Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

It is very difficult to be certain what Emily Dickinson meant by“God,” though there are innumerable references to Him. Her relation to Himis marked by alternating advance and retreat. He is occasionally warnednot to be presumptuous, that all the gifts He may have to show hereafter(the single work from which she quotes most often is the Book of Revelations)are not likely to exceed certain occasions of bliss she has known onearth. God, a supreme intelligence, was not a stable concept in her mind.On the other hand, she lived constantly close to another world she calledInfinity, Immensity, Eternity, and the Absolute. For her these concepts werenot merely greater in degree from the dimensions of earth: they were differentin kind; they were altogether other; they were nonsense. There dwelther audience. If you set yourself to write verses for people down here onearth, in time, you were bound to miss the tone—the tone that is current inimmensity. Immensity does not niggle at off-rhymes and at untidy verseendings.Immensity is capable of smiling and probably enjoys those thingswhich insult the intelligence of men. Walt Whitman wrote: “I round andfinish little, if anything; and could not, consistently with my scheme. …”It would be difficult to assemble five of the more mature poems of EmilyDickinson which one could place before an antagonistic reader and say thatthey were “finished poems.” For those two poets, that word “finish” wouldsmack strongly of poems servilely submitted for the approval of judges,princes, and connoisseurs. Art—the work of art—was slow in presentingitself as the project of a continent-conscious American. Hawthorne strove forit, but Hawthorne was not caught up in the realization of the New World’sboundlessness; he even averted his face from it, and consciously. Poe’s mindknew both the boundlessness and the work of art, and the double knowledgewas among the elements that destroyed him. The work of art is therecognition of order, of limits, of shared tacit assumptions and, above all,of agreed-upon conventions. Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson seemedto be at every moment advancing into new territories in relation to writing;the time for them had not come to consolidate what they had acquired, toestablish their limits and to construct their conventions.I have said before that Americans can find no support for theiridentity in place, in time, or in community—that they are really in relationonly to Everywhere, Always, and Everybody. Emily Dickinson is a signalillustration of this assertion. The imagination of this spinster withdrawninto a few rooms in Amherst was constantly aware that the universe surroundedevery detail of life. “I take no less than skies,” she wrote, “for earthsgrow thick as berries, in my native town.” Her tireless observation of the226