Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief, by Roger Lundin, Eerdmans, 1998, 272 pp.; $16, paper

When Emily Dickinson died at 56 in 1886, she was virtually unknown outside a tiny circle of acquaintances. Today she ranks as America's greatest poet and one of its most creative—though enigmatic—religious thinkers.

So argues Roger Lundin in this powerful contribution to the hundreds of books and articles on the Belle of Amherst.

That Dickinson has attracted so much attention is hardly surprising. After a seemingly conventional upper-middle-class childhood and adolescence, and a single year at Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary, Dickinson gradually secluded herself to her homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts. Except for two extended visits to Boston for eye treatment, in the last three decades of her life she saw few persons beyond her immediate family, and in the last two decades she left the grounds of her home but once. Frequently dressing in white, she permitted only a handful of visitors, sometimes expecting them to converse from the other side a slightly opened door, and other times simply turning them away. The same determined reclusiveness marked Dickinson's control of her work. Of some 1,800 known texts, only a handful were published in her lifetime, despite repeated entreaties from friends to share the fruit of her genius. Though Dickinson may have enjoyed several romantic relationships, including one in late life, she remained single.

Lundin argues that Dickinson's poetry was in large measure about belief, its uncertainties and comforts. On precisely arranged sheets, the Amherst poet crafted compressed lines about weighty topics—nature, consciousness, suffering, the life to come, and, of course, God. In Lundin's rendering, Dickinson's poetic sensibilities were particularly attuned to the vast silences. Her God was not so much nonexistent as mute, an eclipse, hidden: "I know that He exists / Somewhere—in Silence— / He has hid his rare life / From our gross eyes," she would write.

Nature too seemed mute. Where earlier generations had seen nature as a play of types—traces of divine intentionality written into the material fabric of creation—Dickinson saw in nature only tropes—a forum for the play of humanly imposed meanings. So it was that those dying in ages past "Knew where they went— / They went to God's Right Hand— / That Hand is amputated now / And God cannot be found—." And in the echo of this silence Dickinson erected the self, the autonomous "Columnar" self. With this gesture, Lundin urges, she accelerated the long Protestant tendency to move the center of God's activity from the external to the internal world.

But Dickinson went considerably further. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson and other nineteenth-century romantics, Dickinson sought to fathom the inexhaustible richness of consciousness itself. With them, she regarded ignorance, not sin, as the heart of the human dilemma. Men and women needed heaven in order to compensate for finitude and death, not to redeem life of its moral stain. By delving deep into the precincts of consciousness, she showed her preference for the private expressive self over the public conventional self favored by her evangelical Whig contemporaries (though one finds in Lundin's Dickinson few prefigurations of a post-Freudian world of subliminal desires or, for that matter, a postmodernist reveling in the endless play of signs).

Still, there were limits. Dickinson resisted the romantics' tendency to deify the self; she also resisted their tendency to sentimentalize childhood and death. So it was that the Victorian romantic readily blended into the modern realist. She proved herself a keen student of the natural world, but it was a Darwinian world, red in tooth and claw, filled only with the truths of human projection, not designs of divine creation. Like her contemporaries Melville and Nietzsche, Dickinson heralded an inner revolution as profound in its consequences as any political tumult: the coming of a world without belief. In this and other respects, Lundin argues, Dickinson lived the quintessentially modern life.

Even so, one suspects that her modernity lay not so much in her dalliances with naturalism as her contentedness with the present, with the life at hand. The economic affluence of her family situation, and the ready access to the intellectual and cultural currents of the day, undoubtedly formed part of that contentedness. But so did an underlying sense that the world at hand simply filled life's most fundamental needs: "I find ecstasy in living—the mere sense of living is joy enough." Under the circumstances there was no need, really, of an afterlife: "If roses had not faded … there were no need of other Heaven than the one below … and if God had been here this summer, and seen the things that I have seen—I guess that He would think His Paradise superfluous."

Complicating this picture of a mind stretched between Victorian romanticism and modern realism was Dickinson's complex attitude toward the historic Christian tradition. At times she seemed skeptical of the whole business. As a Mt. Holyoke student she approached but never managed to cross the threshold of conversion, classing herself with the small minority of "No-Hopers." As an adult she gradually gave up attending church, gradually disassociated herself from meaningful involvement in her family's daily devotions, gradually jettisoned the main tenets of her forebears' Calvinism. In time, prayer too seemed to be more about resignation than affirmation. Indeed, that was hardly the bottom of it, for often enough Dickinson's God presented himself, if at all, as deceitful. He offered tender mercies with one hand and bitter disappointments with the other. Even the glories of June proved illusory; "old sophistries," she would call them.

Yet Lundin finds too much evidence of spiritual passion and theological concern to say that Dickinson ever definitively renounced Christian faith. The poet longed to believe that suffering betokened more than itself—though she displayed a Lutheran-like sensibility that human frailty invariably compromises all aspirations. Jesus emerged as a trustworthy friend, an example of human suffering—though neither an atoning redeemer nor an expression of human infinitude. She was an avid Bible reader, quoting 38 biblical books at different times and places—though typically holding Scripture at arm's length as a text to be parodied as well as revered. And despite her sardonic skepticism, she remained convinced that our maker would somehow preserve and transform our lives beyond the grave—though she remained chary of making hard and fast affirmations about the afterlife.

But perhaps such ambivalence was the point of it all: "Too much of Proof affronts Belief," Dickinson would write. Art was her chosen arena for wrestling with some of the most troubling questions of modern thought; it gave her unfettered freedom to play out her uncertainties: "I dwell in Possibility— / A fairer House than Prose— / More numerous of Windows— / Superior—for Doors." An exhilarating vision it was—a vision of life suspended in midair between the poles of orthodoxy and settled atheism. "On subjects of which we know nothing," she wrote, "or should I say Beings … we both believe, and disbelieve a hundred times an Hour, which keeps Believing nimble."

Even in her letters, Lundin argues, Dickinson often seemed to be posing, trying on a face. Choosing not to choose became a choice in itself, a style of life. Tell the truth, but tell it slant, she wrote with a wink. But where principled agnosticism left off, and timid reluctance to shoulder the moral obligations of commitment began, remained less clear. And no one knew it better than Dickinson herself, for "[t]he abdication of Belief / Makes the behavior small—."

Challenging much of the conventional wisdom about Dickinson, Lundin contends that Dickinson reacted not so much against the bracing Calvinism of her New England parents and grandparents as against the Whig synthesis of moral uplift and social influence that had come to dominate the culture in which she was reared. Not that Dickinson could be regarded as a keen social critic. She held little interest in history or in the environing society, and not much interest even in the Civil War. Though Lundin valiantly tries to show that Dickinson was a concerned partisan of the Union cause, the evidence runs thin—so thin, in fact, one is left to suspect that Dickinson is best described as essentially apolitical. The gold lies elsewhere.

Through it all Dickinson possessed a remarkable ability, like the greatest of hymn lyricists, to say more with a verbal gesture than most writers managed in an extended essay. One contemporary remarked that the Amherst poet could say more in ten words than the most learned professor could say in an hour's lecture. Dickinson possessed an almost preternatural capacity for cutting to the heart of the human situation, to say what others sensed without words to express. So she would paraphrase the English poet Edward Young, with characteristic succinctness, "We take no note of Time but from its loss. … Part with it as with life reluctantly."

The book brims with insights. Lundin is a master of the telling detail, the stray incident that illumines a life pattern as a lightning flash in the night illumines a landscape. We read for example of Dickinson's relation with her parents, which revealed their Whig propriety as clearly as her lethal wit: "Father and mother sit in state in the sitting room perusing such papers only, as they are well assured have nothing carnal in them." So too Lundin suggests that Dickinson's determined reclusiveness was unusual but hardly abnormal. He stoutly resists theories that would explain her behavior as a reaction to a failed romance, either heterosexual or lesbian. Dickinson's extended family differed about many aspects of her legacy, but they agreed that her reclusion was gradual and in its own way entirely natural—"only a happen," as Emily's sister Lavinia put it.

The larger methodological point, useful for historians of all periods and subjects, is to be wary, as Lundin is wary, of reductionisms of all sorts. Lundin's careful attention to the ordinary details of Dickinson's life, viewed in chronological progression, suggests that explanatory frameworks retrofitted on the data of the past cannot substitute for empathic understanding and plain common sense.

These days it takes considerable courage to try to say anything new about Emily Dickinson. The scholarship on her life and work is perhaps the literary equivalent of Lincoln studies. The flow seems inexhaustible, now warranting even two scholarly organs, Dickinson Studies and The Emily Dickinson Journal, as well as the occasional Bulletin of the Emily Dickinson International Society. Lundin, the Clyde S. Kilby professor of English at Wheaton College, seems appropriately humbled yet energized by the challenge. He occasionally allows his own mastery of the modern Western literary, philosophical, and theological canon to overwhelm the story. It is not always evident that his brief but frequent side trips into the thinking of a C. S. Lewis or of a Richard Rorty improve the luminosity of his own words. Nonetheless, Lundin gives us a magnificent literary biography, massively researched, elegantly written, subtly argued.

Above all, he is able to make this extraordinarily brilliant woman also extraordinarily believable. She sat "in the light of her own fire," a contemporary remarked shortly after her death. Lundin's prose catches the rays of that fire and focuses them into a work of haunting beauty.

Grant Wacker is associate professor of history of religion at Duke University. His book Heaven Below: Early Pentecostalism and American Culture was published in June by Harvard University Press.

NOTE: For your convenience, the following book, which was mentioned above, is available for purchase:

• Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief, by Roger Lundin

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.