Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

animals and plants about her has none of that appropriative feeling that wefind in the Concord writers; she knew well that they are living their livesengaging in no tender or instructive dialog with man, and that their livesare part of a millennial chain. She “gives them back” to the universe. In thisconstant recognition of the immensity of dimensions of time and place, sheis the least parochial of American poets and exceeds even Walt Whitmanin imaginative sweeps. She could have rejoined Poe in the preoccupationsthat lay behind his Eureka.And can we say of her that she wrote for Everybody? Yes; for whenone has overcome the “low” desire to write for anybody in particular—thecultivated, the chosen souls, one’s closest friends, when one has graduatedfrom all desire to impress the judicious or to appeal to the like-minded—thenand only then is one released to write for Everybody—only then releasedfrom the notion that literature is a specialized activity, an elegant occupation,or a guild secret. For those who live in “immensity” it is merely (andsupremely) the human voice at its purest, and it is accessible to Everybody,not at the literary level, but at the human. It is Everybody’s fault, not hers,if Everybody is not ready to recognize it. Perhaps only when Everybodyis dead will Everybody be in a condition to understand authentic humanspeech. “Some work for Immortality, the chiefer part for Time.” In EmilyDickinson we have reached a very high point in American abstraction. (Itis characteristic of her that her thought turned often to the Alps and the Andes.)She was, as we have seen in the letters, the least confiding of women,the shut-in, the self-concealing; yet if the audience were large enough, if shewere certain that Everybody would attend, her lips could unlock to floodsof impassioned confession and uninhibited assertion.The problem of the American loneliness which we discussed inrelation to Thoreau is the problem of “belonging.” He was a lonely manbecause the elements to which he tried to belong were near and few; EmilyDickinson, in all appearance the loneliest of beings, solved the problem ina way which is of importance to every American: by loving the particularwhile living in the universal.227