Books are the best things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? … They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system … One must be an inventor to read well.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The American Scholar"

… I present a case for various stylistic, theoretical, and thematic influences on Dickinson's writing, examining probable models or sources for the most striking of her language techniques and ideas. Dickinson read widely and passionately. By the number of her references to books and quotations from them, it is evident that the Bible was her best known text—although, like Melville, she seems to have regarded it more as a "lexicon" of "certain phenomenal men" and mysteries than as an orthodox spiritual guide.¹

Biblical style, in its King James version and as modified by seventeenth-century writers and Americans generally, provided a model for the extreme compression, parataxis, and disjunction of Dickinson's style. Contrary to the assumptions generally underlying scripturalism, however, Dickinson believes both that language is essentially fictitious or arbitrary and that language's potential for meaning exceeds the individual's control of it and its application to any single circumstance. For her, language is simultaneously inadequate and too powerful. It is, therefore, primarily a tool for delineating moments of epiphany or change, not the tool of Adamic naming or for inscribing commandments in stone; it does not reveal eternal truth. This belief and its concomitant linguistic tendencies toward fragmentation and emphasis on the verb rather than the noun find partial support in the work of two New Englanders, Emerson and Noah Webster. In her fifth letter to Higginson, the poet claims "[I] never consciously touch a paint, mixed by another person—" (L 271). Like every poet Dickinson helps herself to colors, but the mix is unmistakably her own.

The Language of the Bible

To be familiar with the Bible was as unquestioned a part of nineteenth-century New England life as eating, and in some minds as necessary a part. The Bible was a primary text in schools, including Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, where Dickinson studied, respectively, from the ages of 9 through 16 and for ten months of her seventeenth year (two terms). Written into the Academy by-laws was the stipulation that "the instructors should be persons of good moral character … firmly established in the faith of the Christian religion, the doctrines and duties of which they shall inculcate as well by example as precept … The Preceptor shall open and close the school each day with prayer. All the students shall uniformly attend upon the public worship of God on the sabbath."² Mount Holyoke prided itself on its piety and its conversion of non-believers, and the Bible heads the list of textbooks circulated by its principal (Life II, 362, n. 19). Thus Dickinson was under considerable pressure to convert while at Mount Holyoke, and this caused her some concern. There were other students who, like her, refused to "give up and become a Christian" (L 23), but she felt herself to be in the erring minority.³ Waves of religious revivalism swept New England and Amherst during Dickinson's girlhood and youth, and all her family and close friends eventually joined the church. Scripture was common idiom among them. At the age of 14, for example, in a playful letter informing her friend Abiah Root that she is not at school this term and is about to learn to make bread, Dickinson writes (L 8; September 1845):

So you may imagine me with my sleeves rolled up, mixing flour, milk, salaratus, etc., with a deal of grace. I advise you if you don't know how to make the staff of life to learn with dispatch. I think I could keep house very comfortably if I knew how to cook. But as long as I don't, my knowledge of housekeeping is about of as much use as faith without works, which you know we are told is dead. Excuse my quoting from the Scripture, dear Abiah, for it was so handy in this case I couldn't get along very well without it.

Writers of popular and scholarly literature also apparently "couldn't get along very well without" quoting or paraphrasing the always "handy" Bible. For cultural and familial reasons, then, as well as for her own spiritual and aesthetic ones, Dickinson knew her Bible well.

Although critics frequently refer to the Bible as Dickinson's primary literary source, discussion has focused on her use of particular biblical passages, ideas, and myths. Even Johnson's extreme claim that the poet's "words and phrases … are absorbed from the Bible" and "have passed through the alembic of the King James version of biblical utterance" retreats at once to note which books the poet quotes most frequently.⁴ Yet the stylistic correspondences of Dickinson's language to the Bible's are easily isolated and identified.

The language of the Bible is characteristically conjunctive, highly economical, and often organized in parallel sets or binary pairs, variously thematic, syntactic, and lexical. James Kugel describes the biblical sentence as "highly parallelistic … usually consisting of two clauses, each clause stripped to a minimum of three or four major words."⁵ For example, the following lines from Dickinson's favorite gospel author move in terse, heavily conjunctive syntax organized in repeating sequences and pairs:

And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Esaias, which saith, By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and shall not perceive: For this people's heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them. But blessed are your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they hear. (Matthew 13:14-16)⁶

The passage begins with balanced pairs of affirmation and denial: ye shall hear and not understand, and shall see and not perceive. The sequence then becomes longer, at first through plain addition of evidence: hearts are gross, and ears are dull, and eyes are closed. The ands here are symmetrical; the order of the phrases may be changed without altering the meaning of any unit. In the clause beginning "lest at any time they should …" the first and (linking see with hear) is simply conjunctive, but the sequence then becomes asymmetrical and misleadingly simple: the ands preceding understand and heal substitute for what should logically be a subordinating conjunction or conjunctive phrase. In rough paraphrase, the sentence might run: "this people's heart, ears, and eyes are closed lest they should see and hear, which would lead them to understand, and which would make it possible that I heal them." The work of the reader in following this sentence consists in filling in the blanks created by these ands. To interpret "and I should heal them," the reader must construct a phrase to replace and. Particularly in "and I should heal them," and is more disjunctive than conjunctive; it does not belong in the same sequence as "see … and hear … and understand." Because the parallel sequence of verbs allows the repeated subject (they) to be omitted, "should heal" appears parallel to "should understand" and the other verbs preceding it; however, "heal" has a different agent of action (they see, I heal). The unexpected and syntactically disguised move from they to I creates a masterful rhetorical effect: Jesus' healing seems as inevitable a result of opening one's eyes as actual seeing is.

The conjunctive parataxis of this passage is complex in its intent and effect.⁷ It creates suspense and builds to a surprising but apparently inevitable climax—the perfect combination for representing the simple effectiveness of God's grace if you but "see and hear" it. At its conclusion the passage returns to what Kugel calls the most characteristic biblical mode, the parallel double clause, here repeated so that its figure is doubled twice: in the deleted repetition "but blessed are your eyes … and [blessed are] your ears …" and within each clause: "your eyes, for they see … your ears, for they hear …" The extreme compression of Dickinson's poems and that of biblical text are strikingly similar. In both cases the compression stems from frequent use of ellipsis, parallel and short syntactic structures linked paratactically or by simple conjunction, and apposition.

Compact and conjunctive or paratactic syntax occurs in biblical passages less artful than the one just quoted. In Genesis, for example, the story of Babel begins:

And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. (Genesis 11:1-4)

At the conclusion of a psalm from which Dickinson quotes in a letter, we find:

Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me: then shall I be upright, and I shall be innocent from the great transgression. Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my strength, and my redeemer. (Psalm 19:13-14)

First Corinthians contains the more extreme but not atypical passage:

Therefore let no man glory in men. For all things are yours; Whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come; all are yours; And ye are Christ's; and Christ is God's. (I Corinthians 3:21-23)

In each of these passages there is a rhythmical sameness of tone. Sentences or clauses are short, and connections between them are coordinate rather than subordinate, the most frequently used being and. Often there is no linking conjunction or adverb, which causes a momentary lapse in the reader's progress forward. In the lines "Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me," for example, the antecedent for "them" is not immediately clear, nor is the role fearfully ascribed to sins in the servant's life. "Dominion" in the second clause thematically echoes the opening clause's possessive "thy servant" to mark the difference between welcome and unwelcome servitude. But the two are not given equal syntactic weight: God's dominion is presumed and receives merely the possessive "thy"; sin's dominion is feared and can only with God's help be avoided. Linking the sequence of pleas "Keep back thy servant … let them not" is the unarticulated assumption that God controls all, but also that any contact with "presumptuous sins" would give them "dominion" over even God's servant. The second clause explains why the plea of the first clause is necessary. As in so many of Dickinson's poems, the logical connecting work of the syntax is left to the reader and is only clear on repeated readings.

Kugel, too, concludes that the point of biblical parallelism is to make the reader discover the connection between "two apparently unrelated parallel utterances."⁸ "A is so and B is so" or "A is so and B is not" will make sense as a complete statement only when we understand A and B in relation to each other. We see the similarity between the Bible's and Dickinson's suggestive use of paratactic juxtaposition most clearly in comparing its proverbs to her aphorisms. For example, the proverb "A good name is better than precious ointment; and the day of death than the day of one's birth" (Ecclesiastes 7:1) may be interpreted multiply. The reader must imagine and order the array of possible relations between its halves, between ointment and birth, and a good name and death. Remember the similar gap between subjects at the end of Dickinson's poem "He fumbles at your Soul": "Deals—One—imperial—Thunderbolt / That scalps your naked Soul—/ When Winds take Forests in their Paws—/ The Universe—is still—." Like the thematic lapses created by parataxis in Dickinson's poems, the blank space (or the space filled with a coordinate conjunction) in biblical texts becomes a focal point of meaning; the text is transparent only when a sentence or clause is isolated, and then the transparency is misleading. The Bible's word, like the New Testament's Word incarnate, carries the greatest meaning when it links apparently discontinuous or separate realms: the literal and the figurative, the personal and the universal, earth and heaven.

Dickinson uses parataxis, repeated conjunctions, and parallel syntax less frequently than the Bible does. Even poems as markedly paratactic and conjunctive, respectively, as "It was not Death" and "My Life had stood" appear sparing in their juxtapositions in comparison with the biblical passages just quoted. Recall the opening lines of the former poem:

It was not Death, for I stood up,
And all the Dead, lie down—
It was not Night, for all the Bells
Put out their Tongues, for Noon.

It was not Frost, for on my Flesh
I felt Siroccos—crawl—
Nor Fire—for just my Marble feet
Could keep a Chancel, cool—

And yet, it tasted, like them all …
(510)

In these lines we hear biblical sparseness and see an overlapping balanced effect in the repeated "It was not … for" clauses and in the qualifying coordinate clauses "for I … And all …" of lines I and 2. Dickinson, however, repeats few besides function words, and her syntax is generally less repetitive than the Bible's: here she repeats the initial structure of balancing clauses only in the first two stanzas, and with considerable variation.⁹

In both biblical prose and Dickinson's verse, the short clauses and rapid progression from one unit to the next give a feeling of inevitability to the narrative's progression. The paratactic linking of phrases "And now we roam … And now we hunt … And do I smile" of "My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun," like Paul's "All is yours, and ye are Christ's, and Christ is God's," collapses hierarchies of importance and precedence at the same time that it builds toward a climax. Individually every action or conclusion—like every soul or "sparrow" in New Testament theology—holds equal weight, yet all gain their importance from their existence within the whole, be it Dickinson's poem or the Christian God. When the linked actions form a sequence, it seems equally inevitable. In a poem about what the heart asks, Dickinson's speaker seems to move from childhood to old age, although the process of decreasing demands could as easily happen in a single night as in the course of a lifetime:

The Heart asks Pleasure—first—
And then—Excuse from Pain—
And then—those little Anodynes
That deaden suffering—

And then—to go to sleep—
And then—if it should be
The will of it's Inquisitor
The privilege to die—
(536)

Regardless of which time scheme is primary, the sequence (combined with the poem's opening definite article—The Heart) implies that no heart continues to ask for pleasure and that every heart will eventually have received enough pain to desire its own death. Seventeenth-Century Stylists

Compression, (disjunctively) conjunctive syntax, and parallelism characterize other modern writing besides Dickinson's—much of it, like hers, influenced by biblical style. Morris Croll describes "baroque" or early to mid-seventeenth-century prose in terms easily convertible to both Dickinson's and the Bible's language. The similarities have a logical basis on both sides: Montaigne, Burton, Pascal, Sir Thomas Browne—Croll's major examples of baroque stylists—were extremely familiar with the Bible and biblical texts, and Browne and George Herbert were among Dickinson's favorite writers. In fact, the resemblance between Dickinson's and Herbert's poetry was so strong that Millicent Todd Bingham published two stanzas of his "Matin Hymn" that Dickinson had copied out and stored with her verses as Dickinson's own.¹⁰ The seventeenth-century sentence, Croll tells us, is "exploded." It uses either loose coordinating conjunctions, or has "no syntactic connectives … In fact, it has the appearance of having been disrupted by an explosion within" (209). In both its "loose" and "curt" forms, this style portrays "not a thought, but a mind thinking" (210); the sentence's movement is spiral, not "logical" or straight. Rather than adopting the Bible's balanced parallelism, this style tends to be asymmetrical, to break a parallelism as soon as it has been established: " … out of the struggle between a fixed pattern and an energetic forward movement" the baroque style creates its "strong and expressive disproportions" (226).

According to Croll, "curt" baroque prose tends to begin with a complete statement of its idea, much like a proverb in style and tone; the rest of the paragraph or section (or poem) provides new apprehensions or varying imaginative aspects of that logically exhaustive initial statement. Abrupt changes in subject and changes from one mode or style to another (from literal to metaphoric, or from concrete to abstract form) characterize the following imaginative exploration of the kernel idea. Croll gives an example from Browne's Religio Medici (which Dickinson owned):

To see ourselves again, we need not look for Plato's year: every man is not only himself; there have been many Diogenes, and as many Timons, though but few of that name; men are lived over again; the world is now as it was in ages past; there was none then, but there hath been some one since, that parallels him, and is, as it were, his revived self. (218)

Browne's prose anticipates, and Croll's anatomy describes, the progress of several Dickinson poems: first the aphoristic statement of the theme, then brief varying elaborations of its idea. "Essential Oils—are wrung" announces its theme immediately. Other poems begin: "Life—is what we make it" (698); "Impossibility, like Wine / Exhilarates the Man / Who tastes it; …" (838); "Perception of an object costs / Precise the Object's loss—" (1071); "To disappear enhances" (1209); "The Rat is the concisest Tenant" (1356). An even more extreme example of curt baroque prose is Herbert's "Prayer, I," which consists of numerous fragmentary representations of prayer, beginning:

Prayer, the Church's banquet, Angel's age,
God's breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase …

and ending:

Church-bells beyond the stars heart, the soul's blood,
The land of spices, something understood.

The poem contains no complete predicate. Much of Dickinson's poetry, like baroque poetry and prose, moves by a sequence of "'points' and paradoxes reveal[ing] the energy of a single apprehension in the writer's mind" (218-219).

"Loose" baroque style, usually intermingled with the "curt" style, differs only in its greater use of participais and subordinate conjunctions, according to Croll. Its subordinate conjunctions, however, are used so loosely as to have the effect of coordinate conjunctions: individual clauses maintain great autonomy, and there is no tightly logical or single means of advance from one member to the next. Look, for example, at the Herbert stanzas that Dickinson copied out (stanzas 2 and 3 of Herbert's "Matin Hymn"):

My God, what is a heart?
Silver, or gold, or precious stone,
Or star, or rainbow, or a part
Of all these things, or all of them in one?

My God, what is a heart,
That thou shouldst it so eye, and woo,
Pouring upon it all thy art,
As if that thou hadst nothing else to do?

Although the second of these stanzas is considerably less paratactic than the first, its connectives remain loose. "That" refers back to the preceding (repeated) question "What is a heart," and thus carries the weight of the whole preceding stanza. Eye, woo, and pour (thy art) may present the same action of God with increasing specificity, or "pouring …" may be a less direct, more general action, as its less active (participal) form suggests. Herbert's descriptions of God's actions overlap one another, as do his speculations about the substance of the heart in the previous stanza. Each embedded or branching clause repeats part of a previous idea and leads in a new direction; the progress of the sentence continues to seem spontaneous and to offer multiple directions for interpretation.

Because Dickinson's poetic mode anticipates that of twentieth-century poets, particularly the Modernists with their revived interest in the metaphysical poets, her poetry sounds less strange to the twentieth-century ear than it did to her century's. A glance at Longfellow's verse, which Dickinson greatly admired and referred to frequently, illuminates the gulf she created between her own and her contemporaries' work. This does not mean there were no similarities between her poetry and, for example, Longfellow's; like Dickinson, Longfellow experimented with rhyme, meter, and the rhythms and diction of speech. In "The Jewish Cemetery at Newport" his language is colloquial: he uses relatively simple syntax, leaves sentences incomplete, and uses frequent exclamations and colloquial phrases ("all this moving"). Yet the long lines, the repetitive, highly adjectival phrasing, the heavily right-branching parallel syntax, and the lack of metaphorical complexity give this poem an entirely different character from Dickinson's poetry. The first stanza runs:

How strange it seems! These Hebrews in their graves,
Close by the street of this fair seaport town,
Silent beside the never-silent waves,
At rest in all this moving up and down!

In "My Lost Youth" Longfellow writes in shorter, rhythmically and syntactically looser lines, but the contrast with Dickinson's economy and ellipsis is still striking. The last stanza of this poem follows:

And Deering's Woods are fresh and fair,
And with joy that is almost pain
My heart goes back to wander there,
And among the dreams of the days that were,
I find my lost youth again.
And the strange and beautiful song,
The groves are repeating it still:
"A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."

Longfellow's poems are readily accessible on the levels of narrative and intent as neither Herbert's nor Dickinson's are. His verse, and most nineteenth-century American verse, works through extension and repetition, whereas Dickinson's works through compression and juxtaposition.

The Hymns of Isaac Watts

From the Bible and from Herbert's poems and Browne's prose, Dickinson would be familiar with tersely conjunctive syntax, sentences that progress asymmetrically or through apposition and paradox, and paradoxical or cryptically metaphorical rather than extended logical developments of an idea. Closer to home, the psalms and hymns of Isaac Watts, as familiar to many New Englanders as the Bible itself, offered her these same characteristics in a meter she adopted for almost all her poems. Emily's mother, Lavinia Norcross Dickinson, owned Watts' Hymns, and the family library housed copies of his Church Psalmody and Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs of the Reverend Isaac Watts.¹¹ Although the poet does not mention Watts by name, she was undoubtedly familiar with several of his hymns, and she quotes from one of them.¹² Her use of hymn meter (often called the common meter) for all but a few metrically experimental poems is widely attributed to her reading, and singing, of Watts.

In addition to being part of the common New England vocabulary of rhythm and verse, Watts may have held special attraction for Dickinson because of his frequent use of irregular rhymes and harsh-sounding phrases (usually involving vocabulary considered neither poetic nor religious), and because of the extraordinary variety of sounds and themes he used within a simple rhythmical frame.¹³ Watts's hymn 632, for example, uses a common conjunctive parallelism and irregular rhyme in stanza 5:

And must my body faint and die?
And must this soul remove?
O, for some guardian angel nigh,
To bear it safe above!

Watts rhymes men with vain, fell with miracle, haste with test, throne with down (hymns 347, 438, 632, 648), or, in hymn 352 alone, lies with ice, stood with God, sea with away. In lines unusually vivid and metaphorical, Watts's hymn 630 uses the polysyllabic "abominable" with an art anticipating Dickinson's. It begins: "My thoughts on awful subjects roll, / Damnation and the dead," then recounts the "horrors" a "guilty soul" imagines on her deathbed:

Then, swift and dreadful, she descends
Down to the fiery coast,
Among abominable fiends,
Herself a frighted ghost.

There endless crowds of sinners lie,
And darkness makes their chains;
Tortured with keen despair, they cry,
Yet wait for fiercer pains.

A darkness so tangible it "makes" chains; a soul in herself "dreadful" or in "dreadful" flight; sinners keenly despairing "Yet" waiting for "fiercer pains": these images and ambiguities would appeal to Dickinson's imagination.

Dickinson's own rhythms, loose rhymes, and abbreviated (therefore often cryptic) metaphors of description sound less unusual when placed beside Watts's hymns than when compared with the work of her contemporaries. Listen, for example, to the similarities in meter, rhyme, use of polysyllables to fill a line (her "possibility" and "Cordiality," like Watts's "abominable"), and vivid substantiation of the insubstantial between Watts and Dickinson in a poem she writes on the soul's near escape from death:

That after Horror—that 'twas us—
That passed the mouldering Pier—

Just as the Granite Crumb let go—
Our Savior, by a Hair—

A second more, had dropped too deep
For Fisherman to plumb—
The very profile of the Thought
Puts Recollection numb—
The possibility—to pass
Without a Moment's Bell—
Into Conjecture's presence—
Is like a Face of Steel—
That suddenly looks into our's
With a metallic grin—
The Cordiality of Death—
Who drills his Welcome in—
(286)

Like Watts, Dickinson uses common meter here; lines coincide with clause or phrase boundaries, and stanzas form complete syntactic and metaphorical units; abstractions gain concrete properties (his darkness forms chains; her thought has a profile); and rhyme is consistent but not perfect (note her Pier with Hair, Bell with Steel). Dickinson's poem compacts more metaphors, and her primary metaphor for the soul's meeting with death is far more chilling than Watts's, but her familiarity with his dramatic and loosely irregular verse may have cleared a way for Dickinson to her own extraordinary poems.

The American Plain Style

In a still broader sense of influence, the American idiom itself, in both its literary and daily forms, may have contributed to Dickinson's use of a style that is biblical in origin.¹⁴ By the mid-nineteenth century Puritan "plain style" had become the language of self-expression, the trusted idiom in America, although—or perhaps because—it had lost its bolstering doctrinal and political contexts. According to Perry Miller's "An American Language," the plain style's demand that one speak from personal knowledge and as comprehensibly as possible made it the natural mode of discourse for a people living "in the wilderness" and, by the late eighteenth century, attempting to form a democracy.¹⁵ All American writers, he claims, have had to deal with the consequences of this wholesale adoption of the principles and techniques of plain style (214). Because of its pervasiveness, Dickinson would inevitably have used language to some extent within its dictates. For epistemological reasons also, Dickinson may have felt some affinity for this style. Miller describes the plain style as inherently "defiant"—a style that both proclaims authority for the word and places the word's authority in individuals' articulate examinations of the truth; the style encourages practical discourse on theoretical or spiritual truths. Hence, it can as easily be turned against the idea of an authoritative God as it can be used to support that idea. Authority of language lies with the "plainest" (that is, apparently most artless yet still most commanding) speaker. The Puritans kept the style's implicit defiance in check by subordinating their word to God's Word; the latter was the law which theirs attempted to interpret and reflect. Emerson, Miller claims, partially maintained this check on defiance through his romantic belief in Nature as the origin of language, while Thoreau released the defiance of this style in his prose, "glory[ing] in his participation in the community of sin" (226).

More covertly than Thoreau, Dickinson does the same. Her very disguise of defiance, however, may also stem in part from inherent characteristics of the plain style, which demands the simplicity reflected in its name but paradoxically also a kind of reticence that may prevent its complete message from being articulated. Ideally, the plain speaker "convey[s] the emphasis, the hesitancies, the searchings of language as it is spoken" (232); plainness lies in the apparent artlessness of the speaker's or writer's use of the word. Partly as a consequence, writers in the plain style leave much unsaid, and they claim that their discourse says even less than it does. Using words sparingly leaves much to implication, and making modest claims for a text may disguise the authority its author in fact feels. Thus the plain style frequently underplays its own importance and seriousness;¹⁶ even when it most anarchically expresses the perception of the individual, it maintains the guise of saying little, and that only matter-of-factly. Hence, while speaking "plain" truth, an individual may confound every doctrine that the Puritans held true and believed the plain style must express. As Miller puts it: "The forthright method [plain style] proved to be … the most subversive power that the wicked could invoke against those generalities it had, long ago, been designed to protect" (220). Through reticence, indirection, and disguised claims for the authority of her word, Dickinson manipulates characteristics of the plain use of language in poetry that contradict Puritan convictions about the individual's relation to God and His Word. The style that affirms God's truth for the Puritans, and denies that God's power is the only good (while still celebrating it) for Thoreau, becomes ironic with Dickinson: while appearing to affirm or naively question, she denies the trustworthiness of any superhuman power.

Although biblical style, particularly in its King James translation, has been widely influential, the Bible has influenced ideas of language at least as profoundly as it has actual language use. In the Bible, language is authority: "And God said, Let there be light: and there was light" (Genesis 1:3); or as John redescribes this moment: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (John 1:1). Adam's name giving is a second creation; he brings into the human world of language what God's Word has made. For Moses, the word is law to be preserved in stone. Language in all these cases is transparent; it has an immediate relation to things and principles and reflects their essential nature. By knowing the proper names, one may know the world. For American Puritans, this idea of language led to the belief that an individual's power to articulate depended on his or her spiritual condition. Those who had been converted were expected to manifest their condition of grace and to demonstrate their obedience to God through the quality of their understanding as represented in their use of words. What one knew one could, and must, express.

This notion of language depended on the inherent "truth" of the word; no word could be ambiguous or ironic and still manifest the essential truth of God. By the same logic, lying—that is, abusing the word by distorting or obscuring its meaning—diminished a person's ability to know the world and, through it, God. Hence, lying was a grave sin. William Ames preached that "the frequent use of obscene speeches seemeth to be more hurtful to piety, than the simple act of fornication," while proper or "plainly" eloquent speech ideally would be so powerful "that an unbeliever comming into the Congregation of the faithful … ought to be affected, and as it were digged through with the very hearing of the Word, that he may give glory to God."¹⁷ According to this philosophy, the most economical style is also the most efficacious. Regardless of the speaker's immediate audience, all language is directed ultimately to God, and "God's Altar needs not our pollishings," as the compilers of the 1639 preface to the Bay Psalm Book proclaim. Flourishes at worst confuse meaning, but even at best they hinder a statement's force: "The efficacy of the Holy Spirit doth more clearly appeare in a naked simplicity of words, then in elegance and neatness … So much affectation as appeares, so much efficacy and authority is lost."¹⁸ Authority and utility are the twin supports of this system.

The idea that language should adequately define and name things had a broad secular base as well in nineteenth-century America. In his essays "On Candor" and "On Language," James Fenimore Cooper lists an increasing lack of directness in expression as one of the greatest flaws of American English.¹⁹ Fearful of the vulgarizing effect of democracy even while he extols its virtues, Cooper laments that Americans pervert the significance of words by using them inappropriately and inexactly. The original meaning of a word is its proper meaning; to transfer its use to a different context or to use it more broadly constitutes a misuse of the word, not to mention a "misapprehension of the real circumstances under which we live" (112). Believing that a word may be misused and thus cause a "misapprehension of the real circumstances" of life presupposes that the proper use of language leads to accurate or proper apprehension of the world. Language delineates and labels the facts of nature. The word Cooper chooses as an example reveals the social roots of his anxiety about language change: the broadening misuse of the word "gentleman" does not make a tramp into a gentleman, he insists; it only weakens the proper meaning of the word and confuses the "natural" distinctions between types of men. Without saying so explicitly, and like the Puritans, Cooper would have language be unironical, immediately and unambiguously connected to the equally "plain" facts of the world.

It is in her attitude toward language and toward communication itself as much as in her characteristic manipulations of the word that Dickinson differs from her contemporaries and predecessors who wrote in plain style. Like them, she emphasizes the bare force of the word, eschewing elaborate syntax, modifiers, and extended conceits. Like them, she tends to stress the word's direct mediation between the individual and the world (for them, God). Like them, but to an unusual extreme, she makes small claims for her writing: her poems are "a letter to the World"; she is often a girl, or (like) a daisy, bird, spider, or gnat. Even when she has volcanic power, she generally appears harmless and unimportant: "A meditative spot—/ An acre for a Bird to choose / Would be the General thought—" (1677). Dickinson, however, senses a different need for both plainness and reticence from those who believe in a natural or divine law of language. The word has two faces for her. Its effect may be epiphanic and it may come to her as a "gift," revealing "That portion of the Vision" she could not find without the help of "Cherubim" (1126). This is the language of poetry, of pure communication, "Like signal esoteric sips / Of the communion Wine" (1452), or a "word of Gold" (430). At other times the word is all but meaningless—an "Opinion" (797), an empty term. In a letter to Bowles she writes: "The old words are numb—and there a'nt any new ones—Brooks—are useless—in Freshettime—" (L 252). Her trick as poet is to make the old words new. To do this, she trusts "Philology," not God or Nature, and when she succeeds in doing this she feels that she has been lucky.

To Dickinson's mind, success in speaking plainly, in creating a word "that breathes" (1651), does not prove spiritual salvation or make her a candidate for fame, partly because her sense of moral superiority depends on overthrowing the notion that God or the world can save her. The economical use of the words of ordinary life gives language its power. Speaking indirectly or subversively disguises the poet's usurpation of moral judgment from divine or human law, and thus saves her to speak again. As Perry Miller suggests, in Dickinson's poetry the pull between plainness and reticence subverts the whole idea of plainness. Because her meanings are not plain, they cannot be expressed plainly despite her use of simple words; her plainest speech is that of indirection.

As this conception of language implies, for Dickinson there is no stable relation between spiritual truth, the facts of existence, and the terms of language. Names are not adequate to things, and the function of language is not primarily to name. Things are perceived and understood through their relations to the rest of the world and by the process of cumulative, even contradictory, definition rather than by categorization or labeling. Dickinson has greater affinity with the lexicographer, the scientist of language seeking to clarify each word's various meanings, than she does with the Romantic Ur-poet Adam. Her language stresses the relation between object and its effects or relations in an active world; meaning, for her, is not fixed by rules or even by her own previous perception of the world. The principles of Dickinson's world do not have to do with immutable properties and distinctions.

Dickinson manifests her belief in the flux or instability of relationship in the narratives of her poems more obviously than in her use of language. For example, the figures of her poems often change positions relative to each other, or prove to be undifferentiable rather than separate identities. In "The Moon is distant from the Sea," first "She" is the moon and "He" the water, then she becomes "the distant Sea—" and his are the ordering "Amber Hands—" of light (429); the "single Hound" attending the Soul proves to be "It's own identity." (822); in an early poem, she and her playmate Tim turn out to be "I—'Tim'—and—Me!" (196). In a late poem, desired object, self, and "Messenger" are indistinguishable in both their presence and their absence; in a mockery of simplicity, all have the same name:

We send the Wave to find the Wave—
An Errand so divine,
The Messenger enamored too,
Forgetting to return,
We make the wise distinction still,
Soever made in vain,
The sagest time to dam the sea is when the sea is gone—
(1604)

Although this poem may be read as an elaboration of a truism—that one must give to receive, or that some losses cannot be prevented—it also ironically suggests that distinguishing present and absent sea (loved "Wave" from our own) is "vain." The "wise distinction" persists in failing to recognize the absurdity of damming what is not there and cannot be kept anyway. We attempt to conserve only what we have already lost.

Similarly, in "The Sea said 'Come' to the Brook" (1210), the grown Brook takes the same form and title as the Sea that wanted to keep it small, as if to prove that the existence of one sea does not prevent the growth of innumerable physically indistinguishable others. In the last stanza it is not immediately clear which "Sea" is which:²⁰

The Sea said "Go" to the Sea—
The Sea said "I am he
You cherished"—"Learned Waters—
Wisdom is stale—to Me"

In countless other poems, unspecified and multiply referential "it" or "this" is as meaningful a subject for speculation as any clearly delineated event or object. Metaphor serves as the primary tool of definition and explanation because it allows for the greatest flexibility in its reference to fact.

Emerson's Theories of Language

To the extent that language does reflect the world for Dickinson, her conception of language is closer to Emerson's than to the Puritans'. The Amherst poet was familiar with the Concord poet's works from at least 1850 on. In that year, she received "a beautiful copy" of Emerson's 1847 Poems (L 30). In 1857 Emerson lectured in Amherst, eating and sleeping at the Evergreens, where Emily may have joined Austin and Sue in entertaining him. She told Sue that he seemed "as if he had come from where dreams are born" (Life II, 468). In 1876 the poet gave Mrs. Higginson a copy of Representative Men—"a little Granite Book you can lean upon" (L 481). She also quotes or paraphrases five of Emerson's poems in her letters and poems, most notably his "Bacchus" in her "I taste a liquor never brewed" (214) and "The Snow Storm" in her "It sifts from Leaden Sieves" (311).²¹

Emerson writes at length of language as an ideal system of meaning in his essays "Nature" and "The Poet." His use of language in his own prose, however, contradicts his theories. In theory, Emerson's notion of language stems from Puritan ideas of the word as an extension of the Oversoul, or God. For him, as for the Puritans, language in its pristine or original state is transparent: "Words are signs of natural facts."²² Similarly, for Emerson, speech that derives from an accurate perception of nature "is at once a commanding certificate that he who employs it is a man in alliance with truth and God" (Works I, 36). In its ideal form, language translates and interprets spiritual truths as for the Puritans, but now through the mediation of nature. Because of this mediation, at its plainest and most authoritative language is "picturesque"; it is "poetry." Words stand for (name, signify) facts of nature, which are in turn "emblematic" of spiritual facts. Language, then, is both referential (transparently reflective of nature) and metaphorical. Human language derives from nature, which is in turn "the organ through which the universal spirit speaks to the individual" (Works I, 66). Ideally there would be a one-to-one correspondence between the facts of nature, the words of speech, and the facts of the spirit; that is, human language would exactly reproduce the language of the universe.

Because of its base in nature, according to Emerson, language is also both fixed or universal and constantly undergoing change. The laws of the spirit or Oversoul, the ultimate referent of language, do not change, but their forms in nature may. Natural objects "furnish man with the dictionary and grammar of his municipal speech" (Works I, 37); when these objects are altered so are the meanings of our language. Each age requires its own interpreter or poet to keep language true to nature (and to read nature's new forms), but each interpreter expresses the same truths, albeit in different forms. Because the laws of nature are fixed, the primary act of language making is naming and the principle word is the noun. Emerson traces the development of language through that of the individual: "Children and savages use only nouns or names of things, which they convert into verbs and apply to analogous mental acts"—a necessary stage in language making, he implies, but a departure from language as pure poetry (Works I, 32). Verbs provide, as it were, the transitional form in the desired transformation of language from directly referential (noun to fact) to symbolic (noun to spiritual fact). Language translates perceived nature into human speech and thereby assists in the transformation of nature into spirit. It is not itself stable, but it leads from the world of nameable things to the sphere of immutable spirit.

Emerson never develops the implications of this philosophy for the use of a particular syntax or parts of speech. Were he to do so, the poet or premier language user would logically be Adamic, a pronouncer of names. The ceaseless contradictions and qualifications of Emerson's prose, however, suggest otherwise. Although he preaches about natural laws, he sees nothing but change, and he bases all knowledge and all language on what may be seen (the inner eye interpreting through the outer). While at one minute in "Self-Reliance" he commandingly and absolutely propounds: "Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string" or "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist," in the next he questions: "Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then?" (Works I, 47, 50). In a longer passage from the same essay, Emerson characteristically combines highly embedded syntax replete with parallel modifiers and self-referring phrases with paratactically juxtaposed aphorisms as pithy as any that Dickinson coins: "In this pleasing contrite wood-life which God allows me, let me record day by day my honest thought without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, it will be found symmetrical though I mean it not and see it not. My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects. The swallow over my window should interweave that thread or straw he carries in his bill into my web also. We pass for what we are. Character teaches above our wills" (Works I, 58). Emerson's essays move by associative elaboration of a central idea—often first presented in metaphorical form—not by formal, logical stages or steps. He uses language as if its meaning were less certain or clear than he describes it as being.

Certainly Dickinson recreates the full force of Emerson's perception that all nature, and thus all language, is in constant "flux" in her definition of nouns. Recall, for example, her use of repeated verbs and restrictive clauses in her definition poems: "Revolution is the Pod / Systems rattle from / When the Winds of Will are stirred" (1082); "Escape" is "the Basket / In which the Heart is caught / When down some awful Battlement / The rest of Life is dropt—" (1347); or "Bloom—is Result—" of a process requiring some thing or someone "To pack the Bud—oppose the Worm—/ Obtain it's right of Dew—/ Adjust the Heat—elude the Wind—/ Escape the prowling Bee / [and] Great Nature not to disappoint …" (1058). To repeat earlier and more extreme examples, the love "diviner" than that "a Life can show Below" can only be defined by its cumulative acts and effects. In this poem's final stanza, the subject-noun is almost lost in the barrage of its verbs:

'Tis this—invites—appalls—endows—
Flits—glimmers—proves—dissolves—
Returns—suggests—convicts—enchants—
Then—flings in Paradise—
(673)

Similarly, Dickinson defines the nominalized verb "saved" by its relation to the act or art of saving: "The Province of the Saved / Should be the Art—To save—" (539). An abstraction, like an object, stems from or stimulates action, and hence it can be known. Ernest Fenollosa, a later pupil of Emerson's, articulates the philosophy that seems to underlie Dickinson's definitions: "Fancy picking up a man and telling him that he is a noun, a dead thing rather than a bundle of functions! A 'part of speech' is what it does … one part of speech acts for another … 'Farmer' and 'rice' are mere hard terms which define the extremes of the pounding. But in themselves, apart from this sentence-function, they are naturally verbs. The farmer is one who tills the ground, and the rice is a plant which grows in a special way … a noun is originally 'that which does something,' that which performs the verbal action."²³ By Fenollosa's logic, land apart from their "sentence-function," Dickinson's action-oriented nouns are "naturally verbs."

Dickinson's poems typically conceptualize action instead of presenting it, or they make the action itself conceptual, epistemological. Even in poems about action or change in nature ("A Route of Evanescence" or "Further in Summer than the Birds"), the poet emphasizes process, causality, and relationship more than temporal acts; the flight of her hummingbird receives its effect from reflected light and the bush it touches. The poem is full of action, but there is only one verb (Adjusts):

A Route of Evanescence
With a revolving Wheel—
A Resonance of Emerald—
A Rush of Cochineal—
And every Blossom on the Bush
Adjusts it's tumbled Head—
The mail from Tunis, probably,
An easy Morning's Ride—
(1463)

Revolving, Resonance, Rush, tumbled, and Ride refer to aspects of the bird's movement but do not present it. The poet's use of nouns and participial adjectives suggests that the bird flies so fast and so effortlessly that the act itself cannot be perceived; we know the act by what it touches and by what we can surmise ("the mail from Tunis").

For Emerson, the whole end of nature is to be interpreted; things are "characters" to be read, and "every object rightly seen, unlocks a new faculty of the soul"; language and the world and language and the soul are one (Words I, 31, 36, 41). For Dickinson, nature is not transparent and language is not an organic adjunct (or reflected image) of its processes. We "consign" words to language instead of allegorically perceiving them in nature's great poem. As though in response to Emerson's maxim that "Words are signs of natural fact," Dickinson finds language's greatest power in abstraction, in what cannot be found in nature. "Dont you know that 'No' is the wildest word we consign to Language?" (L 562), she questions; and her "Essential Oils" of meaning are "wrung," "not expressed by Suns—alone—". To enliven language, this poet makes it less instead of more natural; she distorts grammar, inverts syntax, and represents words as produced or conventional units which she can reproduce for her own purposes. Powerful words are blades, swords, and distilled attar—things created by human civilization for human use. In their less powerful aspect, words are arbitrary labels and may be tossed aside: "If the Bird and the Farmer—deem it [a tree] a 'Pine'—/ The Opinion will do—for them—" (797).

Emerson expresses the idea that language is inadequate and primarily conventional (not organic) in the ceaseless reexaminations and shifting balances of his prose and in his numerous references to the fallen state of humanity and language in the contemporary world. Dickinson holds the same belief but does not find it a reason to despair. The impermanence of meaning and language liberates her to speak as she might not otherwise dare. Emerson's search for meaning is directed toward nature: his poet is always in part the scribe of what he sees. Dickinson's search most often occurs within "Philosophy" (1126, 1651), not nature. Her dictionary is her "companion," and she ranges freely in her explorations of meaning there.

Noah Webster and Lexicography

Dickinson may have found support for her semantic emphasis on the verb or change and for her belief in the constant changes of language in her family dictionary. Temperamentally and philosophically, she was suited to lexicography. Unlike understanding that stems from archetypes or symbols, lexical understanding works from context and always provides alternative shades or directions of meaning. Lexicography encouraged both Dickinson's scientific and her fanciful tendencies: speculating on the connections of a word's various definitions or possible etymologies might lead to the profound, or it might lead to the ludicrous.

Dickinson may also have felt a special affinity for the lexicographer Noah Webster. In opposition to almost all grammarians and philologists of his day, Webster was convinced that language stems etymologically from verbs, not from nouns. In an introductory essay to his 1841 American Dictionary of the English Language, Webster theorizes that the "ordinary sense" of all words in any language may be expressed by thirty or forty verbs and that these radical verbs originate as modifications of the primary sense "to move."²⁴ These verbs are then modified into the "appropriate" or "customary" significations that we now recognize as entries in our modern dictionaries. The "principal radix" of a family of words may be a noun or an adjective instead of a verb (as just is the radix of justice and justly); that primary word, however, would always theoretically be traceable back to a verb (as Webster traces just back to "setting, erecting" and the adjective warm to Latin ferveo—"I boil"). Webster states in another essay: "Motion, action, is, beyond all controversy, the principal source of words."²⁵

Given Dickinson's interest in language and in her dictionary (an 1844 reprint of Webster's 1841 edition), there can be little doubt that she read Webster's introductory essay. In 1862 she wrote Higginson that "for several years, my Lexicon—was my only companion—" (L 261), and she speaks in a poem of "Easing my famine / At my Lexicon—" (728). Even taking hyperbolic self-posing into account, we can assume that the young poet spent a lot of time reading her dictionary. A family connection between the Dickinsons and the Websters may also have encouraged her interest in the family dictionary. Webster lived in Amherst from 1812 to 1822 and served with the poet's grandfather on the first Board of Trustees for Amherst Academy; Emily Dickinson later attended the Academy with the lexicographer's granddaughter, Emily Fowler. Although she may not have been influenced by Webster's theory, Dickinson would at least have found scholarly support there for her own probably unarticulated interest in the verb's role in meaning.

Nineteenth-Century Women Writers

Dickinson was influenced in establishing the techniques of her style by writing which states or implies both that language is primarily an instrument of naming and that language primarily expresses the boundaries of motion, of interactive meaning. Although it is not the focus of this study, Dickinson's use of narrative is also an element of her style. The poet tends to tell a story in her poems, to present ideas or feeling through a plot. The Bible's use of parables—in fact, the Bible itself as an encyclopedia of stories—may have encouraged her propensity to write in tales. Her plots, however, resemble those of popular writers of the period, particularly women writers, suggesting that they may well have influenced this aspect of her style. Certainly Dickinson's most common plot closely resembles the base plot of several women writers.

The Dickinson family subscribed to The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's New Monthly Magazine, and Scribner's Monthly along with The Springfield Republican and two other newspapers—all of which published at least occasional current fiction, poetry, or literary criticism. Emily, Lavinia, Austin, Sue and their friends also bought books on a regular basis and exchanged them with one another. The poet's letters are full of references to what recently published story or book she is reading or that someone has recommended that she read. Although the most frequently repeated references are to authors famous at the time and now (Emerson, Longfellow, both the Brownings, Eliot, and so on), the poet also speaks highly of a number of American women writers, mostly less well known at present: among others, these include Helen Hunt Jackson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rebecca Harding Davis, Francis Prescott Spofford, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Marcella Bute Smedley. In a letter of her early twenties (L 85; 1852), for example, Dickinson writes Sue how "small" her "catalogue" of reading has been of late and then goes on:

I have just read three little books, not great, not thrilling—but sweet and true. "The Light in the Valley" [a memorial of Mary Elizabeth Stirling, who died a few months previously], "Only" [by Matilda Anne Mackarness] and A "House upon a Rock" [also by Mackarness]—I know you would love them all—yet they dont bewitch me any. There are no walks in the wood—no low and earnest voices, no moonlight, nor stolen love, but pure little lives, loving God, and their parents, and obeying the laws of the land; … I have the promise of "Alton Lock" [by Charles Kingsley]—a certain book, called "Olive," [by Dinah Maria Craik] and the "Head of a Family," [also by Craik] which was what Mattie named to you.

Dickinson's debt to British women authors as role models is much greater than her debt to Americans, but in terms of plot her response to the two groups is largely indistinguishable. Gilbert and Gubar attribute not only her primary romantic plot but also the forms of her daily life to Dickinson's familiarity with the plots of British and American women's novels and poetry: "The fictional shape Dickinson gave her life was a gothic and romantic one, not just (or even primarily) because of the family 'rhetoric' of exaggeration but because the gothic/romantic mode was so frequently employed by all the women writers whom this poet admired more than almost any other literary artists." In her poems, they argue, she articulates variously the details of the plot she has constructed for her reclusive and eccentric life.²⁶

The most common plot of Dickinson's poems involves a speaker who is the victim of some monstrous power, usually ambiguously sexual or romantic and usually specifically male. Several poems involve courtship (about which the speaker is ambivalent). For example, death is a courteous gentleman who "kindly stopped for me—" (712) or "the supple Suitor / That wins at last—", bearing his bride away to "Kinsmen as divulgeless / As throngs of Down—" or, in another variant, "as responsive / As Porcelain." (1445). A bee and rose act out the drama of courtship in a number of poems; for example, in "A Bee his burnished Carriage / Drove boldly to a Rose—", she "received his visit / With frank tranquility" and then, as he flees, "Remained for her—of rapture / But the humility." (1339). Another poem (239) seems to give the withholding lover both feminine and (implicitly) masculine roles; in the middle of the poem, "Heaven" is first a seductress but then a Conjuror—a term usually reserved for male magicians:

Her teasing Purples—Afternoons—
The credulous—decoy—
Enamored—of the Conjuror—
That spurned us—Yesterday!

Heaven teases without giving what she promises and, in what Dickinson usually makes the masculine role, spurns the already enamored. "I cannot live with You" (640), like any number of poems written to "you" or "him," rests on the same premise as "'Heaven'—is what I cannot reach!" (239): relationship here is impossible (except in the cases where it is not desired, as with death) and so the speaker is left with "that White Sustenance—/ Despair—".

Haunted houses or ghosts appear in several poems, the most famous of which are well known: "One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted," with its gothic chase through an "Abbey" and with "Assassin hid in our Apartment" (670); and "The Soul has Bandaged moments," where a "ghastly Fright come[s] up / And stop[s] to look at her—" (512). Ghosts appear as everything from "Eternity's Acquaintances" (892) to the "Emerald Ghost—" of a storm that cannot be shut out in "There came a Wind like a Bugle" (1593), and figures in these and other poems are frequently haunted.²⁷ Dickinson once wrote to Higginson that "Nature is a Haunted House—but Art—a House that tries to be haunted" (L 459a). Gilbert and Gubar claim that this comment's "frank admission of dependence upon [gothic] metaphors … tells us that the self-hauntings of (female) gothic fiction are in Dickinson's view essential to (female) art."²⁸ At the very least, the metaphor shows Dickinson's conscious and theatrical use of popular gothic and domestic metaphor.

In most of Dickinson's plots the speaker feels herself besieged or unjustly tormented. One might speculate, of course, that Dickinson writes of suitors, unrequited love, and goblins or specters because these are her primary day-to-day concerns, but this seems unlikely. What we know of her life suggests rather that these story elements are a literary coin she trades in to give her thoughts currency and drama. The poet's twisting and even mockery of the stock gothic plot in several poems (for example, where ghosts are not the "superior spectre" one need fear; 670) also suggest its distance from the larger concerns of her life. She does not live as a heroine and probably does not believe that heroines as such exist, but she knows how to dress her speakers, and to some extent her public self, in that garb.

In her study of nineteenth-century American women poets, Cheryl Walker accumulates evidence that the commonly held nineteenth-century stereotype of the poetess also provided material for Dickinson's themes and plots and may have contributed to the molding of her life (especially her reclusiveness, dressing in white, and repeated assertion of extreme sensitivity). Focusing on the expressions of feeling that the pose of poetess invites, Walker sees less irony in Dickinson's manipulation of that common plot than I do. The poet assumed a role in and out of her poems, Walker argues, partly for convenience, as protective camouflage, but partly because the role fit, and perhaps also because the paucity of roles for a woman poet left her relatively little choice: "Sometimes it is hard to distinguish the true feelings of these women poets from those dictated by the role they assumed to satisfy public expectations. For a woman like Dickinson the sense of difference from others, the intense feelings, were certainly real. But it is also important to remember that one's self-conception is determined in part by the social vocabulary of one's culture. Still, the poetess was more than a social norm. She was an accessible image for a literary self." According to Walker, Dickinson's frequent reference to or use in her poems of "intense feeling, the ambivalence toward power, the fascination with death, the forbidden lover and secret sorrow"—all major features of expression and plot in the "women's tradition" in poetry—mark her familiarity with this tradition if not its influence on her. Although her language itself (and thus ultimately the poetry) is at great variance from that of her contemporary female and male poets—Walker herself admits that the poet "certainly … ignored [this tradition's] stylistic conventions"—Dickinson's topics and sentiments are often indistinguishable from those of her sister poets.²⁹

Judging by a contemporary writer's characterization of typical feminine and masculine styles, Dickinson shares more with the latter than with the former. Mary Abigail Dodge, whose sketches Dickinson almost certainly read in the Atlantic Monthly in the late 1850s and 1860s and who chose her pen name "Gail Hamilton" because it allowed her to write with a "sexually indeterminate pen," brags of her ability to keep her gender unknown by demonstrating her mastery of both masculine and feminine styles:

I inform you that I could easily deceive you, if I chose. There is about my serious style a vigor of thought, a comprehensiveness of view, a closeness of logic, and a terseness of diction, commonly supposed to pertain only to the stronger sex. Not wanting in a certain fanciful sprightliness which is the peculiar grace of woman, it possesses also, in large measure, that concentrativeness which is deemed the peculiar strength of man. Where an ordinary woman will leave the beaten track, wandering in a thousand little by-ways of her own,—flowery and beautiful, it is true, and leading her airy feet to "sunny spots of greenery" and the gleam of golden apples, but keeping her not less surely from the goal,—I march straight on, turning neither to the right hand nor to the left, beguiled into no side-issues, discussing no collateral question, but with keen eye and strong hand aiming right at the heart of my theme. Judge thus of the stern severity of my virtue.³⁰

When writing of women's digressiveness, Hamilton's prose becomes every bit as "flowery" and "airy" as that of the writers she describes. This sentence uses embedded and parallel descriptive clauses, repeated right-branching constructions, and a profusion of adjectives. The style of the "stronger sex," in contrast, is to the point, as typified by the first two and last sentences above. More than Hamilton, Dickinson writes with what might in her age be called a "masculine" "terseness of diction" and "concentrativeness." Although the speech of the poems may resemble women's more than men's speech, the poems' language does not for the most part resemble nineteenth-century women's written language, especially prose. Hamilton openly disproves the accuracy of her stereotypes of masculine and feminine writing by combining what she considers the best features of both in her own prose. Nonetheless, the stereotypes basically hold as descriptions of nineteenth-century prose. American women's writing did tend to be more adjectival, "flowery," and digressive than men's writing—although a twentieth-century reader of popular nineteenth-century men's writing might well describe it using the same adjectives. What Dickinson takes from this writing is its indirection (leaving the straight "beaten track" for a more ambiguous goal), its primary story elements, and its feeling—not its form.

The claims of influence on the work of any writer must be tenuous. My purpose here has not been to argue that Dickinson writes as she does because of her familiarity with the Bible, or with Emerson's writing and philosophy, or with Webster's theory of the origins of language, or because of any other sources. Rather, I present this … evidence as a way of reiterating that all language has a supporting context. The syntactic, structural, semantic, and narrative aspects of Dickinson's poems echo writers and texts the poet knew well. She did not manufacture her style out of thin air any more than she lifted it full blown from other writers' pages. Her seclusion from the world was not, in short, a seclusion from language. In delineating stylistic similarities, I have described some of the affinities between Dickinson and the writers who provide the closest models for her language use….

Notes

¹ Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative), ed. Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 75.

² Frederick Tuckerman, Amherst Academy: A New England School of the Past (Amherst, Mass., 1926), 97.

³ Sewall refutes the myth that Dickinson was isolated socially and spiritually at Mount Holyoke because she did not convert (Life II, 362-364). It is also important to note in this age of greater religious variety that one could be a regular churchgoer and generally adhere to the principles of Christianity without being "a Christian." The poet's letters contain several references to sermons and ministers that she heard until she became completely reclusive in her early thirties.

⁴ Thomas H. Johnson, Emily Dickinson: An Interpretive Biography (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955), 151.

⁵ James R. Kugel, The Idea of Biblical Poetry: Parallelism and Its History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981), 300.

⁶ Dickinson alludes to the gospel of Matthew seventy-four times in her poems and letters, more than twice as often as to any other book of the Bible. Jack L. Capps, Emily Dickinson's Reading, 1836-1886 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), 40-41, 192.

⁷ One of the primary initial arguments of Mueller's The Native Tongue and the Word: Developments in English Prose Style 1380-1580 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) has to do with the complexity and effectiveness of a conjunctive and paratactic style. Mueller notes that the shift of subject (here from third to first person) occurs frequently in scripturalism and in spoken language; it also occurs frequently in Dickinson's poetry.

⁸ Kugel, The Idea of Biblical Poetry, 10.

⁹ There are more extreme examples of Dickinson's repetition, but they follow the same pattern of functional repetition and semantic variation. For example, in "Mine—by the Right of the White Election!" (528), six of the poem's nine lines begin "Mine—" and four begin "Mine—by the …" Like "It was not Death," this poem never identifies its subject, what the speaker insists is "Mine."

¹⁰ Morris Croll, "The Baroque Style in Prose," ed. John M. Wallace, in Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm: Essays by Morris Croll (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966), 207-237 (originally published in 1929). Subsequent citations of Croll in the text will be indicated by giving page numbers in parentheses. Croll speaks only of biblical prose, but Kugel argues at length that the lack of meter in Hebrew makes the Romance language distinction between poetry and prose meaningless. At its most "poetic," biblical language employs the greatest number of "heightening features" to create the greatest intensity (The Idea of Biblical Poetry, 85-86).

Dickinson wrote to Higginson: "For Prose [I have]—Mr Ruskin—Sir Thomas Browne—and the Revelations." "For Poets," she names only Keats and the Brownings (L 261). Millicent Todd Bingham and Mabel Loomis Todd published Herbert's stanzas as Dickinson's in the first edition of Bolts of Melody: New Poems of Emily Dickinson (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1945).

¹¹ James Davidson ("Emily Dickinson and Isaac Watts," Boston Public Library Quarterly, 6, 1954, 141-149) mentions the former two books. Capps mentions only the latter, stating that it belonged to the poet's father (Emily Dickinson's Reading, 187). All three were enormously popular in the nineteenth century.

¹² Watts concludes his hymn "There is a land of pure delight" (626) with the stanza: "Could we but climb where Moses stood, / And view the landscape o'er; / Not Jordan's stream, nor death's cold flood / Should fright us from the shore." Dickinson parodies this vision of heaven in "Where bells no more affright the morn" with her wish for a "town" (or "Heaven") where "very nimble Gentlemen" can no longer wake sleeping children. Her poem concludes: "Oh could we climb where Moses stood, / And view the Landscape o'er' / Not Father's bells—nor Factories, / Could scare us any more!" (112). Watts's hymn is in his Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1834).

¹³ According to Davidson, Watts's psalms and hymns were frequently smoothed out by editors because of this irregularity and harshness. Church Psalmody, however, one of the Watts books belonging to the Dickinsons, was virtually unchanged by editors ("Emily Dickinson and Isaac Watts," 143).

¹⁴ Mueller argues that modern English as a whole has been deeply influenced by scripturalism, primarily through translations of the Bible preceding the King James version (The Native Tongue and the Word). American adoption of some characteristics of biblical style seems to be more specific and more closely tied to biblical authority than were the earlier British borrowings from scripturalism.

¹⁵ Perry Miller, "An American Language," in Nature's Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 208-240. Subsequent page references to this essay will appear in parentheses in the text.

¹⁶ Think of the inevitable opening apologia in Puritan writing, from Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress to the "foolish, broken, blemished Muse" that Anne Bradstreet claims for herself in her "Prologue."

¹⁷ William Ames was the most articulate proponent of the plain style. The passages quoted in the text are from his "Conscience with the Power and Cases Thereof (1643) and The Marrow of Sacred Divinity (1643) as cited respectively in Larzer Ziff's Puritanism in America (New York: Viking Press, 1973), 14, and Perry Miller's The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Boston: Beacon Press, 1939), 301.

¹⁸ From Ames's Marrow of Sacred Divinity, quoted in Miller, "An American Language," 219.

¹⁹ In The American Democrat (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931; a reprint of the 1838 edition), 108-116.

²⁰ Given the context of the poem, it must be the old Sea that says "Go" to the new or "Brook"-Sea. The Brook-Sea speaks last, addressing the older "Waters."

²¹ Capps, Emily Dickinson's Reading, 173-174.

²² Ralph Waldo Emerson, Complete Works, 12 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, 1883). This quote is taken from vol. I, 31. Subsequent quotations from Emerson will be cited in the text as Works, with volume and page number.

²³ Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Ezra Pound (San Francisco: City Light Books, 1969), 20-21, 23; originally published in 1936.

²⁴ "An Introductory Dissertation on the Origin, History and Connection of the Languages of Western Asia and Europe, with an Explanation of the Principles on which Language are Formed," ix-lxxi. It is possible that Webster's interest in etymological derivations in this essay and throughout his dictionary influenced Dickinson's similar interest, but there is no special reason to assume this connection. More likely, Webster's derivations provided empirical support for an interest and habit the poet had already developed on her own.

²⁵ Webster, "State of English Philology," in A Collection of Papers on Political, Literary and Moral Subjects (New York, 1843), 365.

²⁶ Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), 584.

²⁷ See, for example, poems 75, 184, 274, 281, 311, 413, 670, 817, 1181, and 1400 for ghosts and 167, 195, 253, 472, 788, 841, 938, and 1004 for haunting.

²⁸ Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman in the Attic, 585-586.

²⁹ Cheryl Walker, The Nightingale's Burden: Women Poets in America, 1630-1900 (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1982), 88, 116, 87.

³⁰ Mary Abigail Dodge, from "My Garden," Atlantic Monthly, 1862. Reprinted in Provisions: A Reader of Nineteenth-Century American Women, ed. Judith Fetterley (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1985), 421-445.