| Dickinson's poetry expressed a central spiritual conviction about God, nature, and death. These central spiritual principles are exposed aesthetically, allowing a dialectical tension to remain in her poems without frantically reaching or grasping for absolute answers. Many of her poems elaborate upon her conviction that human thought is in reality a creation tool, capable of manifesting whatever it focuses upon. Repetitive human thought eventually becomes its own reality. A close perusal of Dickinson's poetry reveals that she subscribed to this method of thinking in forming her own philosophy/spirituality and aesthetic. "Outer from the inner/Derives its magnitude/'Tis Duke or Dwarf/According to the Central Mood" (451 1-4). A thought is a real physical object, operating as a force that creates what it thinks. This concept permeates the transcendental and romantic philosophies and places Dickinson within the intellectual milieu of Emerson, Thoreau, the Romantics poets, and Biblical Scriptures. Dickinson believes the human mind is a God-like creation tool, and poem 677 aptly describes this process: "To be alive--and Will!/'Tis able as a God" (5-6). Close reading of many other poems reveals Dickinson's belief that thoughts were attraction and creation forces that helped shape her acceptance and belief in a higher power, a benevolent creator. Her poetry is the continual attempt to explain the ramifications of her faith, even though many Dickinson readers regard her work as devoid of any "spiritual" representation, emphasizing that her poems only express a cynical, or even more dramatically, an atheistic outlook. There are, however, some critical works that view her poetry as a complex expression of her belief and attitudes towards the spirit and the soul. Dickinson possessed a unique spiritual connection to God and to the world.; Dickinson believed in the human mind as a vessel for the divine spirit. In her poetry, she does, however, continually doubt her findings and intellectual experiments in order to reevaluate, and thereby rework, her observations and examinations. It is by setting ambiguous thoughts on the page that Dickinson can address the balance between doubt and belief in the issues of faith. By her deep studying and reading of the Bible, Emerson, the romantic poets, and the oriental scriptures, she acknowledges that all of life contains a spark of the Divine. She strives for answers that are denied the human intellect, e.g., "I heard a fly buzz" (465). Chasing the riddle of life, she inquired about the quintessential human paradox between the infinite and the finite; and, from this pursuit, she often realizes an unshakable belief in the reality of a higher power. |
