Searching For Faith--Emily Dickinson's Art Of Belief

Emily Dickinson (1830 - 1886) was for years portrayed by biographers and critics as an eccentric recluse, a "little home-keeping person," a mad spinster who had been disappointed in love. Despite this, she was an extremely intelligent, highly sensitive, and deeply passionate person who, throughout her adult life, wrote poems that were startlingly original in both content and technique, poems that would profoundly influence several generations of American poets, and that would win her a secure position as one of the greatest poets that America has ever produced.Born and brought up in a deeply religious climate, Emily Dickinson apparently had a great reverence for orthodox religion and morality. What made her say "I do not respect doctrines" was her rebellious spirit, her moving honesty, her keen sensibility, and her passion for truth. A remark made in 1848 was revealing: "I have not yet given up to the claims of Christ, but trust I am not entirely thoughtless on so important a subject." Religion for her meant an experience of the consciousness which she should be able to feel with the whole of her body and heart, mind and soul. She did not make any final acceptance or rejection on the question of religious belief. Instead, she preferred to struggle with her faith. She implacably set herself upon a course that would lead her away from marriage and church and into solitude. Whatever its costs, from the vantage point of solitude, she made her judgment of the human spectacle in her poetry.After rejecting her father's God as an "Eclipse," she gradually found for herself a new faith. Her faith was rather an experience than an understanding of religion. In her unconventional treatment of religious themes, Dickinson's poetry showed her originality and stress on personal experience and the capacity of human beings. In nature, she experienced religion through viewing earth as heaven. And she glorified Man in the way that she personalized Christ. Alienated from society and its dogma, she sought an identity with "circumference."In the beginning Dickinson was uncertain that she could believe the dogmas, in the end she was certain that she could not. Not being able to find herself a place in orthodox, she forged and processed a new, unorthodox connection, and created a space with which she could identify herself and in which she could include herself. She was, as reflected in her art of poetry, a great religious literary thinker the world has ever produced.