Emily Dickinson and the Poetic Metaphysics of Absence

Elizabeth Paul

ENAM 984

Mr. Cushman

July 6, 1999

Emily Dickinson and the Poetic Metaphysics of Absence

I have perfect confidence in God & his promises & yet I know not why, I feel that the world holds a predominant place in my affections. I do not feel that I could give up all for Christ, were I called to die. Pray for me Dear A. that I may yet enter into the kingdom, that there may be room left for me in the shining courts above.

(L 13)

Austin came to see me when I had been here about two weeks & brought Viny & Abby. I need not tell you how delighted I was to see them all, nor how happy it made me to hear them say that 'they were so lonely.' It is a sweet feeling to know that you are missed & that your memory is precious at home.

(L 18)

While Dickinson’s letters are almost always charged with subtle irony and sarcasm, I believe the first citation expresses a sincere and deeply felt concern about God and a heaven made very real to her through her Christian upbringing. She states that the world holds a predominant place in her affections and that she doesn’t think she could give this up for Christ. However, in a way, this love for the world only seems to exacerbate her desire to know God. God’s absence in the world which holds so predominant a place in Dickinson’s affections only makes him a more powerful presence in her thoughts and feelings. So much so, that she entreats her brother to pray for her. Paradoxically, the absence of God was a significant presence in Dickinson’s life, as it was in many Christians’ lives at the time.

With the first citation expressing her sensitivity to God’s absence, the second citation evinces Dickinson’s sensitivity to absence in human relationships. In this letter, as in many others of her youth, Dickinson harps on the subject of missing someone. In this case, she is the one being missed by her family, and it gives her a certain pleasure to know that she is missed. This, like the first citation, evinces a sensitivity to, and in this case even a conscious appreciation for absence and the way the absence of something allows for a paradoxical presence of that thing in thought.

We see Dickinson creating mysterious absences mimicking that of God consistently throughout her life and poetry. This systematic use of absence suggests that it was a strategy. Furthermore, the connection of that strategy with religion suggests that it was a strategy by which Dickinson sought to discern truth and reality. Thus, Dickinson’s use of absence was not only a strategy, but the practice of a metaphysics. For, in addition to the strategy’s connections to religion and the systematic use of absence which unifies her life and work, the way in which her poems express her belief in the real reality of thought and impress it upon the reader suggest that what appears to be a personality trait in these early letters matured into nothing less than a poetic metaphysical practice.

The paradoxical presence of absence which is central to Dickinson’s metaphysics is also central to Calvinist perspective she inherited with her New England upbringing.[1] Sewall tells us that Edward Dickinson emphasized the importance of schooling more than religion in the lives of his children, that he "was first of all an ambitious man, busy with quite worldly affairs".[2] In a letter regarding his brother becoming a Christian, Edward Dickinson wrote:

"Truly I cannot but rejoice at such news from a brother so dear to me as he is, and for whom I have so high an opinion - and I hope he is really prepared for that happy future state of existence, for which we all ought to be ever in readiness, but which I am sensible I have always neglected - and fear I always shall."[3]

While this tells us that Emily Dickinson's childhood was not dominated by a strictly enforced Calvinism the way it might have been, it also speaks to the inescapable presence of Calvinism in their lives as it was in New England at the time. It also hints at the essence of the Calvinist perspective that became the strategy of Dickinson's practice of her poetic metaphysics. That essence is an abiding awareness of a "future state of existence". The doctrine of the elect, the belief that some were saved while others were damned, neither identified until the moment of Judgment, meant that "no matter what the proportions of fear and hope which this situation encourage(d) in the believer...it is in the future that the deepest reality lies".[4] Dickinson inherited the fundamental belief that real reality existed in a future time and, as the imagery of heaven, Eden, and paradise throughout her poetry would suggest, in a supersensible place.

"What made Puritanism into a dynamic system" writes John Robinson in Emily Dickinson: Looking to Canaan "was a double scale of time and a dual sense of place."[5] What made Dickinson's poetry such a dynamic system was this dual sense of place and the paradoxical sense of the presence of absence, when one of these places is supersensible. When the real reality is supersensible, and one's most immediate sense of reality is mental but also primarily physical, this real reality takes the form of absence or ignorance. But it can also take form in thought. For example, God is intangible and, therefore, physically absent. One is also ignorant as to what God is like and what his plan is. He is represented by mystery which is the paradoxical presence of absence, in thought. Yet, this is a presence. The mystery of God or of the real reality which has its form in the absence of God or reality in physical form, causes one to think about God and reality all the more. And the supersensible thereby takes form in thought as well as in physical absence. Furthermore, a presence in thought is a presence in a person’s life, as the thought of God and the Judgement provided the Calvinists “a powerful incentive to behave as if they were saved”.[6] In as far as thinking about God and supersensible reality made it present in thought and thus in a person’s life, it was a way of making truth itself present.

The Calvinist pracitce of making the present subordinate to the future state of reality is mimicked in Dickinson’s strategy. In Landscape of Absence, Kher thoroughly articulates Dickinson's strategy of absence by which she realizes the presence of truth:

"The ratiocinative mind functions on the surface of the concrete phenomena as projected into time and space. But the poetic mind fructifies by moving on both planes, the outward and the inward, simultaneously, and thereby transcends the merely spatio-temporal dimension of things. The poet, then, sees the invisible in its visibility and the visible in its invisibility. What remains absent to the eyesight becomes present to the insight. The concreteness of what is absent is self-evident to one who sees creatively, one who transforms the opacity of objects into transparency. This inner-outer movement is fully embodied in Dickinson's poetry and suggests a constant relationship and metamorphosis between the poet and the world which stands before her. In this interaction, the absence is felt as most intense presence. In the language of paradox, however, the presence is presence only insofar as it is absence, because it is beyond scientific verification." [7]

What Kher calls the poetic mind is also, undoubtedly, the Calvinist mind and the transcendence of the merely spatio-temporal dimension of things is the Calvinist's approach to exchanging a limited and temporal sense of reality for the eternal and true perspective. The Calvinist’s quest for truth and the poet’s interaction with reality are both based on a strategy of making presence out of absence. This similarity in strategy suggests a unity of purpose. It is possible that Dickinson based her poetic strategy of absence on the Calvinist strategy of absence, and that the purpose of the first was, like that of the second, to discover truth or reality. As a means by which to discover truth and reality, Dickinson’s poetry is certainly not mere word play, nor even solely exquisite and meaningful artistry, but a metaphysical inquiry into truth and reality.

To reach some kind of truth through the paradoxical presence of absence which is a presence in thought suggests the central point of Dickinson's metaphysics, that truth, or reality, exists in thought. To put it another way, thought is more real than physical, so-called reality. It is the real reality. Yet, this metaphysics doesn't devalue or leave behind even the physical which is subordinate to the conceptual, but essential to the poetic process of her metaphysics by which she gains access to the real reality. Without the sense of so-called physical reality, there could be no absence of the real reality. Nor could there be referents for her metaphors and symbols, in short, no language and no medium in which to work and through which to create thought. Dickinson's metaphysics makes it possible for her to live with an inherited Calvinist perspective as well as a love for life and the immediate world. What unites the two, what makes the Calvinist duality of place tolerable and useful to Dickinson is the reality of thought which redeems the physical world and allows her to not only reach truth or heaven eventually, but to be getting there all along:

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 -

Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice -

I just wear my Wings -

And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,

Our little Sexton - sings.

God preaches, a noted Clergyman -

And the sermon is never long,

So instead of getting to Heaven, at last -

I'm going, all along.

(P 324)

It is significant that heaven remains the destination. Despite her mocking of church and clergymen and doctrine, and despite poems in which God is distant, absent, ambivalent, even malevolent (357, 1719,376, 576, 690) she still seeks the truth of another, future reality, here represented by heaven. She even finds that the real reality is not limited inaccessibly to the future, but paradoxically present in a way that allows her to be getting to heaven all the time. The way that she does this is through Kher’s transcendent vision that turns bobolinks into choristers and replaces the absence of a physical God with the imagined presence of a clergyman. Though the clergyman is imagined, he is no less real than the heaven Dickinson is going to all along. It is important to note that this heaven is the same heaven that others get to at last. This heaven is the real reality of Christians and it is accessible in and through thought.

The extremes of fear and hope which the doctrine of the elect could inspire also inspired a great concern, perhaps obsession, with this future reality for which the present reality was lived. Though this real reality was not physically present, it was powerfully present in thought, perhaps in a way more powerful than had it existed physically. The power of the absent Calvinist reality is reminiscent of the power of Dickinson’s absence at home that made her so missed and made her so happy. One might even speculate that, given Dickinson's appreciation for the power of an imaginative presence made possible by physical absence, her failure to be converted during the Second Great Awakening with all the pressures of such a failure, was a strategy by which Dickinson could make God, heaven, truth, and reality more real to herself by keeping them at a distance which conversion would have precluded. This would speak to the great importance that these ultimate questions had for her that she would, like a lover, renounce them so that she might always have them, unmitigated by the stagnancy of satiety. Surely, Dickinson’s continued use of religious vocabulary and themes, including, and, especially, revelation of God, eternity, infinity, paradise, or heaven, bespeak more than just a penchant to appropriate words and concerns of her surrounding culture. Clearly, Dickinson was fascinated and driven by these ultimate questions and found that poetry was a medium for imaginative, transcendent thought, for creating absences, and thus a means by which she could think about these questions and access truth.

David Reynolds’s discussion of the New Religious Style of the nineteenth century, “a widespread shift in the style of popular religious discourse from the doctrinal to the imaginative”, also gives a rationale for believing that Dickinson conceived of her poetry as a metaphysical practice. He writes:

Between 1800 and 1860, popular sermon style, which had in Puritan times been characterized primarily by theological rigor and restraint of the imagination, came to be dominated by diverting narrative, extensive illustrations, and even colloquial humor. In addition, the mainstream churches, knowing they had to compete with novels for the public’s attention, began issuing thousands of tracts which increasingly featured moral stories. At the same time, a spirit of piety permeated much secular fiction and poetry. What was once the province of theologians became largely the business of creative writers.[8]

Reynolds documents Dickinson’s preference for and enthusiastic response to this new style of preaching which made use of creative and imaginative language to affect moral and religious goals.[9] He even speculates that the New Style preacher, Wadsworth, may have been that important figure Dickinson called Master. He concludes that this speculation is “far less relevant than the fact that in the mid-1850s, just at the moment when she was beginning to write serious poetry, she was deeply moved by a preacher who must be regarded as one of the antebellum period’s foremost innovators in American sermon style.”[10] In addition to an innovation in language, this shift in style redefined the province of writers as including religious subjects and goals. It is thus easy to see how Dickinson could have thought of and used her poetry as a means for practicing metaphysics, including the search for truth and reality. It would have been natural for her to appropriate creative religious language as a medium for investigating metaphysics, joining the ranks of “the religionists she praised warmly (who) possessed both the modern stylistic adventurousness and the old concern for ultimate questions such as Time, Death, the Other World, and so forth.”[11] The parallels between Dickinson’s poetic style and strategy and the Calvinist perspective and the New Religious Style suggest that Dickinson’s poetic style and lifestyle of absence had its origin in religion. This, in turn, suggests that the purpose of Dickinson’s poetry was religious or metaphysical at heart.

In addition to the parallels between Dickinson’s poetry and religion, the appearance of a strategy of absence in both her poetry and lifestyle suggests a seriousness and unity of purpose which bespeaks a metaphysical concern and practice. Known as “the myth” of Amherst, Dickinson, like her poetry, is rife with the mystery of absence which unifies her life and work. The most notable absence regarding her life is the absence she created in the public world by retreating to her private lifestyle. While critics assert that Dickinson most likely retreated from the world in order to write poetry, she also cultivated a mysterious self-image through this retreat. Her absence in the public world, indeed, in any place but her own home, became a presence in other people’s thoughts and lives as it elicited talk and speculation that created “the myth”. Dressed in white and haunting her house like an elusive ghost, as when Mabel Loomis Todd came to play the piano, made for romantic stories which added to the mystery about “the myth”. In this way, Dickinson achieved a presence in people’s thought which was much more powerful and enduring than a mere physical presence which can be overlooked and taken for granted, and limited by gender, appearance, age, and time.

It is certainly ironic and fitting that we, also, should remain so ignorant about Dickinson and her poetry because of destroyed letters and puzzling fascicles. This has made Dickinson a giant in some critics’ conceptual worlds, as she was in those of her New England neighbors. It has also given her a powerful presence in the world of literature, academics, and Western culture. The Emily Dickinson Handbook even celebrates the poet’s international, world-wide presence.[12] In short, the mystery surrounding Emily Dickinson has given her a strong presence in people’s imaginative thought and the accompanying more tangible manifestations of this presence in books and classes about her.

The flip side of Dickinson’s absence in the world is the absence of nearly all of the public world in her experience. As feminist critics have shown, however, this retreat does not diminish, but enhances Dickinson’s experience of reality through thought:

Emily Dickinson does not evince any posture of escape from the world....Absence as withdrawal embodies a special type of retreat from the world, a retreat in which the artist cultivates his or her own mode of encountering the world. ThisWithdrawal is not a running away from reality, but a process by which the artist ripens to a deeper perception of reality....In the solitude of her Amherst room, she inscapes the vast horizons of human experience, some eighteen thousand years of human woe and bliss. The world becomes more present to her in her withdrawal from it.[13]