Textual Scruples and Dickinson’s “Uncertain Certainty”

Abstract

This essay posits a necessary relationship between Dickinson’s religious concerns and her textual practice that Dickinson scholarship has not previously considered. This relationship is the foundation of a poetics that synthesizes philosophical materialism and religious transcendence. Skeptical about the merits of an eternity in “Paradise,” Dickinson retains an attachment to the world and a readiness to accept bodily death as the end of all life, as revealed in “Paradise is of the Option - ” (Fr1125). A textual problem with this poem in turn raises the question of what, in its essence, constitutes a “poem” by Emily Dickinson: is it primarily a material entity (the textpage) with which ideas are then associated, or is it primarily an abstract entity (the “Poem”), consisting in a set of ideas for which the written words and the paper are the medium? Any written verbal literary expression creates a dialectic between a textual artifact and its aesthetic properties. In Dickinson’s poetics, this dialectic is focused to an unusual and exemplary degree, as her conceptions of world and God, the material and the metaphysical, death and immortality, are inseparable from her conceptions of poem and text, of aesthetic entity and material artifact. She thus creates a meta-dialectic that encompasses artifact/world/death and God/aesthetic entity/immortality. To track these ideas in detail, this essay pays close attention to three poems that have religious subject matter (and frequent Christian allusions) but differing textual origins: “A word made Flesh is seldom” (Fr1715), “Of Paradise’ existence” (Fr1421), and “No Crowd that has occurred” (Fr653), concluding that for Dickinson the textpage (as material existent) gives embodiment to and fulfills the poem, and the poem (as spirit) breathes vitality into the textpage (as body).