau-Ponty
writes in a similar example:
The two straight lines in Müller-Lyer’s optical illusion are neither of equal
nor unequal length; it is only in the objective world that this question arises.

The visual field is that strange zone in which contradictory notions jostle
each other because the objects – the straight lines of Müller-Lyer – are not, in
that field, assigned to the realm of being, in which a comparison would be
possible, but each is taken in its private context as if it did not belong to the
same universe as the other. Psychologists have for a long time taken great care
to overlook these phenomena. (Phenomenology 6–7)

Merleau-Ponty challenges what he calls a “prejudice in favor of an objec-

tive world.” Our perception is that one of the lines is longer than the other,
and taking each one “in its private context” does not necessarily yield
truth. To understand objects, they must be conceived in the zone of
“being,” in which the meanings of things tie them to one another and to
the people who are interested in them. Our brains make sense of the visual
zone in ways that are generally useful in our day-to-day lives. The act of
perception is not the passive absorption of reality through our senses, nor
is it a purely intellectual phenomenon; perception is conditioned by our
bodies, motivated by our intentions upon the world, and situated in the
context of our lives. A squirrel perceives an acorn on the ground, while the
exquisite sunset does not exist for it. The sunset is there, but meaning –
our experience of things – resides in the intersubjective zone of being.
Meaning-making begins with perception, and perception is embodied,
situated, and subjective.
190 NOBLE

Emily Dickinson is also skeptical about the knowability of an objective

reality out there, and like the phenomenologists who wrote 75 to 100 years
after her, she emphasizes the role of an embodied, situated knower. In “To
hear an Oriole sing,” she imagines some objectivist pointing to a tree in
which an oriole is singing and asserting, “The ‘Tune is in the Tree –’” to
which the speaker retorts, “‘No Sir! In Thee!’” (Fr402) We determine what
we make out of the sensory stimuli in the world. Thus, “whether it be
Rune” or “none” is “of within.” The speaker of the poem is gratefully
instructed by a philosophical “Skeptic” who clarifies that we can never know
an object objectively, only subjectively. Like Merleau-Ponty, the speaker
here desires not to isolate objects from their perceivers but instead to
consider them as engendering one another. The word “tune” has no mean-
ing apart from the human context that finds pleasure or beauty in the
ordered patterning of sound. Truth does not require a perspective that
transcends individual subjectivity but instead sees objects and perceivers as
mutually intertwined. Furthermore, Dickinson anticipates Merleau-Ponty
in implying that this subjective nature of things is grounded in our bodies:
“the fashion of the ear,” she says, “attireth that it hear in dun or fair.”
Sensory input is shaped by our brains, so that there is no objective hearing.
Or, such a hearing may be “only a divine” thing, a song that no person will
ever hear. Dickinson’s poems seem almost deliberately designed to reveal to
readers the fact that their perceptions always yield subjective truths. Like
Merleau-Ponty, she foregrounds the shared role of objects and embodied
interpreters in making meaning.
Dickinson is not simply a phenomenologist avant la lettre; a dualist
separation of consciousness from the rest of the world structures her
world-view. Nonetheless , she does query her assumptions, and she does
so in ways that anticipate phenomenology. She was not alone in this.
Indeed, materialist challenges to dualism had always been part of the
Common Sense philosophy that strongly influenced her education. For
example, as Flower and Murphey write, Thomas Reid, the founder of
Common Sense philosophy, claims that “Conceptions are neither extra-
mental universals, nor universals within the mind. Any conception consists
in some particular act of conceiving. . . . [Reid] holds that real essence is
unknowable, and that conceptions and categories are produced by experi-
ence of their social utility . . . ” (251). Dickinson may well have found
encouragement and nourishment for her emerging phenomenological
thinking in such meditations on the material nature of consciousness and
the situatedness of thought. Her meditations on the limits of dualism led
her in the dual directions of epistemology and ontology. How can we know
 Dickinson on Perception and Consciousness 191
objects out there if our perceptions are subjective? And, if our being is
corporeal, what does that say about our soul, our self? As she tries to think
through such epistemological and ontological questions in her poetry, she
sometimes uses the old terms, sometimes draws from her philosophical
milieu, and sometimes tries to invent a poetics enabling her to think
without other people’s terms altogether.
Writing in France during and after World War II, Maurice Merleau-
Ponty developed a philosophy that combined phenomenology and struc-
turalism and prepared the field for the rise of poststructuralism. He died
prematurely of a heart attack in 1961, at the age of 53, at the height of his
career, thereby losing the ability to clarify some of the misconceptions about
his ideas and work out some of the problems he himself had found in them.
He was mentor to, friends with, and at times rival of many of the most
important philosophers in France of his day: Sartre, Derrida, Lacan, Lévi-
Strauss, de Beauvoir, and others. The generation surviving him tended to
lump him in with his most important influence, Edmund Husserl, as one
more phenomenologist derailed by the search for a transcendent under-
standing of things (Carmen and Hansen 22). Indeed Merleau-Ponty was
engaged with Husserl’s phenomenology but he insisted upon some of the
same limitations in it that Heidegger and, later, the poststructuralists
observed. Above all, he emphasized, we can never gain a transcendent
perspective because, as he put it, “our reflections are carried out in the
temporal flux on the which we are trying to seize” (Phenomenology xv). In
other words, we are always in time, in the world, and no attempt to rise
above our being in the world can succeed.
One of Merleau-Ponty’s key insights was Husserl’s: consciousness is always
consciousness of something. Overturning the Cartesian model of a self
thinking independently of the world about which it thinks, Husserl developed
phenomenology as a method for gaining a transcendent knowledge of things
through close attention to them as they present themselves to us. Merleau-
Ponty fleshed out the logical consequence of Husserl’s claim, arguing that
because we are defined through our situatedness in the world, our relationship
to the world is always embodied. An example from the first chapter of
Phenomenology of Perception (1945) illustrates Merleau-Ponty’s central project
of exploring what it means for our selves to be inseparable from our bodies.
Borrowing a prompt from Sartre, he imagines a carpet, observing that the
empiricist will seek objective knowledge about it. How big is it? What is its
texture and its smell? Merleau-Ponty insists that the answers to such questions
are not objective; they are already inflected by the asker. These qualities do not
inhere in objects; the rug’s redness is determined by acts of perception:
192 NOBLE

This red patch which I see on the carpet is red only in virtue of a shadow which
lies across it, its quality is apparent only in relation to the play of light upon it,
and hence as an element in a spatial configuration. Moreover, the colour can be
said to be there only if it occupies an area of a certain size, too small an area not
being describable in these terms. Finally this red would literally not be the same
if it were not the “wooly red” of a carpet. (Phenomenology 5)
To isolate the redness in the rug as part of the metaphysical entity called
“red” is to background the texture in order to foreground color. The object
itself does not separate texture from color; it is the mind of the perceiver that
does so, and this distinction is limited, since there is a wooly red and an
acrylic red, and the mind that unifies these does so only by choosing to
disregard certain differences. All allegedly objective knowledge achieved
through particular questions is in fact situated knowledge, the product of
an interested mind. Perception is therefore best understood as a transaction
between an embodied mind and the world.
As the examples already given indicate, we are conscious of more in any
object than what our categorizing minds have made of it. That which
exceeds those categories is available to what Merleau-Ponty calls our “pre-
predicative” (also translated as “ante-predicative”) consciousness, a faculty
of awareness that registers the manifold of sense impressions before analysis
carves them up into categories. Merleau-Ponty writes:
It is sometimes the adherence of the perceived object to its context, and, as
it were, its viscosity, sometimes the presence in it of a positive indeterminate
which prevents the spatial, temporal and numerical wholes from becoming
articulated into manageable, distinct and identifiable terms. And it is this
pre-objective realm that we have to explore in ourselves if we wish to
understand sense experience. (14)
Objects are viscous; associated “positive indeterminates” are always avail-
able for our attention. Like other phenomenologists, Merleau-Ponty heu-
ristically questions “the certainties of common sense” in order to perceive
more fully these indeterminates. Husserl had called for a suspension of the
“natural attitude,” resulting in the famed phenomenological reduction.
As Merleau-Ponty describes it:
The best formulation of the reduction is probably that given by Eugen Fink,
Husserl’s assistant, when he spoke of “wonder” in the face of the world.
Reflection does not withdraw from the world towards the unity of conscious-
ness as the world’s basis; it steps back to watch the forms of transcendence fly up
like sparks from a fire; it slackens the intentional threads which attach us to the
world and thus brings them to our notice; it alone is consciousness of the world
because it reveals that world as strange and paradoxical. (Phenomenology, xv)
 Dickinson on Perception and Consciousness 193
When Merleau-Ponty imagines “slacken[ing] the intentional threads which
attach us to the world,” he is imagining unfixing the modes by which we
normally take consciousness of things. Only such unfixing makes us truly
aware of things, and as we become aware of them they become alien to us.
Our closest world becomes “strange and paradoxical” because we lose our
usual sense of how to be conscious of it. When one “steps back” into the
appropriate attitude of “wonder,” one can see “forms of transcendence
[that] fly up like sparks from a fire.” Perhaps what Merleau-Ponty means
by this oft-quoted, poetic, but vague phrase is that the reduction reveals in
the world new forms that sparkle and delight us with wonder at the richness
of what we thought we knew. The question of whether or not phenomen-
ology could yield a “transcendental subjectivity” was hotly debated. Husserl
thought it could. Merleau-Ponty seems to be seeking a middle ground here,
invoking “forms of transcendence” that fly up (but possibly disappear, like
sparks). He imagines, perhaps, a transcendence of conventional wisdom,
but one that is not the attainment of essential knowledge, as Husserl had
claimed.
Emily Dickinson anticipated and thought subtly about this core phe-
nomenological conviction that objects always exist and have meaning in
relation to their contexts and perceivers, and that any quest for true vision
must begin by questioning assumptions. The much-discussed poem
“Perception of an object costs” announces its quite Merleau-Pontian subject
in the first line and follows a logic similar to his, concluding that an attitude
of wonder accompanies a defamiliarized and widened perception.
Perception of an object costs
Precise the Object’s loss –
Perception in itself a Gain
Replying to it’s Price –
The Object absolute – is nought –
Perception sets it fair
And then upbraids a Perfectness
That situates so far – (Fr1103A).
This poem has been interpreted through the lenses of Humean skepticism
and Kantian critique of the thing-in-itself, but the idea that “perception of
an object” costs “the object’s loss” can also be taken phenomenologically.
An act of perception is always situated, and unless the viewer happens to be
a phenomenologist – suspending her natural attitude towards perception –
she will only take consciousness of a limited sampling of the object’s
multiple aspects. There are multiple losses in this transaction. First, the
194 NOBLE

object is no longer an independent other “object”; it becomes part of the

subject’s consciousness. Second, the viewing subject loses all that the object
could be for her insofar she excises from the object its abundant richness,
which exists for her only in her pre-predicative consciousness. And third,
the object itself loses something in this transaction. While its viscosity
remains always a part of it, that amplitude may not be respected as the
perceiver makes use of the object for her own purposes. However,
Dickinson also notes that perceivers and objects both “gain” in some
respects in these transactions: perceivers gain a comprehensible and usable
object and both parties “gain” an attachment to the other.
Dickinson situates this discussion in an economic discourse. The “cost” of
perception is measured in “precise” terms of “gains,” “losses,” and “prices.”
Note, however, that the gain does not “repay” the price; it “replies” to it. The
term “reply” moves the “gains” out of the realm of dollars and into that of
intersubjective communication: the “gain” involves a personalization of a
relationship that otherwise had been one of detachment. The “object” in this
poem remains abstract, but if we illustrate it with the oriole from “To hear an
oriole sing,” we can appreciate how the listener might create an attachment.
Upon hearing an oriole, she thinks, “Ah! An oriole”! This “perception of” the
bird replaces its object nature with an intersubjectivity that may make her life
feel rich, connected, and also powerful. However, that perception inevitably
sacrifices the full otherness of the bird – this is no longer potentially an angel,
a magical creature, nor anything else; it is “just an oriole.” There are gains and
losses for the oriole, too. First off, the bird does not know itself as “an oriole”
at all. To be “an oriole” is to be subjected to a category of the other’s making
that has nothing to do with the oriole’s interest in bugs, breezes, mating, and
other aspects of oriole-nature. The fullness of the oriole’s being is infinite and
is not compatible with its status as the object of someone else’s act of
perception. That said, there may be gains for the bird, too. Being perceived
puts it, too, in relationship. Its vocalization has been turned into a “song” that
is prized by the perceiver. Unlike all the other birds, this bird has been singled
out and perhaps even loved.
The second stanza also aligns with phenomenology. Dickinson and
Merleau-Ponty agree that “The Object absolute, is nought,” that objects
have meaning only in relationships to perceivers. All efforts to define objects
in isolation are doomed because they ignore the viscosity of objects and so
are always fictitious. To posit a metaphysical essence is to introduce a
perspective “so far” from the perceiver that it is effectively lost. We may
long to see things as they really are but we never have access to this kind of
“perfectness” in the world, nor to objective truth.
 Dickinson on Perception and Consciousness 195
Learning the lesson of a fully contextualized truth opens up many
possibilities for liberated perception. In the poem “‘Nature’ is what We
see – ,” the quotation marks around “Nature” indicate irony regarding
conventional ways of ordering and containing the outer world (Fr721B.
Common wisdom has it that nature is things like hills, afternoons, squirrels,
eclipses, bees. But the word “Nay” indicates that these are insufficient ways
of understanding. “Nature” names only objects, whereas Nature without the
question marks exceeds all of these categories. The final stanza consolidates
this point. Truly understood, Nature exceeds the language that shapes our
conventional perceptions; it is “what We know – / But have no Art to
say –.” Names create for us the objects that we perceive “out there,” but we
have a prelinguistic “know[ing]” of the totality that exceeds these categories.
Conventional “see[ing]” and “hear[ing]” are insufficient because they excise
all of the pre-predicative possibilities from consciousness. To return to an
earlier example: Nature is all the ways that the “red” in the carpet is related
to shadows and textures and sounds and smells and all the many ways that it
exceeds the simple “red” that our situated perception imposes on it. Our
wisdom – our understanding achieved through categorizing perception – is
“impotent” compared to the fullness of the terrain on which it acts. When
we credit our “knowing,” the understanding that includes the pre-
predicative phenomena within our field of vision, the result is an invigo-
rated perception.
Dickinson’s awareness of these limits of language anticipates one of
Merleau-Ponty’s central ideas about language:
It is the office of language to cause essences to exist in a state of separation
which is in fact merely apparent, since through language they still rest on the
ante-predicative life of consciousness. In the silence of primary consciousness
can be seen appearing not only what words mean, but also what things mean:
the core of primary meaning round which the acts of naming and expression
take shape. (Phenomenology, xvii)

The separations in nature denoted by words are “merely apparent.”

Language falsely separates parts from one another, belying our conscious-
ness of the totality behind these apparent separations. Dickinson’s “Nature”
can be read as saying something similar. In using large and quite different
abstract words to denote what Nature (without question marks) is –
Heaven, Harmony, Sincerity – she suggests that Nature has a comprehen-
sible core of primary meaning that is accessible to perception but unnam-
able. As Heaven, it is totality. As Harmony, it is a beautifully ordered
working together of many parts. As Sincerity, nature is exactly what it is.
196 NOBLE

The categories “hill,” “afternoon,” “squirrel,” and “bee” however, are not
“Sincere.” They erroneously separate into parts entities that are actual parts
of a harmonious gestalt.
The phenomenological attitude, as described in “Nature is what we hear,”
opens a startling and vastly expanded perspective on the world. Critics such as
Jerome Loving have misread poems like “Nature” and “They called me to the
Window, for” as expressing despair over her inability to capture and fix the
flux of totality (Fr721, Fr589). I would say that the attitude is more one of
wonder achieved through invigorated perception than angst. Indeed, the
wonder of a phenomenological attitude may be the essential ingredient of
artistic vision, as “They called me to the Window, for” suggests.
They called me to the Window, for
“’Twas Sunset” – Some one said –
I only saw a Sapphire Farm –
And just a Single Herd –
Of Opal Cattle – feeding far
Opon so vain a Hill . . . . (Fr589)
In this gorgeous poem, a world of startling imagination, a world of opal
cattle, sapphire farms, Mediterranean seas with huge boats floating exists in
the pre-predicative reality behind and below language. Objectivists see only a
“Sunset,” but the poet – gifted with perception of relationships and subtleties
in the perceptual terrain – sees far more in the spectacles the world affords.
Once again, the quotation marks indicate irony, here in the word “only,”
which introduces a tone of false naiveté. The word reverses convention:
normally when people call us to see something wonderful, we lament that
we can’t see it, but “only” see a mundane reality. But here it is the notion of
“sunset” that is merely mundane, while the artist’s vision is saturated by
jewels and foreign seas. The spectacle is constantly changing and dissolving;
while the collapse of metaphysical certainty implicit in a statement like this
one may well lie at the heart of Dickinson’s renowned misery, is despair
thematized here? Does the poem not display instead wonder at the power of
imagination and a critique of the artistically neutering effects of words like
“sunset,” which close inquiry and deny phenonemological viscosity? The
shaping power of imagination is reinforced by the notion that the hill outside
“dissolved.” It didn’t, of course, but that is what the speaker’s brain made of
what her senses reported to her.
“They called me to the Window, for” not only encapsulates the nature of
artistic vision for Dickinson, but it is also a statement of what art can do:
reveal the spectacular visions afforded by unexpected points of view. In this
 Dickinson on Perception and Consciousness 197
respect, she accords with Merleau-Ponty, who claims that artists are in tune
with the viscosity of objects and thus see more fully than others. Their
artworks make available to others the fullness of the world. In doing so, they
create a kind of rebirth for the rest of us:
Art is not imitation, nor is it something manufactured according to the
wishes of instinct or good taste. It is a process of expressing. Just as the
function of words is to name – that is, to grasp the nature of what appears to
us in a confused way and to place it before us as a recognizable object – so it is
up to the painter, said Gasquet, to “objectify,” “project,” and “arrest.” . . .
Forgetting the viscous, equivocal appearances, we [other people] go through
them straight to the things they present. The painter recaptures and converts
into visible objects what would, without him, remain walled up in the
separate life of each consciousness: the vibration of appearances which is
the cradle of things. Only one emotion is possible for this painter
[Cézanne] – the feeling of strangeness – and only one lyricism – that of
the continual rebirth of existence. (“Cézanne” 281)

In seeing fully, the artist experiences and induces a “strangeness” that is highly
generative. The artist understands that “the vibration of appearances . . . is the
cradle of things”; newness enters the world when art helps us re-perceive what
we see, redrawing outlines, revealing otherwise unrecognized relationships,
and so forth. Dickinson is saying something similar in “’Nature’” and “They
called me to the Window, for” in which the familiar is estranged, revealing
flux and flow (“vibration”) where others see fixity – one fantastic image flows
into another and then dissolves. Dickinson describes something like this
capacity for the “continual rebirth of existence” in her images of “the show-
man” revealing scene after scene of wonder.
Dickinson shares with Merleau-Ponty a sense of the value of an artist’s
singular perspective. She points out that she herself sees “New Englandly”
and invites others to consider the possibilities for rebirth if they see from her
perspective, or truly from their own (Fr256). But art does not simply
describe an individual point of view; it inspires viewers to revalue their
own points of view. Dickinson says that a poet is one who “Distills amazing
sense / From Ordinary Meanings – / And Attar so immense // From the
familiar species / That perished by the Door – / We wonder it was not
Ourselves / Arrested it – before –” (Fr446). People “see through” these
wonders all the time but somehow fail to see them. The artist sees with
complexity and openness, while conventional acts of perception foreclose
complexity. It is a paradox, this creation of something “immense” through
“distill[ation],” a “sense” that in “amazing” us challenges what seems like
sense. Its effect is, ideally, to render viewers dissatisfied with their own
198 NOBLE

limited perceptions. In this way, the poet “Entitles Us – by Contrast – / To

ceaseless Poverty,” stripping from us our certainty though entitling us to
wonder.
Dickinson anticipates a phenomenological aesthetic more particularly in
striving to create an aesthetic experience. As Jane Eberwein writes, “Unlike
the popular poets of her day who concentrated on ‘ordinary Meanings’
(narrative and moral), she would release the ‘amazing sense’ of physical-
psychological sensation (a feeling like Sue’s shivering before the fire). And
she would do so by disclosing or uncovering resources available to anyone but
appreciated by few” (138). The idea of finding amazing sense in familiar
species might suggest that Dickinson idealizes an artistry that reports tran-
scendent truths. But Dickinson avoids such an aesthetic, instead subjecting
readers to the experience of an aesthetic that deliberately and systematically
shines all conventional meanings through a prism, as it were, dispersing
and fragmenting unities that are merely apparent and revealing the multiple
colors and surprises within them (Weisbuch 197). Indeed, Dickinson
finds fault with art that looks through things in order to communicate
the transcendent truths inhering in them, arguing instead for an experience
that “prisms” ordinary things, revealing in them complexities they had not
realized were there. Dickinson’s “Dare you see a Soul at the ‘White Heat’?”
exemplifies her difference from metaphysical art, at the same time modeling
her artistic ideal, a perception-changing experience (Fr401C). The poem
suggests the bodily nature of consciousness, which is both situated and
engaged in the world outside the self. It concurs with Merleau-Ponty’s
claim that “There can be no consciousness that is not sustained by its
primordial involvement in life and by the manner of this involvement”
(“Cézanne” 288).
“Dare you see” is a variation on the theme of Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow’s poem “The Village Blacksmith,” a poem “Dare you see”
both commends for its imagery and implicitly disparages for its insincere
assumption of transcendent knowledge. Dickinson counterposes her phe-
nomenological poem to his more metaphysical one. “The Village
Blacksmith” was first published in 1841 and as Loeffelholz, Manheim, and
St. Armand concur, it is almost surely a source for Dickinson’s 1862 poem
(as her phrase “Least Village, boasts it’s Blacksmith” suggests). Both poems
imagine looking through a door to watch a blacksmith superheating and
working metal, and both use that process to symbolize the way life’s blows
refine our souls. The general idea in both poems is similar: life hammers
blows on us, but we are improved by this suffering and readied for a future
life without suffering.
 Dickinson on Perception and Consciousness 199
An image that evidently caught Dickinson’s imagination appears in
Longfellow’s fourth stanza, where a viewer looks through a door at the
flames of the forge.
And children coming home from school
Look in at the open door;
They love to see the flaming forge,
And hear the bellows roar,
And catch the burning sparks that fly
Like chaff from a threshing floor. (100)
Here, Longfellow offers a comforting affirmation of Victorian values. Of
course, literally, it would be fun to watch such dazzling activity, but the
children’s pleasure also has a symbolic meaning from a transcendent point
of view that is less fun. The image alludes to the Bible, when John the
Baptist refers to the one “that cometh after me . . . whose fan is in his hand,
and he will thoroughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner;
but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire” (Matthew 3:12).
Symbolically, Longfellow’s children are happy to hear the roar of the fan
and see this purging of sinners because it suggests cosmic justice; evil-doers
get their just punishment, the good are rewarded for their hard work, and
the universe is meaningful and just. We do not suffer in vain.
Longfellow reiterates this and other comforting moralities throughout
the poem. In his vision of cosmic justice, suffering is so amply rewarded that
it is easily absorbed. The blacksmith has lost his deceased wife, but he is
comforted by the fact that she is now in heaven, singing in paradise, just as
their daughter is now singing in the village choir. Life deals us painful blows,
but the poem suggests that they are not too bad, and happily we can make
our own fortunes if we will pick up our hammers and faithfully perform the
tasks that face us in our own sphere. And it does not appear especially
difficult to do that:
Each morning sees some task begin,
Each evening sees it close;
Something attempted, something done,
Has earned a night’s repose.
To “earn” a “night’s repose,” all we need to do is complete the “something”
life presents to us. Merit is available and relatively painless to those who do
their duty. How comforting to believe that our suffering makes sense, that
our efforts will be rewarded.
Dickinson implicitly spurns the Sunday-school moralities she finds in
Longfellow’s poem for being oblivious to the suffering that his system too
200 NOBLE

easily absorbs. Her poem focuses not on the blacksmith but on the “impa-
tient ore,” being burned up and beaten. Where children “look in the open
door” in Longfellow’s poem, Dickinson gives a more tense and uncomfort-
able effect with the word “crouch.” While Longfellow says that children
“love” to see blacksmithing, Dickinson demands “Dare you see?” The
spectacle of a soul being super-heated, beaten, and refined to the very
limit of endurance – or worse, enduring eternal retribution – is almost
too much for our eyes. The poem does not challenge Longfellow’s impli-
cation that this rigorous trying process refines the soul, but it does reject its
complacency. In Dickinson’s poem, the soul’s victory is “unannointed,” an
unholy quest for a purification outside the bounds of conventional religious
belief that structure Longfellow’s perception. We can almost hear
Dickinson’s poem mocking the shallowness of Longfellow’s line “Thanks,
thanks to thee, my worthy friend, / For the lesson thou hast taught!” The
lesson of “The Village Blacksmith” is that we must do our duty, swing our
hammers to the work before us and submit to God; “Dare you see,” by
contrast, creates an experience of selves as metal under the blacksmith’s
hammer, terrifyingly burned and beaten until they have been refined into a
desired shape.
Part of what Dickinson rejects in art like “The Village Blacksmith” is its
detachment from the suffering it observes; the children literally stand out-
side, looking in. Its narrator “sees through” the many things he describes in
order to articulate the unified worldview and afterlife that they symbolize.
The descriptions in the poem seem to have been conjured up for the
purpose of communicating a familiar ideology. In other words, ideology
shapes perception. Do we really see the blacksmith? Longfellow imagines
his “mighty man” with clichéd muscles as “strong as iron bands.” The sweat
on his brow is “honest sweat,” a phrase suggesting that Longfellow has
brought that sweat to his mind more in order to communicate the freedom
and self-esteem that hard workers enjoy than to truly describe what he is
seeing. Longfellow’s perception of the blacksmith is determined by his
capitalist preconception.
I get the feeling that Dickinson’s poem began with actual blacksmithing.
Her short poem focuses upon the intense heat of iron and the changes in
color it undergoes during the forging process. The poem offers precise, fresh
details in rapid succession. The poem describes metal at the “white heat”:
“Red – is the Fire’s common tint – / But when the vivid Ore // Has
vanquished Flame’s conditions – / It quivers from the Forge / Without a
color . . . .” This passage features close observation of the ore involved in
blacksmithing. Accurate first-person reporting of direct experience is the
 Dickinson on Perception and Consciousness 201
heart of a phenomenological poem. We see and feel the image. Longfellow
has a moral story to tell; Dickinson has an experience to depict. His poem is
metaphysical – detached; hers is phenomenological – materially engaged. It
is grounded both in the world it portrays and in the imagination and body
of its reader. Her onlooker is “within the door,” engaged with the world
described. She wants us to avoid looking through the agony that the poem
depicts to its promised reward, which is a vision no one can faithfully report.
An art that looks through the world will never understand that the “vibra-
tions of appearances is the cradle of things.”
In this poem, Dickinson’s reflections upon perception (dare you see) are
inextricable from reflections on ontology (it is about the making of the
soul). In both cases, the key lies in the embodied nature of the individual. Its
ontology is similar to – though not identical to – the ontology that Merleau-
Ponty lays out in Phenomenology of Perception. His ontology centers upon
the role of the body in making the self. To get at what he means, he
describes the phenomenon of phantom limbs, suggesting that in such
cases the absent limb may continue to be felt because the world in which
that limb was meaningful persists. For example, perception of a piano
would cause in an amputee the sensation of having an arm or hand because
that is what pianos are for. Our understanding of things is inseparable from
the bodies for which they are meaningful, “sedimented,” he says, into our
bodies through habit, and our understanding of ourselves is inseparable
from the world that is the terrain in which we act. (Recent studies in
consciousness and neurology, such as those by Gallagher and Zahavi, and
Varela, confirm his hypothesis.)
What it is in us which refuses mutilation and disablement is an I committed
to a certain physical and inter-human world, who continues to tend towards
his world despite handicaps and amputations. . . . To have a phantom arm is
to remain open to all the actions of which the arm alone is capable; it is to
retain the practical field which one enjoyed before mutilation. The body is
the vehicle of being in the world, and having a body is, for a living creature,
to be intervolved in a definite environment, to identify oneself with certain
projects and be continually committed to them. (Phenomenology 94)

Selfhood is inextricable from the world in which the self acts.

Dickinson shares with Merleau-Ponty the sense of “an I committed to a
certain physical and inter-human world,” though with many questions
about what that means. She invokes such an ontology in “Dare you see”
in emphasizing the material conditions of soul-making and thereby encour-
aging us to see the soul in relation to its environment, not as something
202 NOBLE

separate. How can a finished ironwork be understood apart from the process
of its making? It bears hammer marks, it is a strong and shaped object; as
such it is inconceivable apart from the beating, tempering, and shaping that
made it. The same is true of the soul. It exists through the interactions the
person has had with the world. Thus, the poem repudiates the distinction of
inner and outer; it tells us to “stand within,” to abjure separations of all
sorts. Do not contemplate life from the outside, it says; if you want to
understand life, get inside and feel it. If you want to understand your soul,
experience its worldliness. It is created through engagements with the world
and therefore understood not despite these but through them.
The poem is not, however, a straightforward exposition of things to come
in twentieth-century phenomenology. It claims that the beating of the
metal symbolizes “the finer Forge / That soundless tugs – within.” This
phrase implies a Husserlian willingness to bracket the worldly dimensions of
being in order to examine the emergence of the soul – an “inner” process of
soul-making. But the poem as a whole has abjured such bracketing. It
makes it difficult to imagine an inner striving in the absence of the world as a
field of engagement. The final stanza imagines a soul undergoing intense
struggle – but over what? What could be the soul’s struggles apart from
material concerns – desire, frustration, anger, and other emotions directed
at the world? The poem does want to imagine a soul completely detached
from the world; it imagines a process of perfecting a soul so intense that
when it is complete, the soul is “light” – completely nonmaterial and
perfect. It repudiates the material forge in which it was created, eschewing
materiality as it enjoys transcendental subjectivity. It is as though Dickinson
were committed here to a noncorporeal ontology – such as her Calvinist
culture promulgated – and is trying to understand it in light of challenges
posed by her phenomenological bent. But even the notion of the soul as
“light” bears signs of some of the challenges of phenomenology to
Dickinson’s ontological heritage. Most of the poem focuses upon the
making of the soul in a flaming forge. The “light” that results at the end
is still tied to the materiality of the opening of the poem – whether it is
associated with the light of the fire or the light emitted by the super-heated
ore itself, the light is still a trace of the materiality of the soul’s making.
Dickinson may be trying to think of an entity created through material
engagements that eventually ceases to be defined by that process, but it is
difficult. Her language mirrors that fact.
As the ambivalence of these last lines indicates, Dickinson does
not straightforwardly embrace a material and intersubjective soul as
Merleau-Ponty does. Her ingrained Puritan dualism clashes with her
 Dickinson on Perception and Consciousness 203
phenomenological meditations. She imagined a non-intersubjective self
when she mused, “On a Columnar Self – / How ample to rely –” (Fr740);
however, she also envisioned a decentered, intersubjective self in poems
like “Dare you see.”
Dickinson consistently imagines and wonders about her own stable,
coherent, and singular soul, never fully abandoning a dualistic outlook
and consistently expressing faith in immortality. But that faith repeatedly
encountered phenomenological challenges. Consider the following:
There is a solitude of space
A solitude of sea
A solitude of Death, but these
Society shall be
Compared with that profounder site
That polar privacy
A soul admitted to itself – (Fr1696)
The core of this poem is its arch-Cartesian image of a soul that will only be
“admitted to itself” in the future, separated from everything else and
conscious only of itself. The solitudes of space, sea, and death will seem
like society in comparison with a self invited only to visit itself, admitted to
no other homes but its own. This poem expresses the terrible loneliness of
Calvinist cosmology, with its vision of the absolute coherence and aloneness
of the soul. Dickinson contemplates with terror what may well be her
future, if New England preachers are right.
However, implicit in this poem is an intersubjectivity that challenges
this Calvinist ontology. The soul in this poem is isolated only in the
future that the poem fears. The present presumably consists of a soul that
admits and is admitted to others. At present, the soul attaches to all kinds
of society, insofar as “society” is the foil helping us understand what the
future will not be. Bearing in mind that the central image is poised
against a more familiar, intersubjective, earthly entity helps us under-
stand and feel the terrifying nature of existence in this poem. If we
imagine a soul that has been created through engagements in the material
world, then a disembodied existence will strip it of everything that gives
it meaning. In that case, the soul will be nothing but an infinite and
unending yearning, a yawning vacancy, an instinct to connect eternally
deprived of any object – indeed a devastating polar privacy. Recall
Husserl’s statement that consciousness is consciousness of something.
Dickinson imagines such a consciousness, but with no object of which to
be conscious.
204 NOBLE

Another poetic thought experiment entertains the possibility that this

Calvinist ontology is wrong. The late poem “The Spirit lasts – but in what
mode –,” establishes the Merleau-Pontian notion that a soul considered apart
from the body is unimaginable and uses that conviction to challenge conven-
tional Christianity (Fr1627B). Immortality is true: “the spirit lasts,” the poem
opens. But “in what mode”? There’s the rub. The spirit only “furnishes”
through the body. Can we possibly conceive of the essence of “music” apart
from the violin on which it is played? Can we conceive of a “tide” apart from
the sea that the tide moves? No. By analogy, the body is that which the spirit
animates, and the spirit is seen only in what the body does; how then can we
separate body and spirit? As Merleau-Ponty claims, the separation of such
intertwined entities is an illusion created by the objectivity-seeking mind.
However, unlike Merleau-Ponty, Dickinson remains committed to the
idea of immortality, and the poem – even more vividly than “Dare you see”
and “There is a solitude” –creates an experience of the supreme difficulty of
reconciling the anti-dualism of its opening with that abiding conviction.
This challenge is evident in the absence of clarifying antecedents for the
pronouns in the following murky lines: “Does that know – now – or does it
cease – / That which to this is done, / Resuming at a mutual date / With
every future one?” These lines are, perhaps, with difficulty, trying to
imagine the future state of a spirit that has “lasted” and has not yet been
reunited with its body. What will that be like, she wonders. Will the soul be
able to “know” without its agent of knowing, the body? Or, will it cease
knowing until it is reunited with its body, at which point knowing will
“resume”? In the interim, if the soul is not knowing, how will it know it
exists? Can it be said to exist if it does not know it exists? These lines try to
think about the “finite infinity” of Calvinist theology and record the failure
to do so. If the soul is intersubjective, conscious of things, defining itself
through knowing things outside itself, then there is no way to imagine it in
the absence of the body.
This is more or less the conclusion of “No rack can torture me,” one of
Dickinson’s most Merleau-Pontian ontological explorations (Fr649).
Admittedly, the opening is as dualistic a statement as one could hope to
find: “No rack can torture me / My soul is at liberty.” This affirmation
echoes many a religious martyr – for example, Uncle Tom, who says as he is
dying from Simon Legree’s flogging: “He an’t done me no real harm, – only
opened the gate of the kingdom for me” (Stowe 591). Independent of the
body is a soul that cannot be hurt with implements of torture. Dualism
implies that if one really needs to escape torture, one can do so by choosing
death. This is the liberty claimed in this poem.
 Dickinson on Perception and Consciousness 205
The poem opens with the confident Christian assertion that the soul is
stronger than the body and outlasts it. However, the bulk of the poem
registers the insufficiency of this doctrine. That there is a “bolder” bone
knitting “Behind this mortal Bone” graphically demonstrates the limits of
Cartesian ontology in that it is a corporeal metaphor marshaled to help us
understand the soul – the very entity that is deemed antithetical to the body.
The soul is like a superior body, with all the benefits of sensual being
(conceivability) without the detriments (vulnerability to torture, for exam-
ple). Impervious to the cruelties of the merely human realm, this soul can
free itself at will by leaving the body behind, just as an eagle leaves its nest
behind. But understood in a bodily metaphor, this notion of soul simply
does not make sense.
The ending of the poem further probes the insufficiencies of this dualism.
First, as though in response to the insufficiency of its dualist framework, the
poem introduces a third term: “thyself.” What is the relation of the “self” to
the soul and the body? Perhaps it is a term for the body ensouled – or the
soul embodied. The “bolder” bone metaphor was insufficient; perhaps the
“self” is a better way to conceive of the relation between body and soul.
Perhaps the “self” is a term acknowledging the inseparability of body and
soul (like tides/seas and tunes/violins), and it is the body-self that opposes
the suicidal liberation of the soul-self, rejecting the possibility of freedom in
suicide and in voluntary submission to torture. “The self” cannot dissociate
itself from torture any more than the tide can dissociate itself from the sea.
The poem goes on to offer a subtle play on Hamlet’s “To be or not to be”
soliloquy to cement this inseparability. Like “No rack,” this famous solilo-
quy insists that anyone can evade suffering through suicide – except that
“conscience does make cowards of us all.” Dickinson revises: “Captivity is
Consciousness.” We would all choose the freedom of suicide except for
consciousness. Dickinson implies that it is less the fear of punishment in the
undiscovered country that prevents our divesting of our bodies than the fear
that we will never attain that country. Our bodies give us consciousness, and
how can “we” exist apart from our consciousness? A body in captivity allows
for consciousness; a body at liberty allows for consciousness. But what about
a self with no body? The “self” cannot be conscious without the body. The
soul may be impervious to physical suffering, but we can never be confident
that it will outlast the collapse of consciousness any more than a tune can
outlast its violin. Or perhaps even more troubling is the polar privacy of an
eternity of disembodied consciousness that we have already seen.
For Dickinson, this is one of the limits of thought she wants to probe.
She is a thinker who goes “Out opon Circumference / Beyond the Dip
206 NOBLE

of Bell –” which is to say she mentally travels to the limits of things and
wants to see beyond them (Fr633). In this case, she takes the relationship
between body and soul as far as she can imagine it, and then she wonders
and tries to look beyond the limit she has reached. The result of such
thought experiments is what I have been calling an “invigorated percep-
tion.” We may not have a more secure grasp on transcendent truths, but we
see more fully and richly the things we know. Invigorated perception reveals
the limits of conventional knowledge and the greater possibility within what
we thought we knew. Things exist in contexts, in webs tying them to
humans who care about them and also to countless other attachments. To
awaken to the complexity of what we know and to faithfully report it is in
some way to create “the cradle of things.” In this sense Dickinson shares
Merleau-Ponty’s view that “there is only one lyricism – that of the continual
rebirth of existence.”
 chapter 11

The Infinite in Person: Levinas and Dickinson

Megan Craig

1.
Depth takes multiple forms in Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Reading her, one
moves from word to word, line to line, only to find oneself suddenly
submerged, falling, or flying. The depth might open as “a Pit,” “a sea,” “a
grave,” or “Paradise,” “Mountains,” “Sunrise,” or “Sky.” The world contains
many kinds of expanses, and Dickinson is a thinker of myriad spaces includ-
ing the desert, the ocean, a cup, a daisy, the mind, and the illuminated space
of a “dazzled” face:
Me – Come! My dazzled face
In such a shining place! (Fr389)
Different spaces require novel forms of navigation. It will be one thing to
wade through a sea of graves, another to grope up a mountain, and yet
something else to “Come!” into a “shining place.” Through multiple forms
of movement (standing, falling, crawling, kneeling, circling) and despite
all the possibilities for spaces opening up and closing in around us,
Dickinson expresses a curious, fragile hope. It is the hope found in space
being unstable, ambiguous, and open. No place is secure or final, and
Dickinson chronicles the effort required to keep moving through uncharted
territory, to rise to the next day and acclimate to the next season.
For Dickinson all things tend toward openness, both terrifying
and wondrous. Her poems pivot from the spaces she inhabits to spaces
that inhabit her, illustrating a precarious differentiation between inside
and outside. Sometimes the world seeps in gently, eroding the shores of
the self:
So soft opon the Scene
The Act of evening fell
We felt how neighborly a thing
Was the Invisible (Fr1225)

207
208 CRAIG

Sometimes the world opens majestically, “magic Perpendiculars / Ascending,

though terrene – ” (Fr1474). Yet other times, the world intercedes violently:
I dared not meet the Daffodils –
For Fear their Yellow Gown
Would pierce me with a fashion
So foreign to my own – (Fr347)
In each case something familiar (evening, trees, a flower) begins, compounds,
reverberates, and ultimately dismantles the poet’s sense of identity or place.
Every surface seems pricked with a thousand glimmering holes. They are
small; they accumulate. This is not the heroic, destabilizing all-at-once
romance of the sublime. It is a much more humble, minimal variety of
displacement, transcendence, and mystery Dickinson expresses: towering
blades of grass, dangerous shards of frost, the tragic death of a bee who
cannot say “Alas!”
To be human in Dickinson’s poems is to be radically open. The self she
describes, however confined, is always subject to the invasion of something
exterior, as if to be a self is to be a fluid membrane or a bundle of nerves.
There is no consolation or possibility of flight from an impinging world.
Instead of describing subjects who merely dwell in or enter physical places,
Dickinson’s subjects become the objects of spaces that have inhabited them.
Every space she describes is animated and precarious – potentially terrifying
and potentially transformative.
Read in light of the twentieth-century philosopher Emmanuel Levinas,
Dickinson’s concern with the displaced subject and the intrigue of
the intimate come into relief as philosophically prescient and ethically
urgent. Both Levinas and Dickinson can be read as reacting against the
Enlightenment’s faith in the heroic triumph of human reason and against
Romanticism’s heady optimism in passion and nature.1 Theirs is a darker,
more modest, and sober thought. Dickinson wrote the bulk of her poetry
from the confines of her Amherst room, churning out just over seven
hundred of her nearly eighteen hundred poems between 1861 and 1865, in
the midst of the Civil War. Levinas’s early philosophical thought issued
from the imposed captivity of a German labor camp in the years between
1940 and 1945, in the midst of World War II. Although neither of them
make war an explicit theme of their work, their thought nonetheless bears

1
Richard Sewall argues that Dickinson is not a romantic or metaphysical poet: “Her more precarious
stance, her more self-conscious, detailed, and poignant exploration of the dark interior, her distant
and often paradoxical God, set her apart from these poets and made for a different rhythm and
language” (708).
 The Infinite in Person: Levinas and Dickinson 209
indelible traces of violence and rupture. Interruption becomes a critical
subject of their work and a dominant feature of the very syntax of their
writing – a stuttering, halting verse or prose made visceral in Dickinson’s
dashes and in Levinas’s jarring grammar.
Dickinson and Levinas are thinkers of the human and the mere. Both
describe the infinite varieties of space we find ourselves subject to and the
essential ambiguity of space definitive of the human condition. To be human
is to be capable of feeling displaced, to be opened or knocked out of phase.
For Dickinson this means that the “self” is a precarious achievement, prone to
disappearance. For Levinas this means the “subject,” never stable, issues out
of a core of vulnerability. For both of them, the spaces we inhabit are
populated with depths exceeding consciousness, and consciousness itself is
a space exceeding subjectivity. Levinas helps us understand the ethical
implications of Dickinson’s poetry: the value of the mere, the effort required
to turn or to prance, to stand in the sunrise and rise to the day. At the same
time, Levinas helps illuminate a surprisingly postmodern notion of subjec-
tivity underpinning Dickinson’s poems. The self is ever opening and moving
toward something other than the self – transcending toward the world.

2.
Emmanuel Levinas is among the most influential continental philosophers
of the twentieth century, but above all, he is known as the philosopher
who restored ethics to the center of philosophical debate. His two major
works, Totality and Infinity (1965) and Otherwise Than Being or Beyond
Essence (1976), revolve around a complicated set of concerns with subjec-
tivity, temporality, and language. Most of all, however, they question the
possibility of ethics in the wake of the Holocaust. The opening lines of
Totality and Infinity make this clear: “Everyone will readily agree that it is of
the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality”
(Totality 21). Levinas’s central insight is that if ethics is to be meaningful, it
has to be meaningful in the face of brutal realities: in the wake of the war,
everything is open to question.2 Securing ethical meaning entails a radical
shift in what the term “ethics” means – a transition from a notion of ethics
as a codified system, a Kantian “categorical imperative,” or set of discrete

2
Richard Bernstein describes Levinas’s realization that “we must now give up”. . . “the [Kantian] idea of
‘reconciliation’, the ‘promise’ – being worthy of ‘the Happy End . . . . The phenomenon of Auschwitz
demands (if we are not duped by morality) that we conceive of ‘the moral law independently of the
Happy End’” (256).
210 CRAIG

rules, towards a notion of ethics as individual and incremental response

and responsibility. Levinas calls this “ethics without ethical system” (Is it
Righteous to Be? 81) and relates it to the ever-open, interruptive surplus of
questions over answers, infinity over totality. The war demonstrated the
failure of moral maxims to translate into ethical acts. Levinas separates ethics
from laws and insists upon the daily, hourly, work of response and respon-
sibility to the “particular and the personal” (Totality 26), an unrelenting
attention to what he describes as “the gravity of the everyday” (Righteous
47). There is no way of generalizing such an ethics into a theme. Instead,
every instance of ethical response is unique, requiring the reconfiguration of
everything one thought one had known memorized, or practiced before.
Three deceptively mundane terms – other, face, and responsibility – form
the core of Levinas’s ethical philosophy. Totality and Infinity stresses the
priority of the other, the dramatic (traumatic) interruption of the egoistic
self occasioned by the exposure to an other’s face, and the infinite respon-
sibility incumbent on us to respond to the call of others. Otherwise Than
Being or Beyond Essence intensifies these themes and places new emphasis on
the sensitivity and vulnerability of the subject – her flesh and blood
exposure to the world. The later text also reflects an aesthetic concern
with how to write ethically about ethics. If ethics evades thematization,
how does one write a text that refuses the closure Levinas associates with
comprehension, understanding, and knowledge?
In seeking to express his ethics of infinite opening in writing that is,
itself, radically open, Levinas produces texts resistant to facile compre-
hension or restatement. The dominant features of his late prose include
compounding repetitions and an obsessive avoidance of the copula.
Alphonso Lingis, who translated Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence
from the original French into English, noted the unique challenges posed
by Levinas’s acrobatic grammar, explaining “[Levinas’s] thought succeeds
in formulating itself without being set forth in predicative assertions”
(Otherwise xxxviii). The interruption Levinas describes as characteristic of
subjectivity becomes performative in texts that force their readers to
navigate without closure, to read in the absence of a definitive theme.
The distinctive quality of Levinas’s prose has caused interpreters signifi-
cant frustration and inspired Derrida to provide the following description
of Levinas’s nonlinear, nearly poetic, argumentation: “It proceeds with
the infinite insistence of waves on a beach: return and repetition, always
the same wave against the same shore, in which, however, as each return
recapitulates itself, it also infinitely renews and enriches itself” (Writing
and Difference 312, n. 7).
 The Infinite in Person: Levinas and Dickinson 211
The rupture Levinas conceives at the heart of the subject and enacts as a
method of writing resonates concretely with his own historical situation: that
of a Jewish prisoner whose life was irrevocably interrupted by the Second
World War. Levinas began writing his first published book, Existence and
Existents, while in captivity as Jewish prisoner of war in the years between 1940
and 1945. This early text introduced several animating concerns: questions
about the disruption and discontinuity of time, about what it means to live in
the margins of the living and the dead, and the possibilities for hope under
such circumstances. In captivity, Levinas experienced “the distinction . . .
between liberation and the mere thought of liberation” (91), realizing that
returning from trauma or re-entering the world will require something more
radical than naïve hope for the future. Tied to himself like an anchor to a boat,
the solitary subject has no future far enough to be the basis for a new
beginning: “Existence drags behind it a weight – if only itself – which
complicates the trip it takes” (16). For Levinas something radically new
must originate a new beginning, and the future takes shape concretely in
the shape of another person who has her own time, irreducible to one’s own.
The world, insofar as it is a social, pluralistic world, contains an infinite
number of ambiguous openings, embodied touchstones of hope.
Levinas calls these openings “faces.” They are upsurges of humanizing
excess that continually surprise a subject, knocking her off balance and
subjecting her to more time than she imagined possible. Although Levinas
refuses to provide any concrete, positive description of what a face might be,
he tells us that faces signify “the rupture of the immanent order, of the order
that I can embrace, of the realm which I can hold in my thought, of the order
that can become mine” (Righteous 48). The face Levinas describes is not
reducible to any determinate bodily location or any set of features. Instead,
Levinas insists that the face eludes understanding. It remains essentially
enigmatic and invisible, endlessly withdrawing in its shifting expressions.
Levinas borrows the moment Descartes thinks infinity – a thought containing
more than he can think – from the Third Meditation for the structural analogy
of the eruption of something more in a seemingly closed or finite space. In
Descartes, the thought of infinity, a thought he could not have supplied
himself, is the first glimmer of the external – proof that he is not alone in his
room. For Levinas, the dawn of a face attests to a surplus of life, a rising tide of
more humanity outpacing every theory and confounding comprehension.
Prone to the incessant interruption of faces, the Levinasian subject
splinters and splits an infinite number of times and in countless ways.
The negative consequence of being so deeply torn up is that the subject
can never pull herself fully together. The positive effect of displacement is
212 CRAIG

that the subject never hardens into a fixed identity incapable of trans-
formation. For the prisoner emerging from the confines of a life bracketed
by war, this essential plasticity and openness of the self is critical. Levinas
describes the human subject as constitutionally open to the openness of the
world, vulnerable to impact that reconfigures and perpetually widens the
parameters of the self. Such enlivening exposure is, according to Levinas,
both the privilege and the risk of being human.
The inability of the subject to petrify into a self-sufficient, finalized
subject attests to the ethical structure of subjectivity – a plurality deep in
the heart of the self. Every face issues a unique demand, calling the self
further off-center, as if to be a subject is to be subjected to infinite centers of
gravity, none of them one’s own. The split self, internally de-centered,
carries within it a unique capacity to pivot on a shifting, external point.
Levinasian ethics requires one to respond while off-center, to rise to a
demand from the outside, to call into question the ways “my spontaneity”
is moved “by the presence of the Other” (Totality 43).
Seen in this light, ethics is not a set of rules for behavior or maxims one
might memorize and unreflectively enact. Instead, ethics is the more mun-
dane, yet more incessant, responsibility to respond to new faces. This is a
radically minimal account of ethics insofar as it does not attempt to articulate
what is demanded, or how one should go about responding. There is very little
prescription Levinas offers beyond what he calls “the simple, ‘After you, Sir’”
(Otherwise 117) – the seemingly banal imperative to hold the door and let the
other go ahead of oneself. This may seem vague to the point of being mean-
ingless. And yet, Levinas’s account is radically demanding insofar as there are
no limits to the faces one might encounter or the slow, cumulative labor of
letting the other go ahead of oneself, holding open every door – every time.
Despite the nominal effort required to hold a door, the responsibility
Levinas describes can seem crushing, overly difficult, perhaps inhuman. He
uses traumatic imagery and expressions of excess in his descriptions of ethics –
along with nonstandard capitalizations and disjointed syntax. All of this can
make Levinas seem like a philosopher of the extraordinary and the other-
worldly. As a result, Levinas is sometimes accused of making ethics rely on an
impossibly impractical and metaphysical demand or of engaging in something
that might have religious significance but that is certainly not philosophy.3
He insists that the other takes precedence over the same and that infinity

3
The first criticism is one leveled by Richard Rorty. See in particular “Response to Simon Critchley” in
Deconstruction and Pragmatism. Alain Badiou articulates the second criticism in Ethics: An Essay on the
Understanding of Evil.
 The Infinite in Person: Levinas and Dickinson 213
prefigures totality. Yet this philosopher of infinite responsibility is also the
philosopher of the face. To be a subject means to be punctured by a face, by a
height that is no higher than a head, no more distant than a person.
It is, therefore, not toward another world that Levinas turns. Insisting on
the infinite depth of the interhuman and the irresolvable complexity of the
interpersonal, he instead calls for a revolution, a turning around toward the
things closest to us – toward the faces so near we have ceased to register
them, to the overlooked, the abandoned, and the neglected. Seen in this
light, Levinas’s ethics is an ethics of the ordinary and the mere, a realization
of the infinity in the world, depths that open, repeatedly, from here below.

3.
Describing the human subject as fractured, Levinas emphasizes its ambi-
guity and the impossibility of describing it through any paradigm or
concept. Humanity appears excessive, overspilling every frame. At the
same time, Levinas articulates both the hope and risk of being de-centered,
a sense of possibility and trepidation in the face of an unbounded world.
Similarly, the self Dickinson describes emerges as plural and broken, and
this turns out to be both traumatic and exhilarating. The split subject can be
seen in a variety of anxiety poems where one aspect of the self, an “I” or a
“Me,” cries out toward a “Myself.” Perhaps the most poignant example of
this traumatic split occurs in “Me from Myself – to banish” (Fr709), a poem
about the impossibility of consolidating or collecting oneself:
Me from Myself – to banish
Had I Art –
Invincible My Fortress
Unto All Heart –
But since Myself – assault Me –
How have I peace
Except by subjugating
Consciousness?
And since We’re Mutual Monarch
How this be
Except by Abdication –
Me – of Me – ?
A battle rages between two aspects of the self, each with its own rightful
claims. Levinas uses the terms “ego” (le Moi) and “self” (le soi) to express “an
essential lack of simplicity” characterizing the vying aspects of subjectivity,
214 CRAIG

explaining, “the ego has a self, in which it is not only reflected, but with
which it is involved” (Existence 16). In later work, Levinas explains sub-
jectivity in terms of “a malady of identity” (Otherwise 69) and describes the
psyche as “a peculiar dephasing, a loosening up or unclamping of identity”
(68). Levinas’s point is that the human subject is irreducible to any identi-
fying theme: whether ego, consciousness, a Spinozan conatus, or a
Darwinian drive for self-preservation. The subject exists in tension with
herself. Such “ambiguity of subjectivity” (165) renders her enigmatic and
deeply unknowable (even to herself), and allows her to exist in complicated
ways, rather than blindly in accordance with a single overarching drive or a
brute natural force.
Concerned with a similar complexity and ambiguity, Dickinson differ-
entiates “Me” from “Myself.” She describes a dramatic struggle for psychic
control in which any resolution or “abdication” would entail utter collapse –
a subjugation of consciousness. She wonders whether consciousness defines
subjectivity, questions the existential consequences of suppressing con-
sciousness, and leaves open whether such suppression might amount to
sleep, to madness, or to death. The psyche she envisions is essentially and
irrevocably plural and tensed.
The battle between competing aspects of the self is one of Dickinson’s
obsessions. She envisions herself populated by others who threaten to pull
her apart. Schism and tension figure centrally in poems where the heart
severs from the soul, the brain from the body, or the mind from brain, as in
“I felt a Cleaving in my Mind” (Fr867) and “The Soul has Bandaged
moments” (Fr360). In “One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted”
(Fr407), Dickinson conceives the brain itself as a rambling, haunted house
with “Corridors – surpassing / Material Place.” In a much later poem, “The
Heart is the Capital of the Mind” (Fr1381), she forgoes the architectural
picture of the brain and returns to geographic, political imagery familiar
from “Me from Myself – to banish” to describe the antagonistic struggle for
power between “Heart” and “Mind.” In “The Mind lives on the Heart”
(Fr1384), she meditates on the sovereignty of the heart, intensifying her
imagery as she compares the mind to “any Parasite” and the heart, the host,
to “Meat.” In all of these poems, subjectivity exceeds the bounds of con-
sciousness. The sense of things overspilling their containers reappears in
“The mob within the heart” (Fr1763), where Dickinson returns to spatial
metaphors to describe the heart as a crowded arena of deafening mayhem, a
space of uncontrollable “riot,” “growing like a hurricane.”
The space of the self Dickinson conceives is vast and labyrinthine: a
haunted house, a parasite-riddled host, a hurricane. Her conception of
 The Infinite in Person: Levinas and Dickinson 215
subjectivity includes a Levinasian acknowledgment of the futility of trying
to know exhaustively or describe what it means to be human and a
recognition of subjects as nonidentical pluralities.4 Levinas often invokes
“flesh and blood” (Otherwise 78) sensibility to underscore the raw sensitivity
of a subject who is not only able to think and reason, but who also finds
himself exposed and vulnerable in his own skin, “panting, shivering” (68).
“The self,” Levinas explains, “is the very fact of being exposed” (Existence
118). Dickinson’s myriad descriptions of what it feels like to be vulnerable
and at the mercy of an impinging world include strikingly postmodern
emphases on fragmentation and the turmoil of psychic/embodied life. And
yet, when seen in light of Levinas’s ethics, the hypersensitized, plural, and
broken self emerges as structured for de-centering – uniquely prone to
reconfiguration and response.

4.
“I dreaded that first Robin, so” (Fr347) is emblematic of Dickinson’s sense
of disorienting and painful exposure to the world. It begins with a feeling of
dread, a paralyzing fear of spring. Levinas also described a feeling of “horror”
in connection with “the future” or with something that seems “alien and
strikes against us” (Existence 17, 9). In her poem, Dickinson chronicles a
visceral vulnerability that the poet is, initially, at pains to blunt or avoid. As
with so many of her poems, a noticeable decrescendo commences from a
first economic line that unravels into increasingly chaotic pieces.
Concretely, the poem records the way the early spring inevitably swells
into heady summer heat.
I dreaded that first Robin, so,
But He is mastered, now,
I’m some accustomed to Him grown,
He hurts a little, though –
I thought if I could only live
Till that first Shout got by –
Not all Pianos in the Woods
Had power to mangle me –
I dared not meet the Daffodils –
For fear their Yellow Gown

4
Thomas Gardner explains, “Fragmentation, discontinuity, use of pauses, opacity, wandering and
loneliness, dread, uncertainty, silence, disorientation are equally, often simultaneously, explored [by
Dickinson] as nontotalizing responses to what can never be grasped” (7).
216 CRAIG

Would pierce me with a fashion

So foreign to my own –
I wished the Grass would hurry –
So when ’twas time to see –
He’d be too tall, the tallest one
Could stretch to look at me –
I could not bear the Bees should come,
I wished they’d stay away
In those dim countries where they go,
What word had they, for me?
They’re here, though; not a creature failed –
No Blossom stayed away
In gentle deference to me –
The Queen of Calvary –
Each one salutes me, as he goes,
And I, my childish Plumes,
Lift, in bereaved acknowledgement
Of their unthinking Drums – (Fr347)
In the first stanza we hear the poet’s anxious apprehension. The robin, the
first sign of spring, is a source of pain, as if his steps reverberated through the
poet’s own body and represented the agonizing thaw of frostbitten limbs.
The “dread” inspired by something as innocuous as a robin recalls the
anxiety over the ordinary and the temporal expressed in Dickinson’s early
poems, where she cries out in panic “A Day! Help! Help! / Another Day!”
(Fr58) or admits that “the least push of Joy / Breaks up my feet” (Fr312).5
The threats are pedestrian, banal, but all the more menacing for their
ubiquity. By the second and third lines, the robin is “mastered,” learned
like a difficult lesson. And yet, by the fourth line the poet qualifies her
mastery in a childlike admission that everything is not all better after all.
Mastery is always partial in Dickinson’s work. The thaw commences, but
the pain persists.
In the second stanza, what began as ambiguous dread becomes a pain that
has more localized, embodied form. The robin is not visually unbearable
(though he could have been with his flaming breast) but audibly intolerable
in his shouting song. Silent snows of winter have given way to the cacoph-
ony of spring, with the Robin, personified, aggressively shouting the news.

5
Levinas writes about a sense of paralysis in the face of the future, quoting a line from Maurice
Blanchot’s Thomas l’Obscur as he exclaims, “‘Tomorrow, alas! One will still have to live’ – a tomorrow
contained in the infinity of today. There is horror of immortality, perpetuity of the drama of existence,
necessity of forever taking on its burden” (Existence 58).
 The Infinite in Person: Levinas and Dickinson 217
Dickinson often expresses an extreme sensitivity to noise, the sense that the
most muted rustling blares and that there is something indecent and
excruciating in sound – as in “I was the slightest in the House” (Fr473),
where she confesses: “I could not bear to live – aloud – / The Racket shamed
me so – .” Levinas also thinks about the vulnerability of the ear and insists
on the ethical priority of the audible over the visual insofar as the ear is
uniquely sensitive, permanently open and exposed. In Levinas the ear
becomes emblematic of the viscerally raw sensitivity of the human subject
and the degree to which she lives defenselessly prone to impact. This is one
reason Levinas says that “the face speaks” (Totality 66) (that is, is audible)
even as he insists that it never appears. The ears access more than the eyes
(which rely on the broad light of day) can see. A face audibly registers in the
dark, making itself heard before one has any sense of who is speaking.6 The
concrete significance of contesting the philosophical obsession with light
and vision (sight itself etymologically connected with the Greek theoria, a
visual spectacle) is to suggest that not everything that is meaningful offers
itself in a glance and that ethics, in particular, does not rely on an external
light or operate only in the day. Responsibility extends into the shadows and
the darkness, into the places where one cannot see clearly and the times
when no theory guides.
Dickinson foreshadows the Levinasian hierarchy of the audible over the
visual, suggesting it is not the eye, but the ear, that is paradigmatically
susceptible and uniquely attuned. This is why spring in its acoustic register
intervenes with a brutality more menacing than any visual spectacle, against
which one might draw the curtain or close one’s eyes. The ears remain
uniquely passive, unable to shut, and this turns out to be both a curse and a
blessing. In another poem, Dickinson implicitly associates the vulnerability
of the ear with the fluid permeability of memory, writing “My Hazel Eye /
Has periods of shutting – / But, No lid has Memory –” (Fr869). Sounds,
like memories, flood in. Both of these indicate a nonintentional level of
receptivity, or the degree to which the subject is at the mercy of things
outside her control. The ears, memory, and also the heart, figure as thresh-
olds in Dickinson’s poems, the entry points for populations invading the
self. In “The saddest noise, the sweetest noise” (Fr1789), she thinks about
the painful complicity of the ear and the heart, writing “An ear can break a
human heart / As quickly as a spear. / We wish the ear had not a heart / So
dangerously near.” Earlier in the same poem, she hears the birds’ songs on
the cusp of spring, which make her remember “all the dead / That sauntered
6
Dickinson writes, “I see thee better – in the Dark – / I do not need a Light” (Fr1862).
218 CRAIG

with us here,” memories that, once conjured, she cannot evade. Unable to
distinguish the ear, memory, and the heart, she wishes “those siren throats /
Would go and sing no more.” This is the same admixture of spring, sound,
dread, and memory we find in the earlier poem. Quickly the robin’s first
shout, which was suffered and endured, compounds into “Pianos in the
Woods”; a swelling flock of birds alights in every tree as the robin’s solo
trumpet multiplies into a deafening, atonal orchestra that “mangles” her.7
The next three stanzas of the poem come in quick succession and with a
military beat, as if the entry wedged open by the robin explodes with the
throng of spring’s advancing line – the daffodils with their piercing gowns,
the shoots of grass, and finally, the terrifyingly indifferent, buzzing bees.
Each of them threatens in their own way, torture finding ever more novel
and subtle articulations. The flowers menace with a yellow so intense it
seems to scramble the senses, piercing like a sound directly through the eye.
The grass, too new to provide camouflage or cover, is useless, reckless
stubble, while the bees enact the particularly insidious and acute punish-
ment of indifference. They buzz with the numbing dumbness Dickinson
often associates with nature, God, and the dead – each of these refusing to
speak to her, and yet singularly, wordlessly expressive. The bees, who are so
prevalent in Dickinson’s poems, seem uniquely resilient and single-minded,
rumbling on like the interminable drone Levinas associates with what he
names il y a (there is); “a swarming of points” (Existence 53) characteristic of
impersonal, anonymous existence. For Levinas, il y a expresses the world in
its chaotic, interminable upsurge – the horrific sense of something that
remains inarticulate, but defiantly present. Describing the distinctive threat
of il y a, Levinas explains, “the il y a is unbearable in its indifference”
(Righteous 45). Dickinson’s bees, like Levinas’s il y a, indicate a refusal of the
stark alternatives between being and nothingness, introducing a residual
nonsense that has its own, prelinguistic sense.
At last, in the sixth stanza, a tentative truce is drawn. Resigned to the
inevitable, the poet admits, “They’re here, though; not a creature failed – /
No Blossom stayed away.” The height of spring arrives with the bees:
militant swarms marshaling summer. Nature, in the service of unrelenting
time, refuses to pause or stall, refusing to acquiesce to a frozen soul. Not
only does spring arrive, it unfurls flamboyantly, without restraint or mod-
esty, without “deference to me – / the Queen of Calvary.” The spring

7
In another poem, “Of all the Sounds despatched abroad” (Fr334), we learn that there are sounds more
tolerable, namely the nearly silent murmur of air: “. . .that old measure in the Boughs – / That
Phraseless Melody – / The Wind does – working like a Hand – / Whose fingers comb the Sky – .”
 The Infinite in Person: Levinas and Dickinson 219
remains stoically indifferent, even to the majestic suffering of one who is not
merely tortured, but who commands the Biblical site (Calvary) of Jesus’s
crucifixion outside the walls of Jerusalem, a place also called “The Skull,”
littered with the remains of the dead.8 Calvary, the site of dying, stands in
starkest opposition to the resurrection and explosive life of spring. To be
“Queen” of such a site (queen of a mound, not even a minimally inhabited
place) is to be the royal inheritor of the world’s desertion. And yet, in spite
of all of this, the poet-Queen in the final stanza “lifts” her “childish Plumes,”
her regal skirts, her quills, or the nascent sprouting wings Plato envisioned
in the Symposium, when, provoked by the stunning beauty of the beloved,
“the shafts of the feathers swell and begin to grow from their roots all over
the entire form of the soul” (Phaedrus 251b). The poet’s soul softens as she
literally lifts her pen to write her poem. Simultaneously, she becomes more
undifferentiated from the natural world that initially seemed so alien
and threatening. Dickinson routinely personifies the animals, plants, and
elements littering her verse, but by the end of the poem the poet is
becoming animal, lifting her young feathers like a newborn bird awkwardly
attempting first flight.
The poem concludes with a tentative upward gesture. Dickinson, how-
ever, qualifies the “Lift” of the last stanza (as she did the “mastery” of the
opening stanza) by conjoining it with “bereaved acknowledgement.” There
is no joyous reconciliation, no triumphal resurrection.9 Instead, the poet
soberly accepts the perfunctory “salutes” and the “unthinking Drums,” the
percussive beat of spring’s creatures, which, with military precision, round
out the full orchestra of the season. Nature is not speaking to her (as it
would to Whitman or to Wordsworth), but she discovers ways of making
the inarticulate sounds bearable, even meaningful.
In the end we find a minimal rise so familiar across Dickinson’s poetry –
perhaps most famously in the token differentiation she expressed in the
lines: “It was not Death for I stood up, / And all the Dead, lie down” (Fr355).
Dickinson is a master of drawing an unnerving similarity between the banal
and the profound. She makes the distinction between standing up and lying
down equivalent to the difference between life and death, creating a strange
feeling of the difference being both more than one imagined, and far less.

8
“The place of the skull” is the literal translation of the Hebrew “Golgotha,” the name of the site of
Jesus’s crucifixion used by Matthew (27:33), Mark (15:22), and John (19:17). Luke is alone in his use of
“Calvary,” the Latin derivative of Golgotha. See Luke (23:33).
9
Marilynne Robinson noted in an interview with Thomas Gardner: “There is never any rapture or
transport or anything [in Dickinson’s poems]. The sense of herself and her smallness and so on is
always painfully present” (58).
220 CRAIG

The span of movement between standing up and lying down is like the
utterly marginal interval Levinas expressed as the minimal, and at the
same time infinite gap between waking up and “putting the foot down off
the bed” (Existence 13).10 It is not very far to move, and yet the thought of
getting up and the act of getting up can be separated by an abyss.
Ultimately, the cumulative failures of the smallest gestures compound
and reverberate into tragic magnitudes. Levinas thinks about instants that
become interminable and chasms that open in the most confined space.
Dickinson also conceives the maximal in the minimal and the com-
pounding of seemingly insignificant details. The entire trajectory of
“I dreaded that first Robin, so” moves from dread to “bereaved acknowl-
edgement,” from the robin to the bees, from early to late spring. That is
to say, the poem barely moves at all. The subtle “Lift” of the pen closing
the poem mirrors the incrementally increasing height of the robin seeking
its worm, the daffodil, the grass, and finally the bees, each of them
drawing the poet skyward – yet none of them advancing very far above
the ground.
Despite the linearity of spring’s progression, the textual movement of
“I dreaded that first Robin, so” could be described as a spiral. The poem
begins in one place and rotates around an opening line, descending from a
single thought, word, or image, deepening as it goes. Often one can feel
disoriented by Dickinson’s poetry, unsure of how a poem that began with a
robin arrives at Calvary and drums, and yet sensibly aware of having been
turned around with each new line. Dickinson, like Levinas, shows us what it
looks like to turn around to the things closest, the things beneath one’s feet
or just behind one’s back. The ethics inherent in this more modest variety of
turning requires an attention to detail and particularity, and a reverence for
the everyday. There is nothing heroic or grandiose in an ethics based on
holding the door, and yet incremental acts of turning around become the
basis for every other act of decency and respect. Dickinson reminds us of
how much lies beneath our feet and within arm’s reach, providing us with
an implicit ethical imperative to be more aware and alert to the world’s
neglected, meager, and ordinary creatures and more alive to the world’s
intricate texture and depth. It is not a great distance Dickinson crosses, not
an epic span of time. But in keeping her spaces tiny and her time compact,
she discovers the infinite packed into the finite.

10
Levinas borrows this example from William James, who makes it a centerpiece of his chapter on
“Will” in The Principles of Psychology (2:524 ff).
 The Infinite in Person: Levinas and Dickinson 221

5.
At the close of Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, Levinas uses the
imagery of breathing to illustrate the subject’s immanent expansive space
and bodily core of vulnerability, calling the human subject “a lung at the
bottom of his substance” (180). This description indicates a living, “panting,
trembling” (180) space at the heart of the subject, a pliable and expanding
reservoir for more air, which keeps the subject from condensing into dead
matter. Levinas, blurring any distinction between the physical and the
metaphysical, links the elemental, unintentional act of breathing with
“transcendence in the form of opening up” (181). He then identifies the
subject’s ethical potential as her capacity to, like a lung, “open [herself] as
space” (180). A few lines later he makes the ethical link more explicit, calling
the “exposure to the openness of a face” a “further deep breathing” (180), as
if a face functions like a gust of air forcibly expanding the lungs and
rendering the subject more spacious, radically open.
Dickinson also thinks about degrees of openness and space discovered
within seemingly narrow confines, though she does not articulate the ethical
implications or use the term “transcendence” to describe the self’s inner,
untapped expanse.11 In “I dreaded that first Robin, so,” one senses the
release from the solitude and the captivity of winter forced by surrendering
to the birds, the flowers, and the bees. These draw Dickinson out: literally
out of doors, and figurally out of her protective shell. In the end her plumes
lift, as though buoyed by a breeze.
Wind, breezes, and breath occur repeatedly as themes in Dickinson’s
poetry, often personified. The wind has “tapped like a tired Man” (Fr621),
the breezes become “pretty Housewives” “with their Brooms” (Fr137) or
lend supernatural powers (breath operates like “Witchcraft”) (Fr1712). The
imagery in one poem from 1863 closely resembles Levinas’s imagery for the
subject’s openness; Dickinson describes the rending open of a drowning
subject gasping for air, caught between life and death.
Three times – we parted – Breath – and I –
Three times – He would not go –
But strove to stir the lifeless Fan
The Waters – strove to stay.

11
Dickinson only uses the word “transcending” once in her poems. In “A something in a summer’s
Day” (Fr104), she writes “A something in a summer’s noon – / A depth – an Azure – a perfume – /
Transcending extasy.” It is instructive to note that she invokes “transcending” on the heels of “a
depth,” coming close to the notion of “transdescendence” Levinas borrows from Jean Wahl in order to
describe a transcendence with a new, immanent, directionality.
222 CRAIG

Three times – the Billows threw me up –

Then caught me – like a Ball –
Then made Blue faces in my face –
And pushed away a sail
That crawled Leagues off – I liked to see –
For thinking – While I die –
How pleasant to behold a Thing
Where Human faces – be –
The Waves grew sleepy – Breath – did not –
The Winds – like Children – lulled –
Then Sunrise kissed my Chrysalis –
And I stood up – and lived – (Fr514)
Here breath takes on heroic magnitude, illustrating Dickinson’s recurrent
strategy of blurring the ordinary and the extraordinary. Breathing is a
natural, routine, and effortless (nearly passive) activity. Yet it is also
among the most critical functions of a living being, and one that becomes
exponentially complicated the more one dwells on it or finds oneself denied
its regularity. The habitual turned impossible quickly inspires panic. “Three
times we parted breath and I” seizes on the mortal struggle to do the most
basic thing.
Like “I dreaded that first Robin,” “Three times” begins with a sense of
panicked dread. Rather than a conflict between the poet and the natural
world, now there is a rupture between the poet and the elemental. Separated
from “Breath,” she is literally severed from the source of life and metaphori-
cally cut off from the inspiration (from inspirare: to breath or blow into) that
fuels her poems. The panting pace of the first line (with four dashes) inverts
the steady, drumlike, beat of “I dreaded that first Robin so,” which commen-
ces decisively with an “I” who subsequently softens and dissolves. Here the “I”
hangs between two dashes at the foot of the line, suspended precariously.12
The robin refused to be silent, and now we meet a “Breath,” personified
by the masculine “He,” who refuses to be still. In the midst of her own
drowning, a battle ensues between two elements, air and water, the one
drawing the poet’s soul up, the other submerging her body below. The
second and third stanzas introduce the cruel, toying waves (like a band of
schoolyard bullies). Dickinson often conjoins the childish with the serious,

12
In “Drowning is not so pitiful” (Fr1542), Dickinson echoes “Three times we parted breath and I,”
providing additional explanation for her use of the number “three” as she writes, “Drowning is not so
pitiful / As the attempt to rise. / Three times, ’tis said, a sinking man / Comes up to face the skies.”
Three also signifies the holy trinity and Dickinson’s own trinity: “In the name of the Bee – / And of
the Butterfly – / And of the Breeze – Amen!” (Fr23).
 The Infinite in Person: Levinas and Dickinson 223
showing us the ambiguous threshold between games and realities and the
degree to which the utterly momentous dramas of childhood reverberate
through the whole of life. Here playfulness and mortality coincide, as if the
poet is the subject of a game gone horribly awry. “Billows” toss her “like a
Ball,” make “Blue faces in [her] face,” and drive off the single “Thing,” the
receding sail of a boat that is the sole indication of a human world and the
only prospect of salvation. She is seeing herself from above, looking down
almost lovingly on her own reeling body. In the midst of her near-death
experience, she enjoys a detached, reflective moment as she envisions
“Human faces” on the distant boat – a rare admission in Dickinson of the
potential comfort found in the proximity of other human beings.13
By the last stanza, the raging seas are exhausted. The winds whipping
the waves into a frenzy, “like Children,” have worn themselves out. Only
“Breath” remains undaunted and unfazed. As in “I dreaded that first Robin,
so,” we find a reversal in the last lines of “Three Times,” but the reversal is
dramatic and conclusive. In the earlier poem, the speaker accommodates to
the new reality, however grudgingly. Spring arrives. Here, darkness dissipates,
pushed aside by the first rays of the rising sun. The sun, like a parent dispelling
a nightmare with a kiss, emerges as the third, overpowering, natural element
in the poem. The rising sun mirrors the relentless march of spring, forces
too powerful to resist or evade. Touched by an external light and warmth, the
poet finds herself released and reborn, as a butterfly from the confinement
of its rigid cocoon. Recalling the last lines of “I dreaded that first Robin, so,”
the poet discovers herself softening, becoming more flexible, spacious and
ambiguously depersonified – paradoxically rendered animal in becoming
increasingly humane and more alive.14 She stands, repeating the minimal
rising gesture (over and over, never a single, final stand): raising her pen,
taking a step, keeping her in the margin of life.

6.
The sun that rises at the close of “Three times we parted breath and I,”
functions like a Levinasian face, dawning above and beyond the poet to
draw her up and out. Though many of Dickinson’s poems deal with the
13
Although she invokes “human nature” several times, the only other explicit use of the phrase “human
faces” in Dickinson’s poetry occurs in the poem “Myself was formed – a Carpenter –” (475), where she
personifies her tools: “My Tools took Human – Faces –.”
14
Levinas has a much less articulate sense of animals than Dickinson, but he does invoke “creature
status” as the “hither side” of human identity, a reduction of the ego to a “self prior to all self-
consciousness . . . older than the plot of egoism woven in the conatus of being” (Otherwise 92).
224 CRAIG

agonizing reality of death, they are, like Levinas’s philosophy, more about
survival and the excessive (sometimes painful, sometimes joyful) thrust of
life – death’s failure to be a final end, the haunting traces that remain for the
living, and the rising of the next day.
The minimal rising gesture of standing, coaxed from the outside by a
gentle heat, is not a heroic self-assertion but an involuntary, bodily turn.
Levinas also thought about such minimal bodily confrontation – breath
and incremental steps. In Levinas there is a sense that turning around to
what is closest is simultaneously a turn toward what is deepest and most
mysterious. Asked about the priority of ethics in a 1986 interview with
François Poirié, Levinas responded, “More, often, especially now, I think
about holiness (sainteté), about the holiness of the face of the other”
(Righteous 49). Continuing this train of thought, he added “to respect the
other, to take the other into account, to let him pass before oneself. And
courtesy! Yes, that is very good, to let the other pass before I do; this little
effort of courtesy is also an access to the face” (49). Later in the same
interview he explains, “The human is the possibility of holiness” (55). For
Levinas, the human is the possibility of letting another go ahead of oneself.
This nearly insignificant, and at the same time monumental gesture indi-
cates the human being’s ability to act against the mandates of self-interest
and the natural instinct of self-preservation. Although the notion of the
“holy” has religious connotations, one should remember that Levinas
describes religion in immanent terms as “horizontal . . . remaining on the
earth of human beings” (Entre Nous 70). Both holiness and religion derive
their meaning from something pedestrian and everyday.15 Levinas’s sense of
the “holiness” of the human face, more evident in the “saint” of the French
sainteté, therefore entails an emphasis on the holiness situated in the here
and now, a constant reminder that the world exceeds our grasp and that
faces are concrete sources of infinity all around us – aerating perforations,
unplumbable wells. Within this deflationary, humanized picture of the
holy, the only temple is the crowded streets, and the only afterlife is the
life of another person, who lives on, after one’s own life.
Levinas discovers the holy in the human, while Dickinson discovers “The
Finite – furnished / With the Infinite –” (Fr830). Both of them are concerned
with an immanent transcendence available here on earth, though Dickinson’s

15
In one his essays on Judaism, Levinas links the emphasis on the here and now with an essential tenet of
Jewish faith, explaining: “If Judaism is attached to the here below, it is not because it does not have the
imagination to conceive of a supernatural order, or because matter represents some sort of absolute for
it; but because the first light of conscience is lit for it on the path that leads from man to his neighbor”
(Difficult Freedom 100).
 The Infinite in Person: Levinas and Dickinson 225
sense for otherness extends beyond human faces toward myriad forms of life.
Surrendering to the complexity of a world that frustrates every concept one
might form of it, Dickinson demonstrates, in poetry, the fractured subject
and the revolutionary movement (the spinning or turning) so critical to
Levinas’s ethics. Rather than ascending for an overview, Dickinson descends
to the tiny and the mere. In the process, she, more than Levinas, actively
celebrates the world’s lack of closure and cohesion, finding myriad occasions
for greater sensitivity and “nimbleness.”16 Her obsessively invoked “Heaven,”
like the face Levinas insists “remains terrestrial” (Totality 203), dawns from
below. It is an unanswerable question – “Is Heaven a place – a Sky – a Tree?”
(Fr476) – a locale without any definitive spatial location. In “Some keep the
Sabbath going to Church,” Dickinson contests the pomposity, rigidity, and
self-assurance of organized religion, preferring daily rituals at home and
outdoors and concluding “instead of getting to Heaven, at last – / I’m
going, all along” (Fr236), insisting that heaven is not a trophy earned at
life’s end but places encountered on life’s way, however impermanent and
mere. Similarly, in “I went to Heaven” (Fr577) we learn that “Heaven / ‘Twas
a small Town.” Later she announces “The Fact that Earth is Heaven”
(Fr1435), and later still describes the earthy, perfect bliss of the bumble bees,
insisting: “The most important population / Unnoticed dwell. / They have a
heaven each instant / Not any hell” (Fr1764). This is not an ultimate, happily-
ever-after heaven where all sins are forgiven and debts are paid. It is a more
precarious, “Brittle Heaven,” (Fr724) a heaven bordered by, and sometimes
indistinguishable from “a Pit” (Fr508).
Dickinson renders the insecurity of every space visceral, and this means
that she does not offer us a consoling picture. Reading her, one is subjected to
the full spectrum of human emotion – the heights and depths. Often despair,
fear, and panic resound in the most memorable lines. Her unsteady, uncertain
step – always small – leads from this to this, and never, as Hegel nobly tried to
proceed, from this to that. Her dashes, capitalizations, and dissonant rhymes
accentuate her progression “from Blank to Blank – / A Threadless Way”
(Fr484). We find ourselves bereft of explanations, stalled or led in a circle.
In some sense, the thought leads nowhere. And yet, in spiraling downward,
Dickinson turns us around to what is so close we have ceased to register its
presence. Exclaiming, “Behold the Atom – I preferred” (Fr279) and confess-
ing, “the very least / Were infinite – to me –” (Fr522), she shows the

16
In a letter to Otis Phillips Lord in 1882, a few years before her death, Dickinson wrote: “On subjects of
which we know nothing, or should I say Beings – . . . we both believe, and disbelieve a hundred times
an hour, which keeps Believing nimble” (L728).
226 CRAIG

significance in the seemingly least significant things and encourages her

readers to relinquish the futile quest for an overview in order to be present
to what is (in Derrida’s words) “very little, almost nothing” (Writing 80).17
The value of this movement lies in returning us to the things we are most
apt to take for granted and overlook. For Levinas, this means that ethics
begins with the minimal, nearly banal gestures of decency – holding the
door, saying “After You.” There is a temptation to reserve ethics for crises,
for gut-wrenching situations. Levinas reminds us that in the heat of the
crisis we are already too late. He reminds us that life is rife with less
melodramatic interruptions calling for immediate response – faces rising
all around. His sense of ethics entails an attention to the particular and the
personal, an obsessive vigilance to the here and now. There is no guarantee
that such vigilance will eradicate violence or mystically resolve any global
problems. Life remains precarious and open to traumatic interruption. But
in reminding us of a more incremental, concrete variety of ethical attention,
“individual goodness, from man to man” (Righteous 81), Levinas gives us a
profound responsibility to attend to things one face at a time, without
getting ahead of ourselves. This is the crux of Levinas’s ethical thought, and
yet it is Dickinson, a thinker of increments and minutiae, who articulates
the consequence of overlooking a face, warning: “The Face we choose to
miss – / Be it but for a Day / As absent as a Hundred Years, / When it has
rode away – (Fr1293). The face one ignores, even momentarily, recedes with
a compounding distance, until it lies beyond memory, beyond retrieval.
Insofar as Dickinson returns us to what is always there beneath our feet,
she reminds us, as Levinas does, of the value and the immensity of the
intimate and the ordinary. Her poems prefigure the horrific historical
ruptures that fueled Levinas’s ethical thought, inciting him to question
the possibilities for ethics and the structure of the self. And yet Dickinson is
a presciently postmodern poet in the sense that she intuited both the world
and the human subject as fragmented, broken beyond repair, and nonethe-
less saw the sober hope available to those who might learn to move among
broken pieces. Levinas defined hope as the embodied time of other lives.
Dickinson, thinking of the infinity of skies, trees, blades of grass, insects,
and animals, also conceives an infinity fleshed out in a world teemingly
alive. Reading her, we are “prevented . . . From missing minor Things”
(Fr995). Reading her in light of Levinas, we are reminded that the minor
things are the only things of any real significance; they are instances of
the infinite in person, and to miss them would be to miss all.
17
Derrida uses this phrase to describe the paradoxical scope of Levinas’s project in Totality and Infinity.
 chapter 12

Astonished Thinking: Dickinson and Heidegger

Jed Deppman

In a life devoted to thinking, Martin Heidegger thought most about

the question of the meaning of Being. He constantly formulated versions
of what, following Leibniz, he put forth as the first question of metaphysics:
why “are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing” (Basic Writings
110)? How do we understand existence, the fact that all that is, is? This
question is essential not only because man is the being who “thinks,” “is
open to,” and comes “face to face with” Being, but also because he is
“essentially this relationship of responding to Being,” in fact “is only this”
(Identity and Difference 31). The ancient Greeks lived with this understand-
ing, argued Heidegger, but because Western thinkers had forgotten it
he expended great energy in his 1926 Being and Time and subsequent
works to make his readers notice, care about, and participate in the question
of the meaning of Being. In the 1930 Introduction to Metaphysics, he looked
back and characterized Being and Time as an inquiry into “the ‘disclosure of
being,’ the ‘unlocking of what forgetfulness of being closes and hides’”
(Identity 16). “All being is in Being,” he would argue, but to
. . . hear such a thing sounds trivial to our ear, if not, indeed, offensive, for no
one needs to bother about the fact that being belongs to Being. All the world
knows that being is that which is. What else remains for being but to be?
And yet, just this fact that being is gathered together in Being, that in the
appearance of Being being appears, astonished the Greeks and first aston-
ished them and them alone (quoted in Steiner 26).

Across his career, Heidegger used many vocabularies to work out the
question of the meaning of Being, speaking of “grateful” or “pious”
thinking, “preserving the mystery,” and others. He worked so hard to
define and restore the early Greek sense of astonishment (Thaumazein)
that George Steiner synopsized both his “doctrine of existence” and his
“methodological stance” as versions of “radical astonishment” (27). The
mere “fact of existence” and of “being in Being” was enough to keep

227
228 DEPPMAN

Heidegger in a permanently renewable amazement and to define “the

unique and specific business” of philosophy (27).
With similar consistency, intensity, and lexical diversity – awe, ecstasy,
exhilaration, Noon, crisis, terror, wonder, astonishment, amazement, and
more – Emily Dickinson also valued and questioned the fact that all that is, is.
Naming the “tint” one “cannot take” as the “best,” celebrating the power of a
sunset to “confer” an “ignorance” upon the eye, she identified events of Being
that could remove the film of inherited concepts and return her to powerful,
prereflective experience. In two important letters, she even explained her
poetry as originating in and responding to modes of astonishment. In April
1862 she explained to T. W. Higginson: “I had a terror – since September – I
could tell to none – and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground –
because I am afraid –” (L261). Like a child in a cemetery she “sings” to banish
fear. Simple enough as a metaphor, but of what is she afraid, and what is the
difference between “telling” her “terror” in prose and “singing” it in poetry?
Into which genre falls the letter to Higginson? With its enclosed poems,
iambic patterning, dashes, and performative syntax, it could be a “telling,” a
“singing,” or both. Still another problem is the phrase “I had a terror since,”
which hesitates grammatically between the preterit and the present progres-
sive, between an action completed – I had a terror last September but am over it
now – and one not: Since September I have had a terror and I still have it.
Higginson could not know if Dickinson felt her “terror” had receded or not,
only that she expected writing poems to help her deal with it.
With the letter she included three poems that emphasized the amazing
effects of wind and profiled the poet as a thinker and translator of astonish-
ment. “Of all the Sounds despatched abroad” describes that “phraseless
Melody – / The Wind does” and worries over an imagined “Outcast” from
humanity who has “never heard that fleshless Chant / Rise – solemn – on the
Tree” (Fr334). “There came a Day at Summer’s full” recounts a special day
in which the speaker was “Permitted to commune this – time –” without
the medium of language: “time was scarce profaned, by speech – /
The symbol of a word / Was needless . . .” (Fr325). If those two poems
translated and modeled astonishment for Higginson, then the third tried
harder to arouse it:
South Winds jostle them –
Bumblebees come
Hover – hesitate – Drink – and are gone –
Butterflies pause – on their passage Cashmere –
I, softly plucking,
Present them – Here – (Fr98)
 Astonished Thinking: Dickinson and Heidegger 229
Here the speaker becomes one in a series of natural phenomena that briefly
interact with flowers according to their modes of being. The wind “jostles”
them; bumblebees “hover,” “hesitate,” and “drink;” butterflies “pause;” and
finally she, “softly plucking,” transfers them to Higginson by including
pressed flowers with the letter. The lines “I, softly plucking, / Present
them – Here – ” telescope the times of picking and presentation: as she
plucks, he receives. The last line is dramatic, with its capitalized, present-
tense, Heideggerian verb “Present” and two dashes that isolate and empha-
size the final word: “I Present them – Here –.” To Higginson, “Here” could
only mean now, in the place and moment that I am seeing these flowers and
reading this poem and letter. Everything summons him to place himself next
in the chain of Being, respond to the flowers in his way, and watch himself
do so. Is he astonished?
Six weeks later, in a second letter to Higginson, Dickinson employed a
similar grammatical pattern linking astonishment and poetry:
My dying Tutor told me that he would like to live till I had been a poet, but
Death was much of Mob as I could master – then – And when far afterward –
a sudden light on Orchards, or a new fashion in the wind troubled my
attention – I felt a palsy, here – the Verses just relieve –” (L265).

Again she mixes past and present tenses – “troubled,” “felt,” but then
“relieve” – and betrays uncertainty about whether she is writing after or
within troubling experience, an unresolvedness reinforced by the lingering
memory of her “dying Tutor” and another unlocatable “here”: she feels a
palsy where? Dickinson simultaneously speaks as if she were pointing to her
palsy with Higginson in the room and uses the illusion of immediacy to
illustrate how the “Verses just relieve”: See how caught up I am in this? This is
when and why I write.
The single poem she includes with this letter features a sensitive soul
overwhelmed by unexpected gifts:
As if I asked a common Alms,
And in my wondering hand
A Stranger pressed a Kingdom,
And I, bewildered, stand –
As if I asked the Orient
Had it for me a Morn –
And it should lift it’s purple Dikes,
And shatter Me with Dawn! (Fr14B)
At first the speaker is impoverished or compromised, reduced to seeking
“Alms,” but then she receives munificence in the form of a “Kingdom” and
230 DEPPMAN

a stunning sunrise. The conceit of getting more than requested aligns

Dickinson with the astonished speaker and Higginson with “the Stranger”
and “the Orient”: she asked him for the alms of critical reading and he sent
generous letters to her “wondering hand.” The larger point is that such
unexpected riches do not bring the speaker confidence or security but leave
her “bewildered” and shattered. Whether from the Stranger, the Orient, or
Higginson, astonishing gifts do not translate to revelation, intellectual clarity,
or expertise about writing. Astonishment, in short, does not empower the
poet but creates and intensifies the experiences, sources, moods, troubles, and
emotions that call for poetry to be written.
How much of this, one might wonder, did Dickinson learn from
her famously astonished predecessors, the Transcendentalists? The question
is complicated in part because Emerson and his compeers spoke with many
voices. The introduction to (Essays and Lectures 7) Nature calls for “an original
relation to the universe” unmediated by the views of “foregoing generations”
and seems to find a sustained response in Dickinson’s wonderful poems
about planets, plants, and sunsets (7). But within a few sentences Emerson’s
neo-Platonism reaches a rhetoric of perfection and positive conviction
unwonted in Dickinson. “Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which
are unanswerable,” he says, and we “must trust the perfection of the creation so
far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our
minds, the order of things can satisfy” (7). The “universe becomes transparent,
and the light of higher laws than its own, shines through it.” Dickinson and
Heidegger do not share this “trust” in shining higher laws and the answerability
of all questions.
On the contrary, both thinkers wonder “Why Bliss so scantily disburse –
/ Why Paradise defer – / Why Floods be served to Us – in Bowls” (Fr767).
But they pursue the problem differently. Heidegger scrutinizes not only his
own responses to Being but also those of his contemporaries, and to explain
why there is so little astonishment out there, why Westerners have forgotten
the question of the meaning of Being, he inculpates the history of Western
thought (especially the influence of Plato and Aristotle), the translation of
Greek words and concepts into narrow, rationalistic Latin, the techno-
scientific arrogance of modernity, the rise of self-assertive man, and the
ascendance of logic and analysis as the “science of thinking.” He also sees
the modern world as “darkening” due to “the flight of the gods, the
destruction of the earth, the standardization of man, the pre-eminence of
the mediocre,” and argues geopolitically that Europe was caught “in a
pincers between Russia and America,” two nations he identified as “meta-
physically the same” (Identity 37). In such an historical epoch “the asking of
 Astonished Thinking: Dickinson and Heidegger 231
the question of being” was “one of the essential and fundamental conditions
for an awakening of the spirit and hence for an original world of historical
being-there” (41). It was indispensable if the “peril of world darkening” was
ever to be “forestalled” and if Germany, the “nation in the center of the
Western world” were ever to “take on its historical mission” (41).
Such aggressive geopolitical stances were foreign to Dickinson’s thought.
Yet the ways Heidegger used philology, history, and philosophy to elucidate
“astonishment” and related terms (such as “uncanniness” [unheimlich] and
“anxiety” [Angst]) do offer valuable perspectives on the backgrounds for
Dickinson’s “terror,” “fear,” “trouble,” “palsy,” and the trauma and disori-
entation in which her writing originated. Heideggerian astonishment is no
frisson or passing state but, as Steiner notes, a mood or “disposition”
[Stimmung], a “‘tuning,’ in which and for which the Being of being unfolds”
(31). Poetry is the aletheic, disclosive unfolding of Being, “the saying of the
unconcealedness of what is” (Poetry, Language, Thought 74). We have seen
that Dickinson presented herself to Higginson as a poet attuned to natural
subtlety, that she was troubled by existence, that she apprehended and
responded to such events as a “sudden light on Orchards” or a “fashion in
the wind.” “Apprehension,” says Heidegger, is not something we are
capable of because we are unique among the beings of the earth; it is “not
a function that man has as an attribute, but rather the other way around:
apprehension is the happening that has man” (Identity 119). Dickinson
similarly tends to cast apprehension as an encounter with Being that tran-
scends perception and is greater and mysteriously other than the human
sensibility that is problematically included within it.
Indeed when Dickinson locates astonishment in Being, she often
involves two or more natural phenomena and subordinates or brackets
the human perspective more radically than Heidegger. Where Heidegger
maintains that “man is capable of poetry at any time only to the degree to
which his being is appropriate to that which itself has a liking for man and
therefore needs his presence,” Dickinson uses lyrics to think about aston-
ishing situations where human being is not the focus of the experience, not
appropriate, or not needed (Poetry, Language, Thought 228). She even
rethinks traditional perspectives on such a landmark event in the history
of human astonishment as Christ’s agony: “Gethsemane” she says, “Is but a
Province – in the Being’s Centre –” (Fr670). In moods both lighthearted
and serious, she omits humans or has them yearn for a different ontological
assignment: “The Dandelion’s pallid tube / Astonishes the Grass,” she says
in one poem, and in another she describes how the Robin brings “ecstasy /
Among astonished boughs” (Fr1565, Fr140). In “The Grass so little has to
232 DEPPMAN

do –” the speaker envies the way grass entertains Bees, holds sunshine in its
lap, and stirs “all day” to the “pretty Tunes” that “Breezes fetch along”
before concluding “I wish I were a Hay” (Fr379). Sometimes a speaker will
compare human astonishment with another kind glimpsed in Being – “The
grass does not appear afraid, I often wonder he / Can stand so close and look
so bold / At what is awe to me” (Fr1433) – and sometimes improvise a logic
underlying astonishment, for example by associating it with a season or time
of day. In March, the Sun is “so close and mighty / That our Minds are hot”
we learn in one poem, and in another a “Pang is more conspicuous in Spring
/ In contrast with the things that sing” (Fr1194, Fr1545).
Witnessing astonishment in and among the beings in Being can catalyze
it in a process that either opens Dickinson’s speakers to Being by suggesting
continuity or closes them off from it, leaving them jealous of forbidden
luxuries. Some of her anguished speakers are disappointed by the exclusivity
of Being, God, or Nature. “Oh Sacrament of summer days! / Oh last
Communion in the Haze – / Permit a Child to join –” begs one rejected
speaker (Fr122). When a “minor Nation” of what might be crickets or
cicadas celebrates its “unobtrusive Mass” in the grass, the speaker senses a
“Druidic Difference” that “Enhances Nature,” even as she considers the
experience a “A pensive Custom . . . Enlarging Loneliness” (Fr895). Some
speakers feel mocked by the silent, enigmatic “smile” of Being – “The
Heavens with a smile, / Sweep by our disappointed Heads / Without a
syllable – ” (Fr342) – while others wonder why Being is emotionless:
Without a smile – Without a Throe
A Summer’s soft Assemblies go
To their entrancing end
Unknown – for all the times we met –
Estranged, however intimate –
What a dissembling Friend – (Fr1340)
Here the “soft Assemblies” of seasonal bugs, birds, or flowers reach an
“entrancing end” but nonetheless remain “Unknown” to the speaker no
matter how many “times we met.” Experience and intimacy with Being lead
to estrangement. What a dissembling friend.
Collectively Dickinson’s astonishments speak to the difficulties of
both seizing Being in its emerging–disappearing and knowing how to
respond. Heidegger pursues this same problem by developing aletheia as
the truth disclosed by the conflictual play of presencing in Being.
He quotes Heraclites fragment 123, “physis kryptesthai philei,” which is
usually translated as “Physis loves to hide” or “Nature loves to hide,” but
 Astonished Thinking: Dickinson and Heidegger 233
offers a new translation: “Being (emerging appearing) inclines intrinsi-
cally to self-concealment” (Identity 114). Dickinson’s speakers agree that
Being inclines to “self-concealment” but not all of them feel estranged,
excluded, or overwhelmed. Many also find Being welcoming, entertain-
ing, and intoxicating: “Inebriate of Air – am I – / And Debauchee of
Dew – / Reeling – thro endless summer days – / From inns of Molten
Blue–” (Fr207). Being can be as full of activity and secrets as a middle-
school playground:
The eager look – on Landscapes –
As if they just repressed
Some Secret – that was pushing
Like Chariots – in the Vest –
The Pleading of the Summer –
That other Prank – of Snow –
That Cushions Mystery with Tulle,
For fear the Squirrels – know. (Fr696)
In 1885, in a letter thanking an unknown recipient for an unknown book,
Dickinson emphasized the simultaneous responses she felt when astonished
by a starlit night or a powerful reading: “I thank you with wonder – Should
you ask me my comprehension of a starlight Night, Awe were my only
reply, and so of the mighty Book – It stills, incites, infatuates, blesses and
blames in one” (L965). Whether inspired by Being or a book, astonishment
is a contradictory feeling that stills but incites me, blames but blesses me.
No wonder I thank you with wonder.
If there is a lot of pranking, spying, secret-keeping, and hide-and-seeking
going on among the beings of Dickinsonian Being, and if the human
response is highly variable and of doubtful ontological privilege, then by
contrast Heidegger’s astonishments more reliably occur as mystical or reli-
gious rapture. Stately, exalting, edifying, Being almost always calls for pious
and questioning thought. He prefers such thinkers as Parmenides, Pindar,
Rilke, and Hölderlin, who can be described as shepherds laying themselves
open to Being. Pindar, for example, “thought and composed poetry as a
Greek, which is to say that he stood in the appointed essence of being”
(Identity 103). The series of poems in Heidegger’s 1947 “The Thinker as Poet”
[Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens] are filled with maxims that define a universe
in which man is ontologically central – “Being’s poem, just begun, is man” –
and capable of heroic thought: “When thought’s courage stems from / the
bidding of Being, then / destiny’s language thrives” (Poetry, Language,
Thought 4, 3). Above all, humanity is primordially receptive to Being: “All
234 DEPPMAN

our heart’s courage is the / echoing response to the / first call of Being which /
gathers our thinking into the / play of the world” (9).
It is tempting to conclude that Dickinson emphasized locality, immedi-
acy, humor, and emotional range in her astonished responses to Being,
ultimately remaining unsure about the ontological position of humanity.
Heideggerian astonishment, by contrast, could be understood to stress
systematic questioning, piety, the historical embeddedness of thought,
and the ontological distinctiveness of humanity. Before accepting such
syntheses, however, it is best to examine the basic question of how and
why Dickinson and Heidegger present astonished responses to the calls of
Being as important to human existence.
To think about human astonishment is to begin to unlock what
forgetfulness of Being had closed off. It can destabilize everything we
know because our relationship with Being is always earlier and more
immediate than acquired knowledge. If we reflect on the fact that every-
thing in the universe is instead of is not, we can change what and how we
know. Thus in Heidegger what looks at first like a question limited to
epistemology or Cartesian doubt – what can we know about Being, what
is the truth about why things are? – develops into a questioning about
existence.
With Heidegger in mind, Dickinson’s analysis of “wonder” in the
following poem can be understood both as one of her epistemological,
neo-lexicographical efforts, a try at defining “wonder,” as well as one of her
existential thought experiments, a try at assessing the importance of wonder
as a structure of human being:
Wonder – is not precisely Knowing
And not precisely Knowing not –
A beautiful but bleak condition
He has not lived who has not felt –
Suspense – is his maturer Sister –
Whether Adult Delight is Pain
Or of itself a new misgiving –
This is the Gnat that mangles men – (Fr1347)
6 is] be 7 a] the
Epistemologically, “Wonder” is a paradoxical category: “not precisely
Knowing / And not precisely Knowing not.” By repeating so many words
in the first stanza, especially the serial negations not, not, not, not, not,
Dickinson creates a rhythmic, echoic, unresolved mood of thinking about
thinking. Breaking the lines reveals chiasmus and palindrome:
 Astonished Thinking: Dickinson and Heidegger 235

not precisely Knowing

and not
precisely Knowing not
I interpret this tense, back-and-forth homeostasis as a Heideggerian meta-
wonder about wonder, an attempt to write in such a way as to capture a
mood, perform it, and inspire it in the reader.
Only a lengthy study could compare all the ways the two thinkers do this.
Besides having well-documented astonishing effects on those who person-
ally interacted with them, both of them developed unmistakable stylistic
signatures featuring conceptual difficulty, innovations with syntax and
abstract nouns, written orality, use of apocalyptic tones, and emphatic
calls for reader involvement. Steiner embeds Heidegger’s 1920s style in
the German postwar cultural Zeitgeist of prophetic and apocalyptic writing,
forms of which included cinema, the radical speech acts of Surrealism, and
Ernst Bloch’s messianic and Karl Barth’s exegetic writings. David Porter
notes that Dickinson made “communal” lyric poetry more intimate by
using direct address, emphatic vocal tones, and other “stylistic determiners”
such as punctuation and her “strategies of the vernacular, of wit and
pretended confession,” all of which created “a voice that seemed to have
immediate proximity with the mind” (101).
Lee Braver points out that Heidegger’s “wonder” often begins in an
un- or anti-knowing awareness that everything that exists could instead
be nothing. Such “nihilation strips beings of their familiar use–meanings
so that, as strange, they can strike us and stop our taking them for
granted. Wonder allows us to view our openness or ability to be
aware . . . as extraordinary” (23). As in Heidegger, Dickinson’s speaker
in “Wonder – is not precisely Knowing” understands wonder as not just a
matter of aporia, undecidability, or the limits of logic but as an essential
possibility for human existence, one that fully manifests itself not in
thinking but in feeling: a “beautiful but bleak condition / He has not
lived who has not felt.” We are not human unless we feel the beauty and
bleakness in wonder.
It is rare to hear that wonder is “bleak” or to think of it as a human
“condition.” Philosophically, wonder is usually understood to be either a
preliminary stage of thinking, an open-mindedness ultimately to be con-
trolled by reason, or an innocuous aesthetic category affiliated with beauty
or the marvelous. In these terms, wonder can be cast negatively, as pre- or
irrational thought, or positively, as uncorrupted apprehension, but neither
option is existentially structural enough for Heidegger or Dickinson. In the
236 DEPPMAN

first stanza Dickinson’s speaker asserts that wonder is a defining possibility

of human experience, but in the second she moves from epistemology
to existence. We grow closer to the source of wonder and so emotionally
invested in what we do not know, but do not not know either, that we
outgrow the younger brother of wonder and begin to feel his “maturer
Sister,” suspense. What risked remaining an ethereal opposition between
beauty and bleakness turns physical with the possibility that “Delight
is Pain.”
The question becomes: what transforms wonder into suspense? In the
Dickinson canon this trajectory is often produced by sustained thinking of
death, and if we take that example it helps illuminate the question intro-
duced in the second stanza: “Whether Adult Delight is Pain / Or of itself a
new misgiving –.” The “Adult Delight” of uttermost suspense – of caring
passionately and wanting to know but not (not) knowing what happens
when we die: is this just pain, nothing but meaningless suffering? Or is it
rather a new “misgiving,” the kind of heightened meta-doubtfulness that
can start the process again, renew wonder, and further italicize our bleak and
beautiful being? This question is the “Gnat that mangles men” because,
simple as it is, it necessitates a radical, Heideggerian inquiry into the
relationship between beings and Being.
All in all it is better not to contrast Dickinson the amateur creative writer
with Heidegger the professional philosopher but to think of both of them as
thinkers trying to think about, and from within, states of wonder and
astonishment. Heidegger argues that the most decisive events in the history
of astonishment occurred in ancient Greece. It was “in the Sophists and
in Plato,” most of all, that “appearance was declared to be mere appearance
and thus degraded” (Identity 89–90). Being was construed as Plato’s Idea
and “exalted to the suprasensory realm,” and once this happened a gap grew
between the “merely apparent” world “here below” and “real being some-
where on high” (90). Thus was prepared the philosophical space for
Christianity, the original contribution of which was to translate the
“lower” and the “ideal” worlds into those of the “created” and “creator”
(90). Heidegger concludes that Nietzsche was right to say that Christianity
is “Platonism for the people” (90).
German Idealists, Romantics, Transcendentalists, and others in
Dickinson’s purview expressed versions of the idea that the ancient
Greeks had a more immediate experience of Nature than they did. The
Schiller selection in her copy of Prose Writers of Germany develops the thesis
at length, arguing that the ancient Greeks were very different from moderns
because their culture “had not so far degenerated that nature was
 Astonished Thinking: Dickinson and Heidegger 237
abandoned” (378). Yet Schiller’s Greeks were not Heidegger’s and not a
dominant model for Dickinson either: they were so fundamentally in tune
with nature they could, in Schiller’s words, “not be surprised by her” and
had “no pressing necessity” to “recover her” (378).
More to the point, Heidegger asks a question Dickinson faced her whole
life: what kind of thinking about Being is possible for those who are not
Christian? “Anyone for whom the Bible is divine revelation and truth,” he
answers, already “has the answer” to the question of the meaning of Being
“before it is asked.” Christians think that “everything that is, except God
himself, has been created by Him” and that “God himself, the increate
creator, ‘is.’” People with this faith “can in a way participate in the asking” of
the question about Being but ultimately “cannot really question” unless
they cease to believe and accept the consequences of doing so (Introduction
6). Non-Christians hear and respond differently to the question of Being, of
why things are, and for them the potential for wonder at it is infinitely
greater. Such arguments align with Dickinson’s religious skepticism and
suspicions about the Idealist strands of Transcendentalism, and after read-
ing Heidegger it is not difficult for us to imagine her as an early Greek
thinker, wresting being from appearances, resisting the widespread cultural
error of turning “appearance” into “mere appearance.”
For Heidegger, only poetry “stands in the same order as philosophy and its
thinking” (Identity 21–2). Poetry is like philosophy because it has “so much
world space to spare that in it each thing – a tree, a mountain, a house, the cry
of a bird – loses all indifference and commonplaceness” and the poet speaks as
if Being “were being expressed and invoked for the first time” (21–2). In an
important poem that goes further than any cited so far, Dickinson enacts and
extends the idea that the poet makes the ordinary extraordinary:
This was a Poet –
It is That
Distills amazing sense
From Ordinary Meanings –
And Attar so immense
From the familiar species
That perished by the Door –
We wonder it was not Ourselves
Arrested it – before –
Of Pictures, the Discloser –
The Poet – it is He –
Entitles Us – by Contrast –
To ceaseless Poverty –
238 DEPPMAN

Of Portion – so unconscious –
The Robbing – could not harm –
Himself – to Him – a Fortune –
Exterior – to Time – (Fr446)
We cannot translate the striking opening lines – “This was a Poet – / It is
That” – into easy prose (the poet is the one who) for they reveal the speaker as
an astonished reader, one who is feeling, now, that this was a poet! Aware of
being in a privileged moment, wondering about her own wonder, she says:
It is That
That is dislocated, minimal, and weird. It? is? That? If we insist on a clear
understanding, on choosing a single interpretation for what “It” and “That”
refer to, why they are equated, why “That” is capitalized, or why the verb
tense changes from “was” to “is,” we will be frustrated. Our uncertainty is
on point, the ordinary words are extraordinary, and we wonder.
We wonder what it means to “distill” an “Attar so immense” from “the
familiar species/ That perished by the Door.” Broadly, this is the translation
model from the “wind” poems sent to Higginson: the poet seizes, concen-
trates, and makes “amazing sense” from the “familiar.” The process reflects
Heidegger’s philosophy of ordinariness which, as Steiner notes, construes
ordinary objects neither in Platonic fashion, as the “degenerate fragments”
of a world of ideas, nor as “the fluctuating matrix for intangible Aristotelian
energies” (65). On the contrary, because Heidegger intended to reorient a
philosophical tradition in which the substantive world had been devalued
by “Platonic idealism, Cartesian subjectivity, Kantian transcendence, or
Nietzschean voluntarism,” he attended to the “total thereness” of things,
describing how they filled “him with wonder,” how he stood “soul- and
spirit-deep in immanence, in that which is, and in the utter strangeness and
wonder of his own “isness” within it (67, 65).
With the idea of the poet as a “Discloser,” Dickinson approaches
the Heideggerian vocabulary of aletheia, of truth as disclosedness
[Erschlossenheit] rather than as adequation of language or concept
to reality. For both of them “disclosure” implies an intense and
open-ended – dis-closive – event greater than learning. The term recurs
when they think about the revealing–concealing of Being, God, and
Nature:
The Lightning is a yellow Fork
From Tables in the Sky
By inadvertent fingers dropt
The awful Cutlery
 Astonished Thinking: Dickinson and Heidegger 239
Of mansions never quite disclosed
And never quite concealed
The Apparatus of the Dark
To ignorance revealed – (Fr1140).
Typically, Dickinson features passive verbs – “dropt,” “disclosed,” “concealed,”
“revealed” – to raise but not answer questions about who the agents are
and how exactly they behave in a disclosive event of Being. The anthropo-
morphized (divine?) agent seems inattentive and dangerous – “inadvertent
fingers” with “awful Cutlery” – but we cannot be sure: maybe it is purposeful.
The result is the paradox of wonder so central to the human condition: “. . .
never quite disclosed” but “never quite concealed.” The “Apparatus of the
Dark” is “revealed” but only “to ignorance.”
Events of disclosure can change the way we relate to the world, ourselves,
and Being: “Through disclosedness,” says Heidegger, we enter into “the
possibility of being . . . ‘there’” (Being 315). Disclosure attunes us to our
place(s), to the ways we “‘are’ one way or another” and this “lets us find
ourselves among beings as a whole” (Basic 100). In “This was a Poet,”
disclosing “pictures” is one way the poet enables readers to enter more fully
into being “there,” and although arresting and disclosing pictures may
sound to modern ears like photography, a technique of stabilizing and
preserving the ephemeral natural flow, for Dickinson the term “picture”
emanated from the world of visual art and connoted artistic process. The
poet discloses pictures not by re-presenting Nature but by creating the
linguistic stimuli, the awful verbal cutlery, for the reader to strip beings of
their familiar use-meanings and see or create new pictures of familiar things.
Reading becomes an event of disclosure that reperspectivizes everydayness
and allows us more fully to be here.
Earlier we saw the Dickinsonian poet as an astonished, responsive, self-
healing, translating being. In “This was a Poet” the poet again processes felt
astonishment by modeling it, but now Dickinson explicitly credits him with
inspiring second-order wonder, a wonder at the fact that the poet inspires
wonder: “We wonder it was not Ourselves / Arrested it – before –”.
Amazement is always possible but the poet unlocks it and makes it available
to consciousness. This recalls Schiller’s description of the sentimental poet
who, in reflecting “upon the impression which the objects make upon him”
throws his readers into an emotion that is “only based upon that reflection”
(Naïve 382). But what this Dickinson poem says differently from Schiller
and from all those quoted so far is that the poet distills amazing sense “From
Ordinary Meanings.” This is a hermeneutic or philological procedure that
240 DEPPMAN

originates not in wordless experiences of the Schillerian natural “objects”

such as light or wind but in culture and language. Going from “Meanings”
to “sense” means expanding the semantic strata until they reach the full
range of the English word “sense” – sensuality, sensitivity, sensation. This is
a Heideggerian poet, a thinker who extracts feeling from inherited, circu-
lating meanings and responds both to the historicity of thought and to the
ongoing, vivifying potential of Being.
For both Heidegger and Dickinson “Essential Oils” are “wrung” by
human activity: the “Attar from the Rose / Be not expressed by Suns –
alone – / It is the gift of Screws –.” Once wrested from Being, a poem
becomes an eternal source of disclosure. “This was a Poet” figures the force
of disclosure in the Dickinsonian tropes that valorize aristocratic over
mercantile attitudes toward wealth: “poverty,” “robbery,” “portion,” and
“fortune.” The paradox is that the poet works but produces a good that is
infinite and therefore removed from the economy of labor. Unconscious of
his boundless fortune, the poet and his poems are astonishingly “exterior” to
time, history, fame, et cetera. Because he can paradoxically turn ordinary,
diligent, human, temporal labor and life into an astonishing transcendence
of precisely those things, generations of readers can partake of and be
overwhelmed by his infinite wealth. Their “ceaseless poverty” is another
name for ever-renewable astonishment.
This version of Dickinson’s poet shares much with the ultimate aristo-
crat, Heideggerian Being, which is always everywhere equal to itself, super-
abundant, capable of astonishing beings. Steiner, arguing that Heidegger’s
teaching “constitutes a sort of metatheology whose language is immersed,
inescapably, in that of Pietism, scholasticism, and Lutheran doxology,”
finds in the Heideggerian formula “Was ist das Sein? Es ist es selbst” an
“imitation of the equivalence fundamental to the Judeo-Christian defini-
tion of God: ‘I am that which I am’” (61–2). Dickinson’s formula for the
poet, “Himself – to Him – a Fortune –,” aligns with both Heidegger’s
pronouncements about Being and the Christian formula for God.
If human beings are often given to inexplicable anxieties and astonish-
ments then Dickinson and Heidegger agree that it is because we are
fundamentally not at home in Being. In fact the main reason we cannot
rigorously distinguish among anxiety, wonder, astonishment, amazement
and related states is that they all result from a discomfort equiprimordial
with existence and language: we do not know why we are here. This uncanny,
“un-homed,” [Unheimlich] feeling, says Heidegger, is not some occasional
or accidental phenomenon but the most “basic kind of Being-in-the world,
even though in an everyday way it has been covered up” (Being 322). From
 Astonished Thinking: Dickinson and Heidegger 241
“an existential-ontological point of view, the ‘not-at-home’ must be con-
ceived as the more primordial phenomenon” (234). “Only because Dasein is
anxious in the very depths of its Being, does it become possible for anxiety
to be elicited physiologically” (234). We cover up our not-at-home and
anxious feelings with “tranquilizing” thoughts and idle talk of all kinds, but
this way of being, the “Being-in-the-world which is tranquillized and
familiar,” is only a “mode of Dasein’s uncanniness, not the reverse” (234).
“In anxiety, we say, ‘one feels ill at ease [es ist einem unheimlich].’ What is ‘it’
that makes ‘one’ feel ill at ease?” (Basic 101). We do not know, because while
anxious we “can get no hold on things” and in this “malaise” we “try to
shatter the vacant stillness with compulsive talk” but this “only proves the
presence of the nothing” (101). The larger point is that although anxiety may
seem rare, especially compared to the “fear” into which it is so often publicly
converted, it nevertheless enables Dasein to become “disclosable in a
primordial sense” to itself (Being 235).
Like astonishment, anxiety is frequent in Dickinson’s letters and the
basic mood of many poems. In “This was a Poet,” readers familiar with
Dickinson’s writings can feel anxiety carried in the phrase “perished by the
door.” Although the phrase might seem to be a version of Heidegger’s
“present at hand” – the flowers, herbs, or insects are just there as part of the
ordinary world of the speaker, ready to hand for use in arrangements or as
gifts – ultimately the facts that they have “perished,” spent their being, and
are “by the door” are not innocent clichés for “being handy.”
The door, across Dickinson’s poetry, can be distinguished from the
window, the shore, dawn, dusk, and other liminal elements. It often signals
the thought that we are naked before Being and represents a privileged locus
for Dickinson’s meditations on wonder- and anxiety-producing existential
structures such as waiting, expectation, and anticipation. In 1859, a time
when she was beginning to dedicate herself to poetry, she exclaimed:
“Complacency! My Father! in such a world as this, when we must all
stand barefoot before thy jasper doors!” (L204). The door would become
a threshold between this world of everydayness, usually a female, humble,
domestic, safe, routine, mortal space of “labor and leisure,” and the next or
other world outside, usually male, dangerous, exposed, mysterious, and
radically transformative. Looking at many poems we can see that the
implied or literal presence of a door often signals tense expectation: the
lover will return, the speaker will be absorbed outward, death will come, a
sublime event may occur.
Often “door” poems involve an exciting and frightening formation of a
“we” from an “I” and a mysterious and powerful “He.” A female figure,
242 DEPPMAN

often the speaker, is inside the house. She is worried or breathless and
displays disrupted movements that are stylized as stop and start: running,
hesitating, nervously advancing. The speaker comments on her extreme
experience of time, from intense seconds to decades, and anticipates what it
will be like to be with “him.” Details include the effect of His presence on
conversation, breathing, thinking, appearance (beauty and clothes). The
moment of contact, especially his first look upon her face, is a crux: she
brings a flower or dog as a distracting or protective emblem.
In “The Birds reported from the South” the speaker locks herself in the
house to keep out the “timid” yet threatening flowers: “The Flowers –
appealed – a timid Throng – / I reinforced the Door – / Go blossom for the
Bees – I said – / And trouble Me – no More –” (Fr780). This anxious
speaker’s “trouble” is precisely the kind that Dickinson’s “verses” must
“relieve.” In “Fitter to see him I may be” the speaker fears that she may
be unrecognizable when “He” returns to her door to take her away forever:
“I only must not grow so new / That He’ll mistake – and ask for me / Of
me – when first unto the Door / I go – to Elsewhere go no more –” (Fr834).
To go through the door, to chance these unhoming anxieties and astonish-
ments, to risk losing one’s self in a larger We – such activities change one’s
relationship with Being. In one of her letters to “Master,” Dickinson lyricizes
her prose and figures this unhoming by morphing her house into God’s, her
door into the heavenly gates: “The Violets are by my side, the Robin very
near, and ‘Spring’ – they say, Who is she – going by the door – // Indeed it is
God’s house – and these are gates of Heaven, and to and fro, the angels go,
with their sweet postillions” (L187). In “Again his voice is at the door,” the
speaker goes forth from her house with an exotic stranger and experiences a
“precious hour” (Fr274). This is the astonishing, divine time she wishes she
could share with Master: “Couldn’t Carlo, and you and I walk in the
meadows an hour – and nobody care but the Bobolink” (L233)? In our
homes, we anxious readers rely on the poet in “This was a Poet –” to open
the door to sublime and unhoming existence, then to uncover and distill it in
such a way that it becomes permanently visible, possible, and precious.
We have now looked at how both Dickinson and Heidegger think about
astonishment from epistemological and existential perspectives, but this
study would remain incomplete without a fuller analysis of the ways they try
to integrate astonishment into their thinking of human finitude. Such an
inquiry will help us interpret Dickinson, who is closer to Heidegger than to
her contemporaries in interpreting astonishment existentially rather than
spiritually. Showing non-Heideggerian aspects of Dickinson’s thought will
also help us see the contours and emphases of his philosophy.
 Astonished Thinking: Dickinson and Heidegger 243
The “state-of-mind which can hold open the utter and constant threat to
itself arising from Dasein’s ownmost individualized Being,” says Heidegger,
“is anxiety.” And in this state of mind, “Dasein finds itself face to face with
the ‘nothing’ of the possible impossibility of its own existence” (Being 310).
So why, asks Dickinson in pure Heideggerian fashion, does such an obvious
source of astonishment as our own mortality not “italicize” human existence
more than it does?
Did life’s penurious length
Italicize its sweetness,
The men that daily live
Would stand so deep in joy
That it would clog the cogs
Of that revolving reason
Whose esoteric belt
Protects our sanity (Fr1751)
If life were sweet because it is brief, it would so astonish people that their
minds would fail. That idea is the thetic essence of this one-sentence poem
but it cannot be equated with the poem itself, whose full power in the
reading event lies not in the tight sequence of premises but in the pressing
movements of the speaker’s mind through and around them. The first four
lines are controlled and concise, reflecting the if-then prose of an orator or
philosopher. In the last four lines the performative elements intensify –
the periphrasis expands, the metaphors multiply, the sound patterning
intrudes – and we sense that the speaker is growing dissatisfied with her,
or perhaps all, reasoning. The consonance and alliteration – “clog the cogs,”
“revolving reason” – suggest a hyperconscious thinker pressuring language
to reveal patterns she cannot find in rational prose, lucid as it may be.
“Thinking,” says Heidegger, “begins only when we have come to know that
reason, glorified for centuries, is the most stiff-necked adversary of thought”
(Question 112) Or: “The idea of ‘logic’ itself disintegrates in the turbulence of
a more original questioning” (Basic 105). Clogged cogs suggest something
more dangerous than an analysis gone astray. At risk is sanity itself,
precariously protected by an “esoteric belt.”
In this poem about how we think of life and death it is possible to interpret
the speaker’s burgeoning frustration as a deepening entry into what Heidegger
considers the most disclosive mood of human finitude. “Thrownness into
death,” he argues, “reveals itself to Dasein in a more primordial and impressive
manner in that state-of-mind which we have called ‘anxiety.’” (Being 295).
Anxiety is not “fear in the face of one’s demise,” not a “random mood of
244 DEPPMAN

‘weakness,’” but “the disclosedness of the fact that Dasein exists as thrown
Being towards its end” (295). Being “towards” one’s end is different from
being afraid of something; one’s end is not an object one can fear but a
nothingness, “neither an object nor any being at all” (Basic 104). Anxiety is a
privileged mood that allows new perspectives to come to the fore precisely
because, for “human existence, the nothing makes possible the openedness of
beings as such” (104). Dickinson’s speaker anxiously wonders why we are not
astonished, why we do not “stand so deep in joy” or get driven mad at the
thought that life is ephemeral, and her answer is: because of the way we “daily
live” or, in Heidegger’s terms, how we get “absorbed” into everydayness.
Anxiety, including the emergent anxiety of this lyric, is what brings Dasein
“back from its absorption in the ‘world’” (Being 233).
Of course as Dickinson’s poem teeth-gnashingly notes, the brevity of life
usually does not cause much anxiety. Our cogs hold up, reason revolves, the
esoteric belt does not snap, and the untransfixed “men” that daily live
saunter through the quotidian circuit. Heidegger attacks this problem
directly: everyday Dasein, he argues, is “constantly coming to grips with
its death,” but this is done “in a ‘fugitive’ manner” (Being 303). Yes, many
people “do not know about death” but this does not mean that “Being-
towards-death does not belong to Dasein universally” (295). It is just that
most of the time “Dasein covers up its ownmost Being-towards-death,
fleeing in the face of it” (295). “Losing itself in the publicness and the idle
talk of the ‘they,’” Dasein “fails to hear its own Self in listening to the they-
self” (Being 315). Irresolute, Dasein lives as “Being-surrendered to the way in
which things have been prevalently interpreted by the ‘they’” (345).
The core problem is that the “Self of everydayness” is “the ‘They,’” and
the They is constituted by the way things have been “publicly interpreted,
which expresses itself in idle talk” (296). Idle talk construes death as some-
thing that happens: people die “daily and hourly,” it is a “well-known event”
in our world, and one of these days “one will die too” (297). “Right now,”
however, “it has nothing to do with us” (Being 297). In this manner, dying is
“levelled off” to something that “reaches Dasein” but “belongs to nobody in
particular” (297). The They encourages an attitude of “indifferent tranquil-
lity” both for those who are actively dying and for themselves (298).
Heidegger’s goal in thinking of death is to clear away the misconceptions
that saturate and tranquilize everyday thinking, to “try to decide how
inappropriate to Dasein ontologically are those conceptions of end and
totality which first thrust themselves to the fore . . .” (285). The procedure is
the same in dozens of Dickinson death poems, with the exception that the
 Astonished Thinking: Dickinson and Heidegger 245
inappropriate or inadequate conceptions which “first thrust themselves to
the fore” tend to be more obviously Christian:
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset – when the King
Be witnessed – in the Room – (Fr591)
In this way the They regulates the way we think about death, calls it “a
cowardly fear, a sign of insecurity” to do so, and translates anxiety as a state
of mind into “fear in the face of an oncoming event,” fear which is then
construed as “weakness” (298). Ultimately the They succeeds in covering up
the “true indefiniteness” of death – it can occur anytime – by conceding its
inevitability “sometime.” With this “sometime, but not right now,” death
becomes misty and distant, and it becomes idle or unethical to use one’s
time morbidly thinking of it.
When we flee from our anxiety into these ambiguous ways of speaking,
existential facts get covered over. Death, for example, is “non-relational:” there
can be no substitutes, one must die one’s own death. And death is “not to be
outstripped”: it belongs inescapably to Dasein. Most of all, death “is the
possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein” (294). When Dasein “stands
before itself” as that possibility, then Dasein “has been fully assigned to its
ownmost potentiality-for-Being” (294). This is the point, argues Heidegger,
when all of our relations “to any other Dasein have been undone” (294).
A lifelong observer of the They, Dickinson shared Heidegger’s suspicions
about its “tranquillized self-assurance,” its “average everydayness,” and
littered her writings with skepticism about what “they” say and think
(233). To distinguish herself from her family she used forms of “they”
three times in a sentence: “They are religious – except me, – and address
an Eclipse, every morning – whom they call their ‘Father’” (L261). The
distance she feels from the They enables everything from sarcasm to light
humor. In one poem she admires air: “Air has no Residence, / no Neighbor,
/ No Ear, no Door, / No Apprehension of Another / Oh, Happy Air”! In
another she teases the way They think of God as an all-seeing power: “If
God could make a visit – / Or ever took a Nap – / So not to see us – but they
say / Himself – a Telescope.”
In more serious moods she recognizes the individuating power of the
thought of death:
This Consciousness that is aware
Of Neighbors and the Sun
Will be the one aware of Death
And that itself alone
246 DEPPMAN

Is traversing the interval

Experience between
And most profound experiment
Appointed unto Men –
How adequate unto itself
It’s properties shall be
Itself unto itself and None
Shall make discovery –
Adventure most unto itself
The Soul condemned to be –
Attended by a single Hound
It’s own identity. (Fr817)
This poem begins in the second-order sphere of wonder and astonishment,
with a consciousness noticing and commenting upon on its own kinds of
awareness and seeing itself as a site of experimentation and adventure. In
pure Heideggerian fashion, Dickinson identifies human consciousness as
originally thrown into two basic existential structures: being-with-others
(“aware / Of Neighbors”) and being in Being (“and the Sun”). This is the
everyday consciousness of Dasein as They-self, but somehow, the speaker
posits, it will also become “the one aware of Death.” Not only that, but it
will be aware of the fact that “itself alone / Is traversing the interval.”
Dickinson’s speaker seems to be wondering about what it means for
human consciousness to travel through three stages, from the ordinary
They-self to the awareness of death to the awareness that consciousness is
utterly alone in its movement from being to nonbeing. The third stanza
wonders whether consciousness will be “adequate” to itself, that is, able to
satisfy its own demands, whatever those may be, during the “experiment” or
“Adventure” of dying. The last stanza suggests that “identity” is not iden-
tical but subservient to “consciousness,” the two linked in the final adven-
ture as hound to master.
Heidegger and Dickinson agree that consciousness of death dissolves one’s
ties to others, that “itself alone” must make the “most profound experiment.”
They differ in what this means. Thus the way Heidegger spells out what
happens when Dasein undertakes rigorous, individuated anticipation of death
can be taken both as an initial gloss on this poem and as a statement of some
differences between the two thinkers. He argues that when, in anticipation,
one “becomes free for one’s own death,” one loosens the grip of the They and
becomes “liberated from one’s lostness in those possibilities which may
accidentally thrust themselves upon one” (Being 308). “Anticipation,” in
short, “discloses to existence that its uttermost possibility lies in giving itself
 Astonished Thinking: Dickinson and Heidegger 247
up, and thus it shatters all one’s tenaciousness to whatever existence one has
reached (Being 308). At this point, and crucially “for the first time,” it becomes
possible to “authentically understand and choose among the factical possibil-
ities lying ahead of that possibility” of death, that is, the possibility of the
impossibility of Dasein itself (308).
Invoking a rhetoric of liberation and of shattering the “tenaciousness” of
existence, Heidegger transforms the triumph over the They in death-
anticipation into the possibility for an “authentic” life, an ethical mode of
being in which one can “understand and choose among” the options that lie
before Dasein. For Heidegger, our awareness of ourselves as beings-toward-
death and ontologically unheimlich potentially leads to authenticity, a kind
of existential self-reliance. He develops this possibility by analyzing Dasein’s
“Authentic potentiality-for being,” “resoluteness,” [Entschlossenheit] and
“call” [Ruf] to conscience. “Out of the depths” of uncanny Being-in-the-
world, “Dasein itself, as conscience, calls” (Being 322).
Dickinson’s thinker-poet personae translate anxiety and astonishment, as
do Heidegger’s, but her astonishments rarely open onto moral avenues or
get interpreted as calls to conscientious behavior. In broad terms,
Heidegger’s exposition of anticipation in Being and Time reproduces what
Gary Lee Stonum calls the “romantic quest” uniting knowledge and power,
“one that in Wordsworth, Hegel, Carlyle, or even Whitman takes on the
form of a sustained Bildungsgeschichte” (177). In Dickinson, by contrast,
“Dread, anguish, and catastrophe” are “cultivated” only as spurs to “new or
increased vitality,” intense states that, even when represented as “elevation
and empowerment,” are never given any “positive” or “visionary” content
(176). There is no “embodying or possessing” sublime power in Dickinson,
for it remains a supreme existential possibility that cannot be mastered or
channeled into epistemology or ethics (177).
Yet this stark difference is only true of the early Heidegger. As his writings
progress he catches up to Dickinson in returning endlessly and question-
ingly to modes of astonishment. Braver notes that the myriad forms of
wonder and astonishment that populate Heidegger’s later works can be
taken to represent the “heir” to the existential possibility of “authenticity” in
Being and Time (23). As Heidegger dropped what Adorno called the jargon
of authenticity, he entered more fully into a Dickinsonian ontology of
homelessness where, with all other values devaluing themselves, astonish-
ment at Being became the highest value.
Perhaps this examination of where and how Dickinson and Heidegger
joined and diverged in thinking can enable us to glimpse something of their
place in the history of Western thought. What, after all, shall we make of the
248 DEPPMAN

fact that they committed themselves so fully to wondering about all that is,
to thinking astonishedly of Being in the myriad ways they did? From the
perspective of the history of ideas it means, above all, that they both held out
against strong voices encouraging them to do something much different, to
interpret Being as becoming.
Dickinson had read about the endless transformations of Being in many
places, especially Emerson. One does not get far into the essays in Nature
before hearing about it: (Essays and Lectures 15) “From the earth, as a shore, I
look out into that silent sea. I seem to partake its rapid transformations . . .”
he says in Beauty (15). A few pages later he asks rhetorically: “who looks
upon a river in a meditative hour, and is not reminded of the flux of all
things” (21)? He could never have imagined that Dickinson, a lifelong
observer of nature, could write nearly two thousand poems without ever
using the words “transform” or “flux.” If those words, so commonly and
nonchalantly used in the nineteenth century to characterize Being or
Nature, were absent from her vocabulary it is because she remained, first
to last, more impressed by the cyclicality and permanent mystery of Being.
Decisively she wrote to Maria Whitney: “Changelessness is Nature’s
change” (L948). Similarly Heidegger had read the powerful sections in
Nietzsche’s Will to Power that described Being as, in David Farrell Krell’s
summary, “a necessary fiction, an invention of weary folk who cannot
endure a world of ceaseless change and eternal Becoming” (Basic 8). In
Nietzschean terms, the very question of “Being” was anachronistic, “a
symptom of decadence” (8).
One can only conclude that both Dickinson and Heidegger were more
astonished by and responsive to Being than to the thinkers before them.
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 Citation Index
Note: The letter ‘n’ following locators refers to notes in the text.
poems
“A bird came down the walk” (Fr359), 58
“A day! Help! Help” (Fr58), 216
“A door just opened on a street” (Fr914), 186
“After great pain a formal feeling comes” (Fr372), 23
“Again his voice is at the door” (Fr274), 242
“A lady red amid the hill” (Fr137), 221
“All but death can be adjusted” (Fr789), 217
“An altered look about the hills” (Fr90), 62
“‘And with what body do they come’”
(Fr1537), 61
“A pang is more conspicuous in spring”
(Fr1545), 232
“A pit but heaven over it” (Fr508), 225
“Apparently with no surprise” (Fr1668), 58
“A science so the savans say” (Fr147), 54
“As if I asked a common alms” (Fr14), 229–230
“A single screw of flesh” (Fr293), 23
“At half past three a single bird” (Fr1099), 149
“A weight with needles on the pounds”
(Fr294), 124
“A word dropped careless on a page”
(Fr1268), 101
“A word made flesh is seldom” (Fr1715), 5, 72–74,
89–92, 100
“Before I got my eye put out” (Fr336), 122
“Better than music” (Fr378), 60
“Bring me the sunset in a cup” (Fr140), 231–232
“Crisis is a hair” (Fr1067), 102
“Dare you see a soul at the ‘White Heat’”(Fr401),
198–202
“Death sets a thing significant” (Fr640), 100–101
“Did life’s penurious length” (Fr1751), 243–244
“Drowning is not so pitiful” (Fr1542), 222n.12
259
“Each life converges to some centre” (Fr724),
178–179, 182, 225
“Facts by our side are never sudden” (Fr1530), 169
“ ‘Faith’ is a fine invention” (Fr202), 99, 101–102, 160
“Father – I bring thee not myself” (Fr295), 183
“Fitter to see him I may be”(Fr834), 242
“For death or rather” (Fr644), 133–135
“Forever is composed of nows” (Fr690), 174
“Four trees opon a solitary acre” (Fr778), 171–173
“From blank to blank” (Fr484), 225
“Further in summer than the birds” (Fr895), 232
“Glass was the street in tinsel peril” (Fr1518), 102
“God is a distant – stately lover” (Fr615), 44–45
“Had this one day not been” (Fr1281), 157
“He gave away his life” (Fr530), 127–128
“How human nature dotes” (Fr1440), 66
“How many schemes may die” (Fr1326), 156–157
“How noteless men and Pleiads stand” (Fr342), 232
“I cannot dance opon my toes” (Fr381), 110, 123
“I can wade grief” (Fr312), 216
“I dreaded that first robin so” (Fr347), 208, 215–222
“I dwell in possibility” (Fr466), 170, 181
“I fear a man of frugal speech” (Fr663), 89
“I felt a cleaving in my mind” (Fr867), 21, 214
“I felt a funeral in my brain” (Fr340), 21, 120–121, 232
“If I can stop one heart from breaking” (Fr982), 187
“I have no life but this” (Fr1432), 186
“I heard a fly buzz when I died” (Fr591), 122, 158, 245
“I’ll tell you how the sun rose” (Fr204), 106,
111–112, 114
“I make his crescent fill or lack” (Fr837), 164–165
“I’m nobody! Who are you” (Fr260), 179–180
260 Citation Index
“Impossibility like wine” (Fr939), 170
“I’m ‘wife’ – I’ve finished that” (Fr225), 180
“In lands I never saw – they say” (Fr108), 132
“I saw no way – The heavens were stitched”
(Fr633), 122, 148, 205–206
“I saw that the flake was on it” (Fr1304), 114
“Is heaven a physician” (Fr1260), 182–183
“It always felt to me a wrong” (Fr521), 60
“I taste a liquor never brewed” (Fr207), 233
“I thought the train would never come” (Fr1473), 217
“I tie my hat – I crease my shawl” (Fr522), 225–226
“It was too late for man” (Fr689), 183
“I’ve dropped my brain – My soul is numb”
(Fr1088), 23
“I went to heaven” (Fr577), 225
“Me come! My dazzled face” (Fr389), 207
“Meeting by accident” (Fr1578), 185
“Me from myself to banish” (Fr709), 213–214
“More than the grave is closed to me” (Fr1532), 132
“‘Morning’ means ‘milking’ to the farmer”
(Fr191), 98
“My friend must be a bird” (Fr71), 185
“Nature and God I neither knew” (Fr803), 182
“‘Nature’ is what we see” (Fr721), 87, 195–196
“Nature sometimes sears a sapling” (Fr457), 58
“Nature the gentlest mother is” (Fr741), 58
“No man can compass a despair” (Fr714), 143–150
“No notice gave she but a change” (Fr860), 122
“No rack can torture me” (Fr649), 204–205
“Of all the souls that stand create” (Fr279), 225
“Of all the sounds despatched abroad” (Fr334),
218n.7, 238
“On a columnar self ” (Fr740), 159–160, 203
“One blessing had I than the rest” (Fr767), 230
“One crucifixion is recorded only” (Fr670), 127,
231–232
“One need not be a chamber to be haunted”
(Fr407), 23, 168–170, 214
“One of the ones that Midas touched” (Fr1488), 184
“Our little kinsmen after rain” (Fr932), 56–57
“Pain has an element of blank” (Fr760), 39–40
“Paradise is of the option” (Fr1125), 61
“Perception of an object costs” (Fr1103), 5, 28, 95,
193–194
“Prayer is the little implement” (Fr623), 183
“Publication is the auction” (Fr788), 96
“Renunciation is a piercing virtue” (Fr782), 117
“Safe in their alabaster chambers” (Fr124), 112–114
“Severer service of myself” (Fr887), 23
“Sic transit gloria mundi” (Fr2), 52
“Some keep the Sabbath going to church”
(Fr236), 225
“Soto! Explore thyself” (Fr814), 161–162
“South winds jostle them” (Fr98), 228–229
“‘Sown in dishonor’” (Fr153), 61
“Split the lark and you’ll find the music” (Fr905),
76–77
“Sunset at night is natural” (Fr427), 51–52
“Surgeons must be very careful” (Fr156), 178
“Sweet skepticism of the heart” (Fr1438), 43
“Talk not to me of summer trees” (Fr1655),
137–138
“Tell all the truth but tell it slant” (Fr1263), 5, 158
“The admirations and contempts of time”
(Fr830), 78–79, 127, 224–225
“The Bible is an antique volume” (Fr1577), 59
“The birds reported from the south” (Fr780), 242
“The bone that has no marrow” (Fr1218), 62
“The brain is wider than the sky” (Fr598), 21–22,
120–121, 166–167
“The brain within it’s groove” (Fr563), 171
“The dandelion’s pallid tube” (Fr1565), 231–232
“The face we choose to miss” (Fr1293), 226
“The fact that earth is heaven” (Fr1435), 225
“The first day’s night had come” (Fr423), 22–23
“The grass so little has to do” (Fr379), 232
“The heart is the capital of the mind” (Fr1381),
26–28, 214
“The joy that has no stem nor core” (Fr1762), 165
“The lightning is a yellow fork” (Fr1140), 238–239
“The mind lives on the heart” (Fr1384), 26–28
“The missing all prevented me” (Fr995), 226
“The mob within the heart” (Fr1763), 214
“The most important population” (Fr1764), 167
“The nearest dream recedes unrealized” (Fr304),
106
“The outer from the inner” (Fr450), 163–164
“The province of the saved” (Fr659), 121
“There came a day at summer’s full” (Fr325), 122,
228–229
“There is a flower that bees prefer” (Fr642), 56–57
“There is a June when corn is cut” (Fr811), 152
“There is a solitude of space” (Fr1696), 203
“The reticent volcano keeps” (Fr1776), 183
“The road was lit with moon and star” (Fr1474),
207–208
“These are the days when birds come back”
(Fr122), 232
“These are the nights that beetles love” (Fr1150),
147–150
“These tested our horizon” (Fr934), 162–163
“The soul has bandaged moments” (Fr360), 214
“The spirit lasts but in what mode” (Fr1627), 204
 Citation Index
“The things that never can come back are several”
(Fr1564), 96
“The thought beneath so slight a film” (Fr203), 154
“The tint I cannot take is best” (Fr696), 139–142,
145–147, 233
“The wind tapped like a tired man” (Fr621), 221
“They called me to the window, for” (Fr589),
196–197
“They shut me up in prose” (Fr445), 181
“This consciousness that is aware” (Fr817), 245–246
“This was a poet” (Fr446), 5, 65, 197–198, 237–241
“This world is not conclusion” (Fr373), 64–65
“Three times we parted – breath and I” (Fr514),
221–224
“Time feels so vast that were it not” (Fr858), 148
“Title divine is mine” (Fr194), 181
“To be alive is power” (Fr876), 132–133
“To hear an oriole sing” (Fr402), 5, 184, 190
“To know just how he suffered would be dear”
(Fr688), 80–83
“To lose one’s faith surpass” (Fr632), 183–184
“To make routine a stimulus” (Fr1238), 171
“To this world she returned” (Fr815), 127
“We learned the whole of love” (Fr531), 125
“We like March – his shoes are purple”
(Fr1194), 232
“We play at paste” (Fr282), 106, 114, 116–118, 122
261
“We pray to heaven” (Fr476), 225
“We see comparatively” (Fr580), 135, 158
“What I see not I better see” (Fr869),
103–104, 217
“What mystery pervades a well” (Fr1433), 232
“What we see we know somewhat”
(Fr1272), 160
“When they come back – if blossoms do”
(Fr1042), 183
“While we were fearing it, it came”
(Fr1317), 109
“Who court obtain within himself” (Fr859),
170–171
“Who giants know, with lesser men” (Fr848),
135–136
“‘Why do I love’ you, sir” (Fr459),
31–34, 40
“Witchcraft has not a pedigree”
(Fr1712), 221
“Wonder is not precisely knowing” (Fr1347),
234–235
“You’ll know her by her foot” (Fr604), 35–36,
38–39
“You’ll know it as you know ‘tis noon” (Fr429),
40–41
“You taught me waiting with myself”
(Fr774), 126

letters
L6, 2, 19, 51 L330, 25, 161
L10, 160 L330a, 4
L34, 61 L354, 66
L37, 57 L359, 66
L39, 170 L361, 66
L46, 57 L380, 25
L79, 25 L382, 24
L187, 242 L472, 13
L193, 57 L503, 25
L204, 241 L519, 72
L207, 58 L586, 64
L233, 242 L728, 225n.16
L252, 24 L750, 47
L256, 25 L752a, 65
L260, 25, 106 L788, 25
L261, 25, 228, 245 L807, 59
L262, 25 L860, 173
L265, 119, 229 L907, 24
L268, 106n.1, 119, 187 L948, 248
L269, 187 L965, 233
L271, 9 L969, 171
L280, 103 L1000, 173
L281, 25 L1037, 67
L318, 25
 Subject Index

Note: The letter ‘n’ following locators refers to notes in the text.

Abraham and Isaac narrative, Kierkegaard’s anti-Enlightenment, 90, 97. See also
analysis of, 108–110 Enlightenment
absolute antifoundationalism, 5, 143
in Dickinson’s poetry, 26, 34, 70–74, 83, antinomianism, 8–9
112–114, 134, 146–148, 183–185, 193–194, 203 anti-Platonism, 5
Hegel’s concept of, 7, 85, 92, 103, 110 Antiquity of Man, The (Lyell), 50, 65
Kant’s comments on, 42 anxiety, in Dickinson’s writing, 241–242
in Kierkegaard, 74, 110, 118, 125–126 aphorisms
in Moltmann’s theology, 70–72 in Nietzsche’s work, 132, 135
in Nietzsche, 132–135, 144–146, 149 of Stevens, 136
Schlegel’s concept of, 95 apophatic discourse, 94
absurd appearance, being and, 237–238
in Dickinson’s poetry, 124 appearances, in Heidegger’s work, 237–238
Kierkegaard’s discussion of, 109, 118 apprehension
Addinall, Peter, 59–60 in Dickinson’s poetry, 216
Adorno, Theodor, 247 in encounter, 86, 231
Aesthetics (Hegel), 93 Heiddeger on, 231
Alcott, Bronson, 91 of visual, 136
Alden, John, 44–45 Aristotle, 92, 230
aletheia, Heidegger’s concept of, 232–233, 238–239 Aron, Raymond, 175
alliteration, in Dickinson’s poetry, 243 art
American Cyclopedia, The (Stewart), 18 in Dickinson’s poetry, 123, 196–198, 200–201,
American Dictionary of the English Language, 239
(Webster) 21–22 Hegel on evolution of, 94–95
Amherst Academy, 2, 18, 32, 51 Merleau-Ponty on, 197
Amherst College, 2, 19, 51, 59 Nietzsche on, 146
Dickinson family’s involvement in, 91 representation and, 70–71
fossil collection at, 53–54, 63 association
anatomy. See also mind, anatomy of in Dickinson’s poetry, 6, 16, 96
Dickinson’s awareness of, 13–29 of ideas, 17
ancient Greece, Heidegger on, 230, 236–237 James on senses and, 154
angst. See anxiety association psychology, 17–19
animals astonishment, comparison of Heidegger and
Darwin’s theory of natural selection and, Dickinson on, 227–228, 231–248
48–50, 53, 56–59 astronomy, religion in conflict with, 52–53
Dickinson’s affinity with, 57, 65, 124, Atlantic Monthly, The, 4, 55–56, 106
219, 226 audibility. See hearing
anticipation, in Dickinson’s poetry, 163, 241, Aufhebung, Kierkegaard’s concept of,
246–247 109–110

262
 Subject Index 263
authenticity breathing imagery
in Dickinson’s poetry, 8, 182, 184, 185–187 in Dickinson’s poetry, 221–222
in existentialism, 177, 179 in Levinas’s work, 221
Heidegger on, 246–247 breezes. See wind
Broca, Pierre Paul, 19
Bacon, Francis, 89 Brown, Thomas, 15, 18–19, 40
Bain, Alexander, 14–15, 18, 22 Browning, Robert, 60
banality brutality, Dickinson’s poetry and, 175–187
in Dickinson’s poetry, 216, 219 Burke, Edmund, 2
Levinas ethics and, 212, 226 Bushnell, Horace, 59–60
Barnes, Albert, 55 Butler, Benjamin F., 47
Barth, Karl, 70, 235 butterfly. See metamorphosis
“Bartleby, the Scrivener” (Melville), 100
Beagle (ship), 48 Calvary. See crucifixion
becoming Calvinism, 9, 58–59, 74–75, 131, 165,
being as, 8, 248 202–204
in Dickinson’s poetry, 91, 97–98, 103–104, 132, Cameron, Sharon, 141n.5, 175
169, 173, 182 Carlyle, Thomas, 3, 91
Hegel on history and, 86 catachresis, 98
in Nietzsche’s phenomenology, 132 causation, Hume’s discussion of, 32–33
bees, in Dickinson’s poetry, 113–115, 185, 196, 208 Cavell, Stanley, 3
being cerebral localization, 16–17, 21
becoming and, 8 Chalmer, Thomas, 53
Dickinson on, 233–248 chemistry, Dickinson’s study of, 51
Heidegger on, 227–248 chiasmus, 234–235
Levinas’s discussion of, 210–212 childhood, in Dickinson’s work, 115–117,
Being and Nothingness (Sartre), 8 222–223
Being and Time (Heidegger), 227, 247–248 Choosing Not Choosing (Cameron), 175
being-in-the-world, 240–241, 247 Christianity
being-towards-death, 9, 244 in Dickinson’s poetry, 113–114
belief Heidegger on, 237
in Common Sense philosophy, 6, 32–33, 37 impact of Darwin’s theory on, 47–51
in Dickinson’s poetry, 13 natural theology and, 50–52, 58–59
Berkeley, George, 96 romance of death in, 119
Bernstein, Charles, 3 science and, 52–53
Bernstein, Richard J., 152, 209n.2 “Christmas-Eve” (Browning), 60
Bible. See also Genesis narrative Christology, 5–7
Dickinson’s references to, 61–63, 76–78, in Dickinson’s poetry, 68–84, 127–128
103–104 incarnation aesthetic and, 70–75
Higher Criticism and, 48, 59–60 resurrected body in, 75–79
Kierkegaard’s analysis of, 108–110 circumference, in Dickinson’s poetry, 147–150, 187
science in conflict with, 52–53 Civil War, Dickinson’s work in era of, 208–209
Bildungsgeschichte, 247 Cixous, Hélène, 90
biology, Genesis narrative and advances in, Clark, James D., 25
53–67 cognition. See learning
“Bishop Blougram’s Apology” (Browning), 60 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 3
Blanchot, Maurice, 216n.5 Colton, Aaron, 71
Bloch, Ernst, 235 Common Sense philosophy, 5–6, 190–191
Bloom, Harold, 4, 140, 141n.5 legacy in Dickinson’s poetry of, 30–46
body. See embodiment psychology and, 13, 15
botany, 2, 19, 49, 51 comparative anatomy, Dickinson’s education in,
Bowdoin College, 18 53–54
Bowles, Samuel, 24, 55 comparative religion, 71
brain, Dickinson’s references to, 20–22, 24–25 conatus, 214, 223n.14
Braver, Lee, 235 conscience, Heidgger on, 247
264 Subject Index
consciousness Sartre and, 175–187
in Dickinson’s poetry, 39–41, 188–206, Schlegel’s philosophy and work of, 85–104
246–248 Dickinson, Lavinia, 1, 46
Merleau-Ponty on, 191–206 Dickinson, Perez Cowan, 61
contingency, in Dickinson’s poems, 156–158 disclosure. See also aletheia, Heidegger’s
counterenlightenment. See anti-Enlightenment concept of
Cousin, Victor, 42 Heidegger on, 239
Craig, Megan, 8–9, 207–226 discourse. See language
Creation narrative. See Genesis narrative “Divine and Supernatural Light, A” (Edwards), 65
crucifixion, Dickinson’s poetry and, 79–83, doubt, in Dickinson’s poetry, 6, 64–67, 181–187
218–220 doubting Thomas narrative, resurrected body in,
“Custom House” (Hawthorne), 100 75–79
dread, in Dickinson’s poetry, 208, 215–222
Darwin, Charles, 5–6 dualism
critiques of, 55–56 in Common Sense philosophy, 190
Dickinson’s awareness of, 50–67 in Dickinson’s writing, 190–191, 204–206
natural selection theory of, 47–50 existentialism and, 176–177
scholarly influences on, 54–55 mind-body, 154–155
Dasein, Heidegger’s concept of, 240–248
Das Leben Jesu (Strauss), 60 ear. See hearing
death Eberwein, Jane, 6, 47–67, 148, 198
in Dickinson’s poetry, 68–84, 133–134, 221–226, ecstasy
243–248 in Dickinson’s poetry, 231
learning and, 120–121 of Emerson, 56
De Beauvoir, Simone, 175, 191 Eddins, Dwight, 148
De Man, Paul, 143n.7 education
Deppman, Jed, 9, 24, 26, 175, 227–248 of Dickinson, 3–4, 50–52, 115–116, 123–124,
Derrida, Jacques, 3, 7, 93, 102–103, 191, 210, 226 137, 190
Descartes, René, 176, 211 Kierkegaard on, 121–122, 128
Descent of Man, The (Darwin), 50, 66 in United States, 15–16, 20
De Soto, Hernando, 161–162 Edwards, Jonathan, 64–65, 71
despair, in Dickinson’s poems, 144, 156–157, 160, ego, Levinas’s discussion of, 213–214
176, 186, 196, 225 Eiseley, Loren, 48
De Staël, Anne Louise Germaine, 3 Elementary Geology, 53
Dewey, John, 151 Elements of Intellectual Philosophy (Upham), 18
Dial, The, 3 Elements of Mental Philosophy (Upham), 18–20,
dialectics 32–33
of Hegel, 85–86, 96–98 Elements of Psychology (Morell), 14
in Moltmann’s theology, 72, 82 Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind
Dickie, Margaret, 167–168 (Stewart), 18
Dickinson, Austin, 1, 24–25, 161 Elias, Camelia, 91
Dickinson, Emily Eliot, George, 60, 63, 91
on Christology, 68–84 Eliot, T. S., 94
Darwin’s natural selection theory and, 47–67 Ellerman, David, 125n.5
existentialism and, 177–187 embodiment
fascination with brain and mind in poetry of, Christology and focus on, 68–69
13–29 in Levinas’s philosophy, 224
Hegel’s philosophy and poetry of, 85–104 resurrection theology and, 75–79
Heidegger and, 227–248 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 3, 8, 56, 71–72, 122n.4
incarnation aesthetic and, 70–75 on being, 248
Kierkegaard and works of, 105–128 Dickinson and, 47, 63, 161
Levinas and, 207–226 James and, 153, 160
Merleau-Ponty and work of, 188–206 Nietzsche and, 131
philosophy and poetry of, 1–5 Transcendentalism and, 90
pragmatism and work of, 151–174 Emily Dickinson Lexicon, 14, 78–79
 Subject Index 265
empiricism, psychology and, 20, 134 freedom
Enlightenment, Dickinson’s work and influence in existentialism, 8, 181–184
of, 98–100, 103, 208 Hegel on, 94
en-soi, Sartre’s concept of, 8 Freud, Sigmund, 19
Entschlossenheit, 247 Fuller, Margaret, 91
epistemology
Dickinson’s search for learning and, 9, 107–128 Gallagher, Shaun, 201
Kierkegaard’s analysis of, 108–110, 117–128 Gardner, Thomas, 215n.4, 219n.9
poetry and, 125n.5 Gay Science, The (Nietzsche), 131, 143
Erfani, Farhang, 8, 175–187 Gelpi, Albert, 148
Erschlossenheit, 244–245 gender, in Nietzsche, 131
Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Locke), Genesis narrative, science in conflict with, 52–67
15n.1, 17, 35 geography, 2, 19, 49, 51, 110
Essay on Man, The (Pope), 102 geology, Dickinson’s awareness of, 52–67
Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (Reid), geometry, 110
15–16 Germanic English literature, 91
eternity. See heaven German idealism, 3, 71, 91, 98–99, 236
ethics, in Levinas’s philosophy, 209–212, 224, 226 Gestalt psychology, 189
Eucharist, in Dickinson’s poems, 73–74, 89–90 Gillespie, Neal, 54–55, 58
European Enlightenment, 3 Gladden, Washington, 63, 65–66
Evans, Marian. See Eliot, George Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 2, 91, 97
evolution. See also natural selection, theory of Gould, George, 61
Darwin’s theory of, 47–50 grammar
Dickinson’s awareness of theories on, 50–67 in Dickinson’s poetry, 209–210
Existence and Existents (Levinas), 211 in Levinas’s philosophy, 209
existentialism Nietzsche on, 139
Dickinson’s poetry and, 177–187 graphemes, 93, 100–101
emergence of, 175–177 Gray, Asa, 47, 56
Greece. See ancient Greece
“faces” grief, in Dickinson’s poetry, 21, 72
in Dickinson’s poetry, 222–224 Gruber, Howard E., 53
in Levinas’s philosophy, 211–213, 224–226 Guthrie, James, 56
faculty psychology, 15–17, 19
faith Habegger, Alfred, 19–20, 160
in Dickinson’s poetry, 7, 97–99, 101–104, Habermas, Jürgen, 136
183–187 Hamann, Johann, 90, 97, 104
James’s discussion of, 161–162 Hampshire and Franklin Express, The, 27–28, 55
fear Harde, Roxanne, 69
in Dickinson’s poetry, 76–77, 225, 228, 231, Harper’s, 55
241, 245 Hartley, David, 3, 17–18
Kierkegaard’s discussion of, 73–75, 109–112 Hartman, Geoffrey, 175
Ficino, Marsilio, 1 Haven, Joseph, 6, 15, 18–19, 25, 28
Fineman, Daniel, 7, 85–104 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 100
Fish, Stanley, 151–152 hearing, in Levinas’s philosophy, 217
Fitzroy, Robert, 48 heaven, in Dickinson’s poetry, 224–225
Flower, Elizabeth, 191 Hedge, Frederic, 90–91
flowers, in Dickinson’s poetry, 57, 63, 218, 221, Hegel, G. F. W., 3–5, 7, 60
229, 232, 241–242 antagonism with Schlegel, 95–104
folk psychology, Dickinson’s references to, 23–25 Dickinson and philosophy of, 85–104, 225
fossil evidence, natural selection theory and, 53–54 epistemology of, 108, 118n.2, 128
Foucault, Michel, 143 on fragmentary theory, 91–93
Fragment, The (Elias), 91 here and now in works of, 96–97
fragmentation, in metaphysical philosophy, 91–95 Kierkegaard and, 121–123
Franklin, R. W., 99–100 on language, 100
Freedman, Linda, 7, 68–84 phenomenology of, 120–121
266 Subject Index
Hegel, G. F. W. (cont.)
progressive dialectic of, 85–86, 98
on science, 103
Weltgeist of, 122
Heiberg, Johan, 118
Heidegger, Martin, 3, 5, 134, 175
Dickinson and, 227–248
existentialism and, 8, 191
Thaumazein (astonishment) of, 9, 227–228
Herder, Johann Gottfried, 90, 97
Higginson, Thomas Wentworth
as Atlantic Monthly editor, 4, 106
Dickinson’s correspondence with, 7, 9, 25, 63,
72, 81, 228–229
Dickinson’s poems sent to, 104, 106–128,
228–230, 238
“Letter to a Young Contributor,” 106, 122
Higher Criticism, 5–6, 47–48, 59–60, 70
history
Hegel’s concept of, 85–86
Heidegger on, 230–231
meaning and, 118n.2
Hitchcock, Edward, 48, 51–54, 61
Hofstadter, Richard, 160–161
Hölderlin, Friedrich, 3, 233
holiness, Levinas’s discussion of, 224
Holland, Elizabeth, 66, 187
Holland, Josiah, 55
homiletics, Dickinson’s interest in, 59
Hubbard, Melanie, 6, 30–46
humanity, in Levinas’s philosophy, 209–215
Hume, David, 193
on belief, 33
on causation, 32
Dickinson’s poetry and influence of, 30–46
on intuition, 41–42
skepticism of, 5–6, 40, 45–46
Humphrey, Heman, 59
Husserl, Edmund, 175–176, 191–193, 202, 203
hypostatic union, doctrine of, 70–72, 75, 79–80
immortality, in Dickinson’s poems, 62–65,
133–134, 157–160, 178–187, 203–206, 223
incarnation aesthetics
in Dickinson’s work, 7, 68–69, 77–79, 91–92
Moltmann’s theology concerning, 70–75
Inquiry into the Human Mind (Reid), 15–16
intentionality, in Dickinson’s work, 106
interiority, in Dickininson’s work, 177–178
intimacy, in Dickinson’s poems, 183–187,
207–208
Introduction to Metaphysics (Heidegger), 227
intuition
in Common Sense philosophy, 41–42
in Dickinson’s poetry, 40–41, 43
irony
in Dickinson’s work, 76, 92, 102, 141, 195–196
in Hegel’s work, 94, 97
in Kierkegaard, 94
in Schlegel’s work, 88, 94–95, 102
Is it Righteous to Be? (Levinas), 210–211
James, William, 8, 14, 151–156, 159–162, 164–174,
220n.10
Jesuology, theology of, 71–72
Judaism, Levinas’s essays on, 224n.15
Juhasz, Suzanne, 21
Kant, Immanuel, 6, 42, 60, 90, 104, 108, 193
on the sublime, 140
Keane, Patrick J., 58n.3
Kearns, Michael, 6, 13–29
Kierkegaard, Søren, 5, 7, 74, 94
Dickinson and, 108–128
existentialism and, 176–177, 182
Hegel and, 121–123
on learning, 108–110, 117–119, 121–123, 125–128
metaphysics and, 94
Kirkby, Joan, 55
knowledge. See also epistemology
Dickinson’s search for, 97–98, 105, 106–128
Krell, David Farrell, 248
Lacan, Jacques, 191
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 94
language. See also philology
Common Sense theory on role of, 30
in Dickinson’s writing, 43–45, 73–74, 89–92,
100–104, 133–138, 146–150
Merleau-Ponty on, 195–196
Nietzsche on role of, 138–150
pragmatism and theory of, 151–154
Schlegel on, 94–95, 100
learning
death and, 120–121
Dickinson’s desire for, 105–128
Hegel on, 118n.2
Kierkegaard on, 108–110, 117–128
Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 100
Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind
(Upham), 19
Levinas, Emmanuel, 5, 8–9, 191, 208–226
liberal Christianity, 71–72
Lingis, Alphonso, 210
Linnaean Society, 49
Locke, John, 3, 6, 71
Common Sense philosophy and, 31, 34–35,
40–42, 45–46
early psychology and work of, 15n.1, 17–18, 28
on language, 43–44
 Subject Index 267
Loeffelholz, Mary, 3, 198 Murphey, Murray G., 191
logos, etymological roots of, 73 mysticism, in Dickinson’s poetry, 4
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 198–201
Lord, Otis Phillips, 47, 65, 225n.16 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 94
loss, Hegel’s concept of, 85–87 natural selection, theory of
Loving, Jerome, 196 challenges to biblical creation and, 52–55
Lowenberg, Carlton, 51 Dickinson’s awareness of, 56–67
Lucinde (Schlegel), 94 natural theology, 48, 51–52, 58–59
Luther, Martin, 91 Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and
Lutheranism, 131 Attributes of the Deity (Paley), 51
Lyell, Charles, 47–50, 53, 63, 65 Nature (Emerson), 248
lyric nature, Dickinson’s awareness of, 183–187
Dickinson’s poetry as, 6, 24–27, 105, Neanderthal man, discovery of, 52
120, 123, 235 negation
Kierkegaard’s discussion of, 127–128 in Dickinson’s poems, 140–142
positive negation, in Nietzsche, 142–150
Madden, Marian C. and Edward H., 18, 28 nerves, Dickinson’s references to, 23–25
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 3–4 neural psychology, 19
Malthus, Thomas, 49 New England Primer, 59
Manning, Susan, 71 Newton, Benjamin Franklin, 160
Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, The Newton, Isaac, 52, 102
(Franklin), 99–100 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 4–5, 7–8
Marginalia (Poe), 100 Dickinson’s poetry and work of, 131–150
Marsh, James, 3 existentialism and, 176–177
materialism, psychology and, 17–18 linguistics in work of, 133–138
Mather, Samuel, 71 personification in work of, 138–142
McIntosh, James, 69 positive negation of, 142–150
meaning, Nietzsche’s discussion of, 144–150 Night Thoughts (Young), 2
Meditations (Descartes), 176 nihilism
Melville, Herman, 100 in Dickinson’s poetry, 143–150
mental philosophy, in Dickinson’s in Nietzsche, 143–150
work, 5–6 Noah’s ark, science and orthodoxy of, 53
Mental Philosophy; Including the Intellect, Noble, Marianne, 9, 188–206
Sensibilities and Will (Haven), 19 noise, Dickinson’s sensitivity to, 217–218
mental science. See psychology North American Review, The, 3
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 5, 9 Novalis, 97
Dickinson’s work and, 188–206 Novum Organum (Bacon), 89
metamorphosis, Dickinson’s interpretations of,
54, 223 Oberhaus, Dorothy, 69
metaphor Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and
in Dickinson’s poetry, 21–22, 43, 61, 111, 115, His Expectations (Hartley), 17–18
138–139, 159, 168, 205, 228 Oliver, Virginia, 63–64
in James’s work, 154 “On Incomprehensibility” (Schlegel), 97
metaphysical philosophy On the Improvement of the Mind (Watts), 2
Dickinson and, 85–104, 131–138 ontology, in Dickinson’s poetry, 9, 247
Nietzsche and, 131–150 Opticks (Newton), 102
Miller, J. Hillis, 143n.7 Original Sin, Darwin’s natural selection theory in
Miller, Perry, 71 context of, 58–59
mind, Dickinson on anatomy of, 13–29, Origin of Species, The (Darwin), 49–50, 54, 56–57,
214–226 60, 64–65
Moltmann, Jürgen, 7, 70–75, 81–84 other, Levinas’s discussion of, 210–213
money, in Dickinson’s poetry, 96 Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (Levinas),
Morrell, John D., 14 209, 212, 214–215, 221
Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, 2, 18, 51 Outlines of Imperfect and Disordered Mental Action
Mullens, Priscilla, 44–45 (Upham), 18
268 Subject Index
Page, Carl, 118n.2 positive negation, in Nietzsche, 142–150
pain postmodernism
in Dickinson’s poetry, 23, 25, 39, 76, 128, 180, Dickinson’s poetry in context of, 90–91,
216, 236 226–227
Kierkegaard on, 128 pragmatism and, 152
Locke’s discussion of, 35 poststructuralism, 191
Paley, William, 48, 51, 54, 58–59 pour-soi, Sartre’s concept of, 8
“Paradise of Bachelors and Tartarus of Maids” power, in Dickinson’s poetry, 131–133, 162–164
(Melville), 100 pragmatism, 5, 8
Park, Edwards Amasa, 59 in Dickinson’s work, 151–174
Parker, Theodore, 91 Pragmatism (James), 151, 162–163, 171
Parmenides, 233 precision, in Dickinson’s poetry, 95–96
passivity, in Dickinson’s poems, 123–125 Prelude, The (Wordsworth), 173
perception Presbyterian Quarterly Review, 55
in Common Sense philosophy, 31–35, 37 Principles of Geology (Lyell), 48
in Dickinson’s poetry, 31, 39–40, 193–206 Principles of Psychology, The (James), 14, 154
Merleau-Ponty on, 188–206 Principles of the Interior or Hidden Life (Brown), 19
Perloff, Marjorie, 3 Prose Writers of Germany, The (Hedge), 91,
personification, Nietzsche on, 138–142 236–237
perspectivism Protestantism, 119
in Dickinson’s poetry, 197–198 Proust, Marcel, 4
in Nietzsche, 134–142, 146–150 psychology
phenomenology Dickinson’s fascination with, 13–29
in Dickinson’s poems, 193–206 early research in, 13–19
existentialism and, 175–177 Psychology, or a View of the Human Soul Including
Merleau-Ponty and, 188–206 Anthropology (Rauch), 14
Phenomenology (Hegel), 120–121 public schools, development in U.S. of, 15
Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty), Puritan thought, influence on Dickinson of,
191–192, 201 70–75, 203
philology Putnam, Hilary, 152
in Dickinson’s poems, 73–74, 91–92
Heidegger on, 230–231 rationality
philos, etymological roots of, 73 Dickinson’s critique of, 103–104
philosophy James’s sentiment of, 164
poetry and, 1–5 in metaphysics, 90
psychology and, 13–20 Rauch, Frederick, 14
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature Reformation theology, 70
(Rorty), 136 Reid, Thomas, 15–18, 26, 28, 40–42, 190–191
Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks religion. See also Bible; Christianity; Christology;
(Nietzsche), 146 natural theology
physiology, psychology and, 13–14, 16–18 Dickinson’s doubts concerning, 6, 64–67,
Pindar, 233 181–187
Platonic philosophy, 1, 89–90, 97, 115, 119, 219, Higher Criticism movement on role of, 60–62
230, 236 pragmatism and, 155–156
play Schlegel’s discussion of, 87–88
in Dickinson’s poetry, 115–117, 122–123 Religion of Geology, The (Hitchcock), 52–53, 61
in existentialism, 180–181 Religious Lectures on Peculiar Phenomena in the
Poe, Edgar Allan, 100 Four Seasons (Hitchcock), 54
Poetics (Aristotle), 92 Renan, Ernest, 60
poetry representation, Puritan theories of, 71
Heidegger on, 237–240 resurrection, Dickinson’s meditations on, 68–69,
philosophy and, 1–5 75–79
Poirié, François, 224 Ricoeur, Paul, 168
Pope, Alexander, 102 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 233
Porter, David, 235 Ripley, George, 91
 Subject Index
Robinson, Daniel N., 20
Robinson, Marilynne, 219n.9
Romanticism, 236
in Dickinson’s work, 3–4, 22, 60, 119,
137–138, 208
Root, Abiah, 2, 170
Rorty, Richard, 8, 136, 151, 212n.3
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 4
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 5, 8, 191
Dickinson and, 175–187
existentialism of, 178–187
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 93, 100, 136
Schelling, F. W., 60
Schiller, Friedrich, 4, 116, 236–240
Schlegel, Friedrich, 5, 7
antagonism with Hegel, 95–104
Dickinson and philosophy of, 85–104
on fragmentary theory, 91, 93–95, 97
on language, 94–95, 100
skepticism of, 98–99
Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 72
science
Christology and, 76–77
Dickinson’s study of, 51, 59–60, 64–66
early psychology and influence of, 20
Hegel on, 103
natural theology and, 51–52
religion and ascendancy of, 5–6, 52–67
Schlegel’s discussion of, 87–88
Scottish Enlightenment, 3, 6, 15
Scribner’s, 55
Second Great Awakening, 131
self, Dickinson on precariousness of, 207–226
Senses and the Intellect (Bain), 14–15, 18
sensory experience
in Common Sense philosophy, 37–38
in Dickinson’s poetry, 31, 38–40
Sewall, Richard, 50–51, 52, 91, 208n.1
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 4
Sidney, Philip, 1–2
Silliman, Benjamin, 53
skepticism
in Dickinson’s poetry, 5–8, 40, 43–46, 108,
189–206
Hume’s discussion of, 32–33, 40
intuition vs., 30
Socrates, 1, 119
speculative philosophy, 3
Spencerianism, 160–161
Spinoza, Baruch, 90, 104, 214
Springfield Daily Republican, 55
Standish, Miles, 44
Steiner, George, 227–228, 235
Stevens, Wallace, 136, 173
269
Stewart, Dugald
Common Sense philosophy and work of, 37,
40, 42, 44–45
early psychology and work of, 15–19, 24, 26
Stonum, Gary Lee, 1–9, 247
Strauss, David Friedrich, 48, 60–63, 66, 191
structuralism, 191
Sturm und Drang (Goethe), 2
subjectivity
in Dickinson’s work, 213–215
Levinas’s discussion of, 210–212
sublation, in Hegel’s philosophy, 87–88
sublime, in Dickinsons poems, 140–142
Surrealism, 235
Symposium (Plato), 219
technologia, theory of, 71
Thaumazein (astonishment), Heidegger’s concept
of, 9, 227–228
theocentrism, collapse of, 5
theology. See religion
in Dickinson’s work, 7
Theory Boom, 3
thing-in-itself, Kant’s critique of, 193
“Thinker as Poet, The” (Heidegger), 233–234
Third Meditation (Descartes), 211
“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”
(Stevens), 173
Thoreau, Henry David, 56, 100
Totality and Infinity (Levinas), 209, 212
transcendence, comparison of Levinas and
Dickinson on, 221–226
Transcendentalism, 3, 230, 236–237
Transcendentalist Club, 90–91
Transcendental Romanticism, 56
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human
Knowledge, A (Berkeley), 96
trembling, Dickinson’s references to, 73–74
truth
in Dickinson’s poetry, 97, 131–133, 146–150
pragmatism and search for, 151–154
“Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense”
(Nietzsche), 135–150
Turner, James, 51
Tursi, Renée, 8, 151–174
Twilight of the Idols (Nietzsche), 134–135
typology, theories of, 71
Unitarianism, 72
Uno, Hiroko, 52, 61
Upham, Thomas, 6
Common Sense philosophy and work of,
32–33, 35–38, 40–45
early psychology and work of, 15, 18–20, 24–28
Ussher, James (Bishop), 50, 52
270 Subject Index
Varela, F. J., 201
Verstraete, Ginette, 95
vibrations, theory of, 17
Vie de Jésus, (Renan) 60
“Village Blacksmith, The” (Longfellow), 198–201
Von der Heydt, Jim, 7, 105–128
Von Helmholtz, Hermann, 19
Wadsworth, Charles, 47, 59, 63
Walden (Thoreau), 100
Wallace, Alfred Russel, 48–49
war, impact on Dickinson’s poetry of, 208–209
Watts, Isaac, 2
Webster, Noah, 22
Weltgeist, Hegel’s concept of, 122
West, Cornel, 143
Whitman, Walt, 100, 115, 219
Will to Power (Nietzsche), 132–133, 135, 146–150
wind, 221–222, 232
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 3, 87, 136
Wolff, Cynthia Griffin, 171
Wolosky, Shira, 7–8, 131–150
wonder, in Dickinson’s poetry, 234–236, 245–248
Wordsworth, William, 3–4, 115, 119, 173, 219
Wundt, Wilhelm, 19
Yeats, William Butler, 4
Young, Edward, 2
Zahavi, Dan, 201