Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief

LIBRARY OF RELIGIOUS BIOGRAPHY

Edited by Mark A. Noll, Nathan O. Hatch, and Allen C. Guelzo

The LIBRARY OF RELIGIOUS BIOGRAPHY is a series of original biographies on important religious figures throughout American and British history.

The authors are well-known historians, each a recognized authority in the period of religious history in which his or her subject lived and worked. Grounded in solid research of both published and archival sources, these volumes link the lives of their subjects — not always thought of as religious persons — to the broader cultural contexts and religious issues that surrounded them. Each volume includes a bibliographical essay and an index to serve the needs of students, teachers, and researchers.

Marked by careful scholarship yet free of footnotes and academic jargon, the books in this series are well-written narratives meant to be read and enjoyed as well as studied.

LIBRARY OF RELIGIOUS BIOGRAPHY

available

Billy Sunday and the Redemption of Urban America

Lyle W. Dorsett

The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism

Harry S. Stout

William Ewart Gladstone: Faith and Politics in Victorian Britain

David Bebbington

Aimee Semple McPherson: Everybody’s Sister

Edith L. Blumhofer

Sworn on the Altar of God: A Religious Biography of Thomas Jefferson

Edwin S. Gaustad

Charles G. Finney and the Spirit of American Evangelicalism

Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe

Blaise Pascal: Reasons of the Heart

Marvin R. O’Connell

Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief

Roger Lundin

Thomas Merton and the Monastic Vision

Lawrence S. Cunningham

The Puritan as Yankee: A Life of Horace Bushnell

Robert Bruce Mullin

Occupy Until I Come: A. T. Pierson and the Evangelization of the World

Dana L. Robert

© 1998, 2004 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

First edition 1998

Second edition 2004

All rights reserved

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

255 Jefferson Ave. S.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49503 /

P.O. Box 163, Cambridge CB3 9PU U.K.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lundin, Roger.

Emily Dickinson and the art of belief / Roger Lundin.

p. cm. — (Library of religious biography)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8028-2127-8 (pbk.: alk. paper); 9781467422222 (ePub); 9781467405171 (Kindle)

1. Dickinson, Emily, 1830–1886 — Religion.

2. Women and literature — New England — History — 19th Century.

3. Christian poetry, American — History and criticism.

4. Women poets, American — 19th century — Biography.

5. Belief and doubt in literature. I. Title. II. Series.

PS1541.Z5L86 2004

811′.4 — dc21 97-53055

CIP

www.eerdmans.com

To Matthew, Kirsten, and Thomas

Contents

Foreword, by Mark A. Noll

Acknowledgments

Preface to the Second Edition

Chronology

Introduction

1. The Props Assist the House

2. The Child’s Faith Is New

3. I’ve Stopped Being Their’s

4. Homeless at Home

5. Laying Away the Phantoms

6. A Soul at the White Heat

7. A More General Sorrow

8. Vesuvius at Home

9. The Mind Alone

10. A Blissful Trial

11. Rendevous of Light

Bibliography

Notes

Permissions

Index of First Lines

Index of Names and Subjects

Foreword

One of the tragedies of modern life is the division of intellectual labor into disciplines. Tragedy, though, is probably not the right word, for, while this situation is self-inflicted and filled with irony, it allows neither expiation for practitioners nor catharsis for readers. Rather, the rendering of thought and writing into discrete fields of study appears to be welcomed since it affords multiplied opportunities for cognoscenti to exclude uninitiated outsiders, aspiring authorities to set up fiefdoms, and the programs of annual learned societies to parade the latest fashionable clichés. The greatest loss occasioned by acquiescing to rigid disciplinary boundaries is the distortion of reality. In fact, poets pray, biophysicists take their kids to the movies, novelists cash their checks, financiers bake bread, missionaries propagate the species as well as the gospel, jocks read books. No single vocabulary, no single set of intellectual insights, can encompass the breadth and depth of lived existence. When academic discourses deny or underestimate the wholeness of life, they cheat their adepts. And they cheat the rest of us, for readers need all the help we can get, and from every resource imaginable, if we expect to have even a chance to understand even a portion of the world that whirls about us.

Thankfully, there are many exceptions to the short-sightedness of disciplinary despotism. Thankfully, many authors do exist who write out of broad learning and who do not consider it beneath themselves to be understood by a general audience. Thankfully, many books are still being published whose authors, however accomplished they may be in the latest and most technical questions of their disciplines, are able to bring that learning to bear on questions that transcend the narrow concerns of any one guild of scholars.

A surprisingly large number of such books that reach out beyond the boundaries of particular disciplines are biographies. Almost always, the subjects of biographies are written up because they have achieved distinction in a particular field — Feynman in physics, Ruth in baseball, Lippman in public discourse, Madame Curie in radioisotopes. To be sure, distinguished biographies provide authoritative translations for the laity of the particulars that made the subject renowned. Yet they also go much beyond to show how their subject’s life course illuminates the subject’s work. Usually they also relate the achievements of the person in his or her own sphere to parallel events, influences, trends, movements, and achievements connected to the subject’s times and places. The best biographies, in other words, combine learning in particulars with a concern for the general, and do so while also slaking our inexhaustible curiosity about the personal.

The life of Emily Dickinson, the reclusive poet of Amherst, Massachusetts, might seem less likely than other noteworthy subjects for a well-rounded biography. The woman, who was never comfortable in society and who spent the last half of her life within the confines of one relatively secluded house, does not at first appear to be a subject worth connecting to other things occurring throughout the American nineteenth century in which she lived. Moreover, her poetry is remarkable for its ability to translate with lightening metaphorical leaps the barest of particular observations into the loftiest and most abstract generalizations about The Human Condition. Concreteness abounds in her poems — the fall of snow, the flutter of a bird’s wing, a bridge spanning chasms. But those concrete images seem more devoted to Grand Conclusions than to a particular life.

The singular achievement of Roger Lundin’s biography is to show how profoundly connected Emily Dickinson actually was to so many of the grand developments of her century. Through his own remarkable range of interests as literary theorist, intellectual historian, and cultural critic, Lundin offers persuasive readings of her poems, but also opens them up as striking evocations of her age.

And what an age it was. Emily Dickinson witnessed firsthand the transformation of a rural New England village into a cog in a new world of international commerce and its stoutly Congregational college into a cosmopolitan institution participating fully in the great changes that transformed American higher education during the last half of the century. Through her family she experienced the newfound possibilities and perils of professionalization. Through a wider network of friends and correspondents she experienced the Civil War. Most importantly, she was a fully informed participant in the revolution of sensibility that overtook American letters during her lifetime. When she was born, the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, with their pioneering patriotism, and the poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, with its optimistic pieties, spoke for an intellectual landscape still ruled by a benevolent Deity. By the time of her death, the urban realism of Theodore Dreiser and the sublime egotism of Walt Whitman were pushing aside earlier literary conventions, and the argument from design lay shattered on the altar of Darwinian evolution.

In such a world, Emily Dickinson was a magnifying glass: her meticulously crafted poems force readers to see the aching depths created by that shift of sensibility; they are also devices focusing the rays of the sun into a fire of emotion.

By not treating Emily Dickinson as just a poet, or just a trophy to be won in the literati wars, or just a symbol of an era — but by treating Emily Dickinson and her times whole, and by doing so in prose as refined as the learning on which it rests, Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief will doubtless earn a place in the ranks of distinguished biographies. As such a biography of such a person, its appearance also strikes a welcome blow against the artificial academic divisions that so disfigure the intellectual life of our age.

MARK A. NOLL

Acknowledgments

Iwould not have been able to write this book without the generous support of the Pew Evangelical Scholarship Initiative. The grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts freed me to do a year of research and writing at the start of this project. I am grateful to Nathan Hatch for the pioneering work he has done on behalf of Christian scholarship and to Michael Hamilton for his excellent administration of the Pew ESI program.

In like manner, I wish to thank Wheaton College for the sabbatical leave that enabled me to do further research and to revise my first draft, and for its generous support of my travel and research needs over the past several years.

Over the course of this project, librarians at a number of institutions were unfailingly helpful. I thank the staffs at the Yale University Library, the Houghton Library of the Harvard College Library, the Amherst College Library, and the Jones Library of the town of Amherst. Daniel Lombardo, curator of special collections at the Jones Library, was especially generous in giving of his time during my several visits to that collection. At Wheaton College, Paul Snezek and John Fawcett, of the Buswell Memorial Library, gave timely support and assistance in securing materials and answering questions about sources. As always, Jennifer Hoffman, my editor at Eerdmans, was prompt and judicious in shepherding my manuscript through the publication process.

A number of student assistants provided invaluable assistance along the way. At the start, Lynn Dixon spent endless hours tracking down and photocopying obscure articles and reading many reels of microfilmed documents. Lynn did her work flawlessly, as did Jennifer Siebersma at the project’s close; Jennifer had the unenviable task of checking every citation in the book and of reconciling all inconsistencies in documentation. In addition, Tim Lindgren, Robin Reames, and Matt Lundin assisted me with any number of details at different stages of my work. And finally, my thanks go to Tom Lundin, who gave a week of his summer’s time to the proofreading of every Dickinson poem I have cited in the text.

In the preparation of the second edition of this work, Jennifer Nichols of the University of Notre Dame did brilliant archival work and painstaking proofreading. I could not have completed this revision without her aid. At Wheaton College, Rebecca Wilson and Eva Teague worked diligently proofreading the index for the second edition.

Allen Guelzo, Sue Lundin, Mark Noll, and Chuck Van Hof all read sizable portions of the manuscript at different stages. Their criticism was always timely and constructive. They made me see obvious things that I had missed and opened to me new possibilities that I needed to explore. I am thankful for such astute friends — and for such an astute wife — and for the generosity with which they treated my work, even in its unformed, early stages.

For insight into Dickinson’s eyesight problems, Dr. David Gieser of the Wheaton Eye Clinic provided important information both about her condition and about the probable causes of her anxieties over her disorder. And for my understanding of the poet’s final illness, Dr. Thomas Meloy of the Mayo Clinic offered an astute assessment.

Though reading and writing are by nature solitary practices, scholarship is a communal enterprise. In addition to the persons I have already mentioned, there are many other friends at Wheaton and elsewhere who have deepened my work through their conversation and writing. I am also grateful to the larger community of scholars whose work on Dickinson and American culture has informed my own thinking and writing every step of the way. I wish to single out for thanks the following individuals, some of whom I know well and others whom I have not yet been privileged to meet: Karen Dandurand, Jane Donahue Eberwein, Albert Gelpi, Allen Guelzo, George Marsden, Mark Noll, Dorothy Huff Oberhaus, the late Richard Sewall, and James Turner.

I have dedicated this book to Sue’s and my three children, Matthew, Kirsten, and Thomas. In large measure, they grew up with this work and have shared time with it as a kind of fourth child in our family. They were always eager to ask How’s Emily? and to endure my sometimes convoluted responses to that simple question. Matt, Kiri, and Tom traveled with me to Amherst, heard me talk about Dickinson in any number of venues, public and private, and shared with me a delight in the mysterious intricacies of this extraordinary poet. But most of all, with grace and creative individuality, each of them has enabled me to fathom more completely the sense of what Dickinson meant when she told a friend, I find ecstasy in living — the mere sense of living is joy enough. For Sue and me, these three children have brought — and continue to bring — ecstasy in living and joy beyond all measure.

ROGER LUNDIN

A note on citations: To avoid interrupting the narrative of Emily Dickinson’s life, the text of this biography contains no footnotes or reference marks. At the back of the book, however, readers will find citations for every quotation as well as a bibliography of the works cited in the text and notes.

Preface to the Second Edition

When the opportunity arose to do a second edition of this biography, I took it gladly. Though the response of readers and critics to the first edition had been heartening indeed, there was work to be done to improve upon that book.

First, due to the format restrictions of the series in which Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief originally appeared, I was not able to provide adequate scholarly citations for the texts I cited or engage directly the vast, vital secondary literature on Dickinson and her work. This edition contains a standard bibliography of the primary and secondary sources I have consulted, and in the reworked and expanded section of notes, I have discussed at length important biographical and critical debates concerning the life and work.

I have also taken the opportunity both to expand my account of the religious and intellectual background to Dickinson’s life and to enhance my specific discussions of her poetry. At a number of points, these additions appear seamlessly within the text, but in the notes for Chapter 8 (Vesuvius at Home) in particular, I have been able to provide a more extensive discussion of the poetry than the first edition contained. This has allowed me to examine in greater depth the distinctive nature of Dickinson’s poetry and its relationship to her singular life.

Finally, this edition takes into account important textual, biographical, and critical studies of Dickinson that have appeared in the years since the first edition appeared. Of most importance is the fact that less than a year after Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief was published, R. W. Franklin’s long-awaited new edition of her poetry appeared in print. This work is likely to stand for decades as the definitive edition of Dickinson’s poetry, and all citations of her work in my revised biography have been keyed to Franklin’s text and his system of numbering.

None of this, however, is to say that the secret of Emily Dickinson’s life has been discovered and is about to be disclosed at last. As I argue throughout this biography, accounts of Dickinson’s life and art have been hampered too frequently by the misguided belief that some hitherto unknown fact or unrealized theory will make sense at last of the enigma she was.

That, alas, is not the case, and it never will be. The key to Emily Dickinson’s life and art lies not behind some hidden biographical door but before us in the remarkable body of poems and letters she left behind, as well as in the rich, complex history of the extraordinary period in which she lived. Whether I have treated that life fairly and fully is not for me but for others to judge. What I can say with certainty, however, after years of thinking and writing about this extraordinary woman, is that this is a life — and these are poems — worth knowing.

ROGER LUNDIN

August 21, 2003

Chronology

1828 (May 6): Edward Dickinson and Emily Norcross married

1829 (April 16): William Austin Dickinson born

1830 (December 10): Emily Elizabeth Dickinson born

1833 (February 28): Lavinia Norcross Dickinson born

1840: Dickinson family moves from Homestead to Pleasant Street home

1840–47: ED attends Amherst Academy

1847–48: ED spends one year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary

1850: Revival in Amherst

1853 (March 24): Benjamin Franklin Newton dies

1855 (Winter): ED and Lavinia travel to Washington to visit their father, Congressman Edward Dickinson; return trip via Philadelphia, home of Charles Wadsworth

1855: Dickinson family moves back to Homestead on Main Street

1856 (July 1): Austin Dickinson and Susan Gilbert married

1858–65: Period of ED’s greatest poetic productivity (more than 1,000 poems)

1858–61: ED writes three Master Letters

1861: Civil War begins

1862 (April 15): ED writes first letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson

1864, 1865: ED travels twice to Boston for eye care

1865: Civil War ends

1870 (August 16): Higginson visits Homestead, meets ED for first time

1874 (June 16): Edward Dickinson dies

1875 (June 15): Emily Norcross Dickinson suffers stroke

1878 (January 16): Samuel Bowles dies

1878–84: ED develops relationship with Otis Phillips Lord, considers marriage

1882 (April 1): Charles Wadsworth dies

1882 (November 14): Emily Norcross Dickinson dies

1883 (October 5): Thomas Gilbert Dickinson (nephew) dies; ED leaves home for first time in at least fifteen years

1884 (March 13): Otis Phillips Lord dies

1884 (June 14): ED collapses; early stages of final illness

1885 (August 12): Helen Hunt Jackson dies

1886 (May 15): ED dies; funeral held May 19

1890 (November 12): First edition of ED’s Poems published

1894 (November 21): First edition of Letters of Emily Dickinson published

Introduction

The family and friends who gathered for Emily Dickinson’s funeral in Amherst, Massachusetts, on a sunny May afternoon in 1886 had no idea that the woman they mourned was one of the greatest lyric poets in the English language. To the members of the group that had assembled at the Dickinson home that day, Emily was a beloved sister and a dynamic, albeit eccentric, friend. All of the mourners knew that their reclusive neighbor had written poetry of a kind. Some were even aware that a very few of those poems had been published anonymously during her lifetime. None of them, however, had any notion of the enormous scope of this woman’s genius or the abiding significance of the work that lay upstairs in a box in Emily’s room. Yet within a matter of decades, those poems were to earn her a place in the top echelon of poets in the English language.

Dickinson had wanted it this way. From the time that she began seriously writing poetry in her late twenties until her death almost thirty years later, she had sought to develop her art in virtual anonymity. At death she left behind close to 1,800 poems, only a handful of which had been published against her will or with her grudging permission. Not only did she not seek fame in her own lifetime, but she positively shunned publicity of any kind, securing for herself by her early thirties a solitude that was so complete that few were ever to see her again.

Yet at the same time, Dickinson did not exactly hide her poetic light under a bushel. She carried on a voluminous correspondence and freely sent copies of her poems along with her letters throughout her adult life. We know that she mailed to friends and family over 575 copies of her poems, and given the number of her letters that were lost or destroyed before her fame was secured, the total number is probably much higher than that. She intended her poems to do any number of things for their recipients — to bring comfort to a grieving acquaintance, to revive the flagging spirits of a neighbor, or perhaps simply to entertain or delight a treasured friend.

What Dickinson did not seek in her own lifetime was a larger audience. Having been raised in a Whig culture that prized patience and self-mastery, she was willing to defer entirely the prominence that might otherwise have been hers. She banked on fame, but only the notoriety that would come to her after death. Lay this Laurel on the One/Too intrinsic for Renown, she wrote of her father several years after his death. In life, fame brought only distractions and the prying gaze of the public; after death, it could grant something much more satisfying:

The first We knew of Him was Death —

The second, was Renown —

Except the first had justified

The second had not been — [#1006]

This renown fit neatly into her strategy of immortality:

A Spider sewed at Night

Without a Light

Opon an Arc of White —

If Ruff it was of Dame

Or Shroud of Gnome

Himself himself inform —

Of Immortality

His strategy

Was physiognomy — [#1163]

In saying that Dickinson’s poetry was an art of belief, I intend the phrase in several ways. Her poetry is in large measure about belief — about the objects of belief and its comforts, as well as belief’s great uncertainties. With daring tenacity, she explored the full range of human experience in her reflections upon such subjects as God, the Bible, suffering, and immortality. "On subjects of which we know nothing, or should I say Beings, she wrote a few years before she died, we both believe, and disbelieve a hundred times an Hour, which keeps Believing nimble."

To keep the Believing nimble one needed skill, and in this sense, too, Dickinson realized that belief is an art that demands trial and practice. A product of the romantic age and a prophet of modernity, she comprehended more fully than most people in her day how much the human mind contributes to the process of belief. Art, after all, is about the making of things; and in matters of belief, the history of the modern world is the story of our increasing awareness of the extent to which we participate in the making of truth as well as in the finding of it. However hard it was to fashion and sustain, belief was essential to Dickinson:

So much of Heaven has gone from Earth

That there must be a Heaven

If only to enclose the Saints

To Affidavit given —

The Missionary to the Mole

Must prove there is a Sky

Location doubtless he would plead

But what excuse have I?

Too much of Proof affronts Belief

The Turtle will not try

Unless you leave him — then return —

And he has hauled away. [#1240]

From our vantage point more than a century later, Emily Dickinson stands as one of the major religious thinkers of her age. She knew the Christian tradition, and especially its scriptures and hymns, in depth; on several occasions, in adolescence and young adulthood, she agonizingly approached the threshold of conversion but never passed over it; and throughout her adult life, in her poems and letters, she brilliantly meditated upon the great perennial questions of God, suffering, the problem of evil, death, and her Flood subject, immortality. Though she never joined the church — and quit attending it at all around the age of thirty — she wrestled with God all her life. Only months before she died, she called herself Pugilist and Poet. Like Jacob, who told the angel, I will not let you go, unless you bless me, Dickinson would not let go of God.

For Dickinson the struggle with God had a great deal to do with the considerable challenges that arose to Christian belief in her lifetime. When she was born, the argument from design was securely in place on a six-thousand-year-old earth; at about the time that she began to write poetry regularly, Darwin published The Origin of Species and the earth had grown suddenly older. Like Fyodor Dostoevsky and Friedrich Nietzsche — contemporaries with whom she merits comparison — Dickinson was one of the first to trace the trajectory of God’s decline. As she wrote in a brilliant poem about the ebbing of belief, God’s Hand is amputated now/And God cannot be found —. Unlike Nietzsche, she was not gleeful about the possible loss of God but profoundly sad about it, because The abdication of Belief/Makes the Behavior small — [#1581].

At the same time that she wrestled with God the Father — questioning not his existence as much as his presence and justice — Dickinson was drawn irresistibly to Jesus the Son. It was the humanity of this one who was acquainted with Grief that drew her to him. I like a look of Agony,/Because I know it’s true —, she observed in a poem, and in the suffering of Jesus she detected a truth that she could believe without a doubt [#339]. To the end of her life, Dickinson rarely wavered in her expressions of affection for this Tender Pioneer.

In dwelling so exclusively on the humanity of Jesus, however, Dickinson also exposed the limits of the romantic turn in theology and culture. To a significant extent, she followed the lead of Ralph Waldo Emerson and others as they sought to feed the life of the spirit by drawing from the fathomless depths of the self. In her most expansive moods, she saw those inner resources as more than sufficient to nourish the soul. But when suffering scorched her life and parched her spirit, Dickinson learned the true poverty of human divinity:

It is easy to work when the soul is at play —

But when the soul is in pain —

The hearing him put his playthings up

Makes work difficult — then — [#242]

When theology turns into anthropology, Jesus becomes merely a pioneer in the endless process of bearing pain. A full half century before Karl Barth thundered against the bankruptcy of liberal theology, Emily Dickinson had already intuited the limits of romantic optimism. A Christ who is only a prophetic representative of our own humanity is trapped with us in our finitude. What to do with that finitude was a question that consumed her to the end of her life.

Emily Dickinson is unique among the major figures of modern culture. No other person in American history has become so famous in death after having been so anonymous in life. All comparable persons of greatness in the modern world have led lives that have been, to some degree, public. For the politicians, statesmen, religious leaders, and leaders of business whom we remember, it is a given that the interest they have generated after death has only intensified the importance they had established in life. The same is true even of those artists and intellectuals in whom we take an ever keener interest today. Those painters, poets, and composers may have had only slight influence over the course of world affairs, but as they labored at their crafts, they were known for what they did.

Matters were entirely different, however, for Emily Dickinson. All but alone among the major figures of the modern world, she had no audience for the public performance of her life or work. In the manner in which she lived and wrote her poetry, as well as in her views of God and the self, Dickinson developed the full implications of the modern move to what Charles Taylor has called the inexhaustible inner domain. She pushed to the limit the Protestant tendency to shift the center of God’s activity from the world outside the self to the spiritual world within it. This woman who loved letters because they gave her the mind alone without corporeal friend lived the most intensely focused inward life of any major figure in American history. In doing so, she discovered what Blaise Pascal once memorably termed the greatness and wretchedness of humanity. And in living her extraordinary life as she did, Dickinson was able to practice an art of belief that eventually made her the greatest of all American poets and one of the most brilliantly enigmatic religious thinkers this country has ever known.

1

The Props Assist the House

The Props assist the House

Until the House is built

And then the Props withdraw

And adequate, erect,

The House support itself

And cease to recollect

The Augur and the Carpenter — [#729]

Memory is a strange Bell — Jubilee, and Knell.

Remembrance often overpowered Emily Dickinson. It ran like a fault line beneath the surface of her life, frequently shifting and disrupting the normal course of affairs. As the poet wrote shortly after her mother died in November 1882, memory was to her a strange Bell — Jubilee, and Knell. It was Jubilee because it brought the dead to life and lodged them securely in the mansion of the mind. My Hazel Eye/Has periods of shutting —/But, No lid has Memory —, Dickinson claimed, for Memory like Melody,/Is pink Eternally — [#869, #1614]. Yet at the same time, memory also sounded the death Knell, tolling the loss of ones she had loved. Remorse — is Memory — awake —, and the mind that raises the dead must also acknowledge that The Grave — was finished — but the Spade/Remained in Memory — [#781, #886].

Because of Emily Dickinson’s passion for memory and commemoration, it seems curious that there is but a single reference to her ancestry in all of her poems and letters. Her grandfather was a founder of Amherst College and a major public figure in his day; her forebears on the Dickinson side were among the first settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and played vital roles in the life of the colony and the early republic. Yet all we hear of them in the writings of Emily Dickinson is one brief mention, in the form of a promise she made to send her aunt the family’s copy of her grandfather’s Bible.

Dickinson neglected her ancestral past because she had a remarkably concrete understanding of remembrance and cared little for history in the abstract. Neither the traditions of the church nor the legacies of her ancestors interested her greatly. Because she had not known them directly, she had no memory of them. For her, memory meant the recollection of intense experiences or encounters rather than rituals of general commemoration. It usually involved the revival of a sensory impress — the cadences of a voice or the sight of riveting eyes — that Dickinson carried in her mind and that brought back to life one who had been snatched from her grasp by death. To borrow one of her metaphors, she was intrigued only by the memory of what went on within the dwelling of her conscious life; in the props that had assisted in building that house she had little interest.

MILLENNIALISM AND MORALISM

It was indeed a rich family history to which Dickinson could have turned her attention, if she had chosen to do so. Her ancestry can be traced to the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, when Nathaniel Dickinson was among the four hundred or so settlers who accompanied John Winthrop in the migration that began in 1630. Nathaniel and his wife Anna were doubtless present on the voyage when Winthrop preached his famous sermon, A Model of Christian Charity, offering a prophetic vision of New England. In language that continues to resonate in the American experience, Winthrop reminded his fellow sojourners to the New World: We are entered into Covenant with Him for this work and we shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.

The New England Puritans were in the main postmillennialists. They believed, that is, that the thousand-year reign of Christ prophesied in Revelation, the final book of the Bible, would come as a result of their ardent efforts to purify the church. The Puritans with whom Anna and Nathaniel Dickinson came to the New World believed themselves to have been sent by God on a divine errand into the wilderness. If they were successful, Christ would dwell in their midst and establish his rule over the earth.

The pursuit of godliness and opportunity sent Nathaniel Dickinson first from Boston to Wethersfield, Connecticut, and several decades later to the new plantation of Hadley, Massachusetts. Once planted in the Connecticut River Valley of Massachusetts, the descendants of Nathaniel Dickinson took root in the area and, for several generations, took charge of the town of Amherst. In a biography of her aunt, Martha Dickinson Bianchi wrote of the original Nathaniel Dickinson that he appears to have dominated to a large extent the organization of his own world in his own time. Nathaniel had ten children, and families of nine or ten children became common among his descendants. So many of his heirs stayed in the Amherst area that by the 1880s a family historian could write that in central Massachusetts the Dickinsons threatened to choke out all other forms of vegetation. In reporting on a Dickinson reunion held in Amherst in August 1883, the Boston Journal observed that we may well doubt whether the Dickinsons belonged to Amherst or Amherst to the Dickinsons. At a Dickinson family reunion in 1933, Bianchi noted, Our names outnumber even those of Smith in the telephone book, without counting those of us who have married into another family, and are a perplexity to strangers.

For many generations the Dickinsons farmed the land, remaining active in civic affairs and committed to the covenantal faith of their Puritan ancestors. Only in the generation of Emily Dickinson’s grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson, did some members of the Dickinson family begin to forsake farming for the professions. Following the lead of his older brother Timothy, Samuel entered college and eventually graduated second in his class from Dartmouth in 1795.

In selecting Dartmouth, Samuel Fowler Dickinson and his family chose to align themselves with the heritage of the colonial revival known as the Great Awakening. While the older Congregational colleges, Harvard and Yale, were skeptical of the emotions of revivalism, Dartmouth and other institutions had risen up to champion the Awakening.