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Couriers Within: The Creative Force in the Art of Emily Dickinson

© Linda Sue Grimes

Many feminist critics have misinterpreted Emily Dickinson in their own image. Finding religious metaphor too patriarchal for their taste, these critics assert that well-documented successes like Dickinson do not subscribe to the God of patriarchy, but the problem they cause is far worse than the problem they try to solve. While Dickinson certainly did not subscribe to the puritanical religious metaphor of her day, she, however, did remain a religiously dedicated woman and artist. Although she fashioned her own religious metaphor, she still relied on many images used commonly by her contemporaries. Despite the fact that she departed from orthodox practice, she maintained a personal religion that is quite evident in her poems.

Adrienne Rich exemplifies those critics who fail to realize the significance of Dickinson's religion for her art. Rich writes, " . . . Dickinson did not become a religiously dedicated woman; she was heretical, heterodox, in her religious opinions, and stayed away from church and dogma" (62). This statement not only confuses the meaning of the term, "religious," but it also seriously misrepresents the basis on which Emily Dickinson built her poetic life. According to the twentieth-century religious leader, Paramahansa Yogananda, dogma and -isms stigmatize religions and divide human beings, and humanity can unite in religion only when individuals become God-realized or understand that God is within the individual (13). Emily Dickinson's poems reveal an individual who is struggling for this kind of religious experience to find God within. Because "church and dogma" play no role in true religious experience, to argue that Dickinson was not religious, because she avoided church and dogma is to insist that these two features are central to religious dedication. Religion, however, true heart-felt religion, is a deeply person association between the soul and the soul's Creator. Religion involves asking questions in pursuit of Ultimate Truth: Who am I? What is life? What waits beyond the grave?

These questions were the driving force in Dickinson's creative life. She was always looking for the best way to convey images. For example, when describing herself to Thomas Higginson, she wrote, "my hair is bold, like the Chestnut Bur, and my eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves" (qtd in Johnson 21). That creative force influenced her to write her letter to the world:

This is my letter to the World
That never wrote to Me--
The simple News that Nature told--
With tender Majesty

Her message is committed
To hands I cannot see--

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