When the American poet Emily
Dickinson began an ongoing conversation
with herself about her own inner world, she discovered one of the most unique
sources of creative inspiration in the history of poetry. It was inexhaustible
and, like the breath of the Buddhist, it resided within her, accessible
wherever she was: when she wrote, she withdrew from the world, entering an
interior space that, before long, became her poetic subject. As she gradually
withdrew from the social world, Dickinson became a remarkable transcriber and
translator of inner experience – what in 1855 she called ‘a solitude of space’
(in lyric number 1,696) – and her interior tracings often yielded extraordinary
poems.
Most of us would
feel deeply distressed by the thought of being the only ones in our heads,
sequestered from others and from daily living. Such isolation can be painful
and disorienting, not least because it demands a naked encounter with oneself,
and with no escape into something concrete or into any engagement with another.
When protracted, such experiences can be terrifying: it’s why monastic
seclusion is not for the fainthearted; why, in prison life, solitary
confinement is among the harshest of punishments.
Yet the way
Dickinson inhabits quiet isolation in her poems is fully comfortable. For her,
‘The Brain – is wider than the sky’ and ‘deeper than the sea,’ as she wrote in
1863. There is always something in the mind to follow, to chart or explore.
Perhaps we can learn from the way Dickinson uses self-isolation to generate –
rather than drain off – creative energy. Speaking in an inward voice, she
professed to be afraid to ‘own a Body’ or ‘own a Soul’, but she nonetheless
squared up to owning both, setting out to investigate and understand what she
had been given. ‘I felt my life with both my hands / To see if it was there –’,
she writes in 1862, with the kind of stark presentness that was a
distinguishing feature of her verse. In Dickinson’s hands, poetry was a medium
of vivid and energetic self-encounter.
Dickinson was born
on 10 December 1830 into a prominent family in Amherst,
Massachusetts. Her father, Edward Dickinson, served as state representative,
and her grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson, was a founder of Amherst College;
Emily visited her father briefly in Washington, DC in the House of
Representatives as a young girl. That said, throughout her life, travel of any
kind was rare. She attended Amherst Academy and then boarded for a year at the
Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (1847), after which she returned to her family’s
home in Amherst, a house called the Homestead, where her closest companions –
her sister Lavinia and brother Austin – also resided.
Through the 1850s,
Dickinson gradually settled into a solitary existence, rarely leaving the
Homestead and its parameters, and deliberately sequestered from others: ‘I do
not cross my Father’s ground to any House or town,’ she announced in a letter
in 1869. We know that she took enormous pleasure in reclusive activities around
the property: gardening, cooking, reading, writing, and sewing booklets of
verse. In her later years, she retreated increasingly to her room. This full
withdrawal into the space of the home, unexpectedly, opened possibilities, for
she thrived, and began to develop her distinctive poetic style.
Although some of
her biographers, among them John Cody and Albert Gelpi, see a lack at the
centre of her existence, Dickinson’s profound isolation granted her
perspectives – ranging from the mystical to the ruminative to the critical –
that daily social living might have cut off. Isolation proved a guard against
rigid social expectations, especially those imposed on women, which would
likely have restrained her poetic craft. Alone with herself, and her boundless
creative explorations, she found a world in inner space. Not for her were
marriage, motherhood or domestic cares: ‘I’m “wife” – I’ve finished that’ she
writes with cutting scare quotes in 1861. For Dickinson, sequester was a
feminist act of independence. And, with that understood, she was able to share
a lively written correspondence with friends and editors.
Dickinson’s
compressed, compact and, often, emotionally brutal poetic style arises from a sense of what the
critic Robert Weisbuch in 1975 wonderfully called ‘scenelessness’ – that is,
her standing apart from things, persons, places and times, and inhabiting
instead an intensely inward world. The ‘scene’ is literally missing in her
poetry, and in its place stands the poet’s receptiveness, a state that gives
people, places and things their significance: ‘The Outer – from the Inner /
Derives it’s [sic] magnitude –’, as Dickinson put it in 1862. Released
from the push and pull of daily living, Dickinson sees things anew and from a
boundary-breaking perspective. Her signature dashes mirror the starts and stops
of the human mind, while many of her poems read as puzzling and luminous
transcripts of thoughts, feelings, sensations, perceptions and ideas that are
suspended, standing unanchored and unattached. In a letter in 1869 to her
editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Dickinson wrote: ‘there seems a spectral
power in thought that walks alone’.
To see such a
perspective in play, consider the beginning of one of Dickinson’s best-known
poems, her beautiful and haunting lyric about hearing a fly buzzing in the room
at the instant of her own death. Dickinson wrote about 1,800 poems, but only 10
or so were published during her lifetime, and those were very heavily edited.
‘I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –’ was published only posthumously in 1896,
when the extent of her poetic writings was discovered. It was included in a
hand-sewn manuscript booklet, called a ‘fascicle’, thought to have been written
circa 1863. It is an unconventional poem, even a radical one, its first stanza
especially subversive:
I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air –
Between the Heaves of Storm –
With this opening
image, Dickinson invites us to occupy a specific and exact moment: the
millisecond between life and death, exactly on the line between consciousness
and unconsciousness: one foot in life, the other foot already out. Glossed
simply, Dickinson’s opening line might be understood to say, I heard a fly
buzzing around my body as I died, or as I underwent the
process of dying. It is striking that, in the difficult moment just before
death, Dickinson’s speaker manages to have such an alert and perceptive ear.
And to report exactly what she hears: a simple fly buzzing around.
The power of
Dickinson’s fly, strangely, stems from its capacity to anchor and calm her
speaker’s experience rather than to unsettle it. The poem tells us that the
speaker is quiet on the inside, content to be solitary and unattached. Her (and
our) most common and naive hopes for the moment before death are totally and
completely upended by the fly, for Dickinson’s speaker sees no tunnel of light,
hears no angels singing, and perceives no bells ringing as she catches glimmers
of the other side and prepares to depart.
Dickinson is so at
ease in this poem with what we might call the reality of dying, a comfort that
her inward isolation affords her, that she is able to look around unflinchingly
and with courage. (Her own death in 1886 would be less peaceable – a protracted
fight with disease.) We would expect the speaker in the poem to be overcome or
overwhelmed, but she is so calm that she is able to bear the
buzzing of the fly and to contemplate the finality it suggests: the fly
outlives her to continue its vital, earthly buzzing around as she lies
immobile, and it instantly signals the decaying of her body. And Dickinson’s
insistence on the image of the fly – a winged terrestrial counter-angel – is
also heroic. This is especially true in the context of her life in 19th-century
Amherst, where she was raised in a devout Calvinist family. Her dissent from
her family’s orthodoxy is an open theme in her poems, as in this from 1861:
Some keep the Sabbath going to Church –
I keep it, staying at Home –
With a Bobolink for a Chorister –
And an Orchard, for a Dome –
The image of the
fly is similarly defiant in sharply deflecting the myths the Church teaches.
What do we hear when we die? Flies, Dickinson manages to assert.
The
most striking aspect of the isolation that inhabits
Dickinson’s poems is that it allows her to expand the terrain that the
first-person point of view can inhabit and traverse. We go places and see
things inside of us in Dickinson’s poems that we’d miss in being engrossed in
life. Like the millisecond that opens ‘I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –’,
such perspectives let us imagine and inhabit spaces that we normally do not encounter.
These imaginative crossings can expand our sense of who we are and what the
world is. For example, in a beautiful and striking image for the loss of mental
stability, Dickinson writes in 1862:
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading – treading – till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through –
Here, she is at
once the one observing the funeral, and the deceased – a perspective that
requires bending out of shape our ordinary, first-person interior experience.
In utter isolation, she writes further on in the poem, she sat with only
‘Silence’ as company, the two together ‘Wrecked, solitary, here –’. Dickinson
is bracingly unsentimental about life without others. She does not miss the
presence of people in the emotional landscape of some of her most poignant
poems. She remains locked within herself, as though the inner terrain were
already plenty to explore.
We
learn from Dickinson that self-encounter can generate both creative energy and
art. At a time when we’ve endured so much social distance, dwelled inwardly
with ourselves, tracing and re-tracing our own borders, such lessons are
nothing trivial.
Emily
Dickinson and the creative ‘solitude of space’ | Psyche Ideas
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