Emily Dickinson and Nature

As we have seen and discussed in class, Emily differs from the Emerson transcendentalism (American romanticism) in the sense that for her, observing nature does not lead to revelations. Nature does not answer her questions. Emily adopts a more pessimistic view if nature contrary to, for example, Whitman’s view in which there is a union with nature. For Whitman, nature and mind can unite, for Emily, this is not possible.

This difference in how Emily views nature was one of the aspects or characteristics of her poetry that piqued my interest and which, consequently, had me researching more on the topic.

Henry Wells in his essay Romantic Sensibility finds that Emily distrusted romanticism, which could explain her different point of view. In another reading, Richard Wilbur’s essay “Sumptuous Destitution”, there is no mention of this distrust. However, the author does mention that Emily “could not see in Nature any revelations of divine purpose.”

But what I found most interesting by far was Joanne Diehl’s take on Emily’s ‘relationship’, so to speak, with nature. In Diehl’s Dickinson and the Romantic Imagination, it is states that although Emily shares “an abiding concern with the relationship between self and the world” with the romantic poets, her poems focus on “the struggle she describes between two competing forces: the individual consciousness and all that is external to it.” rather than the union of self and world.

It is in this text that distrust is once again mentioned. To Emily, nature can be a hostile enemy, it is an antagonist. It does not reveal the answers to the questions you make. It does not divulge its secrets. Therefore one can only trust the truth that one finds themselves.

Another interesting way of how Emily relates to nature that Diehl point out is that  “Nature becomes alternately a storehouse from which she takes objects to invest them with personal, allegorical significance or she sees it as the place across which she spreads self, blood, vital life.” (Diehl, 1981) This refers to the ‘self’ that Emily places into the landscape as evidenced in her following poem where the image of body (e.g. blood, artery, vein) is presented in the land:

The name-of it-is "Autumn"-

The hue - of it - is Blood-

An Artery - upon the Hill-

A Vein - along the Road-

Great Globules - in the Alleys-

And Oh, the Shower of Stain-

When Winds - upset the Basin -

And spill the Scarlet Rain-

From this post and what we have seen and studied, one can determine that yes, there seems to be a difference in views between Emily and other romantic poets in relation to nature. One can even describe these differences and compare them. But what continues to escape me are the reasons behind these differences. Joanne Diehl proposes that one of these reasons is the fact that Emily is a woman, a minority in a predominately male community of poets. Of course, Diehl has a feminist view on this topic so it is understandable that she arrived at that conclusion. However, this still raises some doubts. Are the differences presented here in this post really due to that fact that Emily is a woman? What other reasons could have led to her divergent views? I leave the floor open.

References:

Diehl, J. (1981). Dickinson and the Romantic Imagination. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Wells, H. (1963). Romantic Sensibility. In Seawall, R. (Ed.), Emily Dickinson: A collection of critical essays (pp. 45-50). New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. Englewood Cliffs.

Wilbur, R. (1963). “Sumptuous Destitution”. In Seawall, R. (Ed.), Emily Dickinson: A collection of critical essays (pp. 127-136). New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. Englewood Cliffs.