Self, World, and God in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
SELF, WORLD, AND GOD IN THE POETRY OF EMILY DICKINSON AND HERMAN MELVILLE by DON GILLILAND A DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of The University of Alabama TUSCALOOSA, ALABAMA 2009 Copyright Don Gilliland 2009 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ABSTRACT Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville are the major nineteenth-century representatives of a strain of American poetry that may be termed, following Elisa New, “religiocentric.” In support of this proposition, this study explores the following ideas: the meaning of the term “religiocentric;” the vexed issue of the value of Melville’s poetry generally; form, content, and value Melville’s Clarel: A Poem and a Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876); the religious views of Melville and Dickinson, and the areas where they overlap; the interrelationships of religion and textuality in Dickinson’s work. In describing “religiocentric” poetry, I begin with R.W.B. Lewis’s ideas of the emergence in the nineteenth century of what he calls the parties of “Hope” (exemplified by Emerson), “Memory” (for example, in sentimentalist literature and piety), and “Irony” (for example, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s sympathies with both of the other parties but his refusal to embrace either). I locate Dickinson and Melville in the party of Irony. Elisa New’s recent work identifies the dominance of the effects of Emersonianism and the party of Hope in American poetry and describes a different strain which retains an idea of Original Sin and generally has a clear awareness of the problem of suffering. I follow her description of this strain as “religiocentric.” Chapters 2 and 3 argue that Melville should be ranked with Dickinson and Walt Whitman as major American nineteenth-century poets. I discuss two relatively recent articles, by Helen Vendler and Rosanna Warren, which make forceful arguments on behalf of Melville’s poetry, Warren more fruitfully than Vendler. I propose that Melville’s immense ii and difficult Clarel has aesthetic value in addition to its service as a vehicle for the expression of various religious points of view. Dickinson and Melville were deeply interested in and troubled by religion. Though there are important differences in their outlooks, they were both theists and were both firmly grounded in the text of the Bible, even if their theisms ranged outside Christianity. The particular issue of textuality in Dickinson’s poetry permits us to see a synthesis in her religious outlook of the transcendent and the material. iii DEDICATION in memoriam Clara Ruth Gilliland November 21, 1987 – February 16, 2006 iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank Heather White, my Preceptor, my dissertation director, and my expert guide through American poetry during these past several years. Without her nudges to action, more or less gently as the circumstances required, I could not (and would not) have completed this. The other members of my committee, Philip Beidler, Joel Brouwer, Ted Trost, and Fred Whiting, are likewise brilliant and have broadened and deepened my thinking in ways too manifold to try to describe. John Crowley is wise and generous. I thank Gail Smith and Cristanne Miller for their generous advice on Dickinson and on writing critical prose. My daughter Clara died during the time I was working on this project. She is present everywhere in this dissertation. My mother, who died in 1997, bequeathed to me a literary sensibility I continually discover afresh. My father is good to me, his love unconditional. Charlotte, my other daughter, knows about beauty, and shows me how life can be worthwhile. My wife, Leighann, is my abiding, loving partner, and her confidence in me has been unflagging. v CONTENTS ABSTRACT ................................................................................................ ii DEDICATION ........................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ......................................................................... iv 1. HOW TO READ AMERICAN POETRY ...............................................1 2. THE PROBLEM OF MELVILLE THE POET .....................................26 3. THE POETICS OF CLAREL .................................................................65 4. RELIGIOUS ATTITUDES OF MELVILLE AND DICKINSON ........92 MELVILLE..................................................................................101 DICKINSON................................................................................113 5. TEXTUAL SCRUPLES AND DICKINSON’S “UNCERTAIN CERTAINTY” ...................................................139 WORKS CITED ......................................................................................169 vi CHAPTER 1 HOW TO READ AMERICAN POETRY Of the major American poets of the nineteenth century, Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville share the distinction of having been the most anonymous during their lifetimes. Dickinson did not actively seek publication and only a very few prominent members of the literary establishment knew about her abilities as poet. Melville published most of his poetry, but in very small runs, and had no expectations that they would be widely read. In addition, neither poet was inclined to write the kinds of poetry that might have brought wide public attention, such as, for example, poetry of the expansive optimism of the early Walt Whitman or of the decorum and gentility of James Russell Lowell or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In her 1993 book The Regenerate Lyric Elisa New describes a strain in American poetry that she opposes to the Emersonian strain that is often referred to, following Harold Bloom, as the American Sublime. Dickinson’s and Melville’s periods of greatest productivity overlap roughly from 1860 to 1880; we may view the poets retrospectively as having been, during these decades, the pre-eminent poets of the strain New describes. I seek to extend New’s thinking to include two areas she does not address: Melville’s poetry in its entirety, and textual issues in Dickinson’s poetry. In his 1955 book The American Adam , R.W.B. Lewis formulated three modes of thought—we might call them “tempers”—in nineteenth-century America: Hope, Memory, and Irony. Lewis describes the “dialogue” that emerged in nineteenth-century America in terms of a 1 list of characteristic “terms and ideas”: “innocence, novelty, experience, sin, time, evil, hope, the present, memory, the past, tradition” (2). 1 In Lewis’s account, on one side of this dialogue these ideas contributed to the development of mythology in which America was a world that had begun again, “under [a] fresh initiative” made possible under a sort of new dispensation that gave divine sanction for a “second chance for the human race.” The myth found its hero in the person and idea of the prelapsarian Adam, “the first, the archetypal, man.” As the human who existed “prior to experience,” whose “moral position” was impeccably “innocent,” it was appropriate that he should carry forward this new beginning (5). However, this was but one side of one dialogue. Lewis’s list actually creates an intricate contrast among categories of opposed attitudes: the first addresses the human moral condition (sin and evil versus innocence); the second is an outlook from the existential present, which either (a) is wary of the future and reveres the power of the past, in memory, tradition, and experience, or (b) finds fulfillment in the present and looks optimistically toward the newness of the future. These oppositions relate to what Lewis calls the “two polarized parties” that Ralph Waldo Emerson described: “‘the party of the Past and the party of the Future,’ [...] or the parties ‘of Memory and Hope [...].’” 2 Those in the party of Hope (such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman) felt that they “had no past, but only a present and a future”; the essential term in their “moral vocabulary” was “‘innocence.’” Those of the party of Memory were “‘nostalgic’” (the quotations marks are Lewis’s); for them “the sinfulness of man seemed never so patent as 1 Lewis specifically refers to the second quarter of the nineteenth century, but I think it is true to the spirit of his study to discuss his ideas with a broader range that includes the second half of the nineteenth century. 2 Lewis does not cite his sources for his quotations generally, but his Emerson quotations here more or less correspond to passages in the text of Emerson’s 1841 lecture titled “The Conservative,” published in Nature, Addresses, and Lectures in 1849. Emerson ends the essay, not surprisingly, on the side of Hope: “[I]t is a happiness for mankind that innovation has got on so far, and has so free a field before it. The boldness of the hope men entertain transcends all former experience. It calms and cheers them with the picture of a simple and equal life of truth and piety.” 2 currently in America,” and they countered Hope’s “mounting contempt for the doctrine of inherited sin” with “ever more emphatic accents” on “the fixed legacy of corruption” (7). 3 Emerson’s depiction of this as polarization, says Lewis, has the effect of perpetuating an idea of a dualism in American culture, which takes the form either of a view of a parallel development or of the domination of one by the other, with the party of Memory as merely “a bleak foreign hangover” (a remnant of the Old World) or the partisans of Hope as captive to “immature native foolishness.” In a very late poem (1884), Emily Dickinson says