THE RELIGIOUS VOICE OF EMILY DICKINSON.

Title

Identifier

AAI8103951

identifier

8103951

Creator

OBERHAUS, DOROTHY HUFF.

Contributor

Miriam Starkman

Date

1980

Language

English

Publisher

City University of New York.

Subject

Literature, American

Abstract

Emily Dickinson is often considered in terms of American literary and religious traditions. However, she is not only an American poet, but also one who wrote in the poetic tradition of devotionalism. She is therefore in some ways more like other religious writers, especially George Herbert and the seventeenth-century English poets, than like her own American predecessors and contemporaries.;A reading of the canon in context of the poetry of devotion illuminates her work in a new way. ED is like other devotional poets in that the Bible pervades her work; Jesus is a central figure; she uses sacramental and liturgical language as well as that of sacred parody; her concerns are eschatological, death for her going "to God" (e.g., P-390). Moreover, like them, her sensibility is strikingly, emblematically visual; she sometimes expresses doubt and anguish at loss of contact with Deity; many poems are colloquies with God, Jesus, her soul, and her readers. Circumstantial evidence indicates that she read Herbert, Thomas a Kempis, and other religious texts, internal evidence that she learned from them, transforming their concepts and images in the service of her own unique voice. Although she rejected the nineteenth-century institutionalized church, ED's work is "aglow with God and immortality," as her unfairly maligned friend and literary confidante, Susan Dickinson, wrote of her life in an unsigned obituary.;Many poems are to and about Jesus. In those on the life of Christ, ED is "little 'John'" (P-497), for the poems comprise a contemporized Gospel. Similarly, the prayer-poems to Jesus form a modern and revitalized prayer book, her own fresh alternatives for the traditional prayers she rejected. Since the sacraments are commemorations of Christ (Webster, P-833), the poems on baptism, holy orders, the eucharist, and matrimony must be included with the Jesus cluster. When understood in light of these poems, the much-debated nuptial group are about her earthly marriage to Jesus as sacred Muse, a marriage which prefigures her ultimate union with him in eternity. The Master letters are also about Jesus and poetry, her expression of the devotional trope of the dark night of the soul in which she has lost contact with Jesus and therefore of poetic inspiration.;ED's God is a "Force illegible"; however, "All Circumstances are the Frame / In which His Face is set--" (P-820). Therefore, God's existence and love can be known not only through Jesus, the Logos, but also through the soul, poetry, and nature. Although ED sometimes criticized God for his aloofness and the pain of death, she does not doubt his existence. Further, these reproaches and their frequently comic form indicate that ED is on intimate terms with God. More consistently she praises him for his creation and expresses faith in a God who did not "Ignite{lcub}d{rcub} this Abode / To put it out--" (P-1599).;Often she contemplates the soul's nature and destiny: ED's soul is immortal; body and soul are separate, even sometimes debate with one another as in the devotional tradition beginning with medieval times. ED's soul-guest poems are her versions of the religious trope of the pure heart as dwelling for Deity; she stresses that the soul must be wed to divinity in order to achieve its goal, particularly to create the work of art.;ED is a sacred poet whose "Business is Circumference" (L-268), to live fully and meditatively the life of the soul in the presence of divinity and to "sing" about her variegated experiences because of "love" for God and her fellow creatures (L-269). The white she wore, like the white of the poems, is symbol for her dedication to the eternal, to God, the soul, and poetry.

Type

dissertation

Source

PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx

degree

Ph.D.

Program

English

Item