Emily Dickinson.

Emily Dickinson

by Cynthia GriffinWolff (Knopf, 641 pp., $25)

IN LITTLE MORE than an ample lifetime,there have developed two main critical attitudes toward Emily Dickinson: first, a more or less benign recognition of her poetic achievement; and, second, the quasi-political use of her life as a paradigm for suppressed womanhood in both the nineteenth century and our own. The exponents of these views have tended to divide along lines of gender. Male critics in the first half of this century, represented chiefly by Allen Tate in a landmark essay in 1928, were the earliest discerners of her genius. The restoration of the Dickinson texts in 1955 by Thomas H. Johnson remains the standard version by which her work is evaluated. The exploratory biography This Was a Poet (1938), by George F. Whicher, was nobly surpassed by the still-definitive two-volume work The Life of Emily Dickinson (1974), by Richard B. Sewall.

Cynthia Griffin Wolff's new biographyof the poet is not about to dislodge Sewall's achievement. In fact, though both inhabit the biographical category, they are clearly different kinds of books. Cynthia Wolff's Emily Dickinson, so hefty in the hand and handsome in format, leaves us less concerned with biography than with the attempt to determine the place of its subject in our literary history. No new information about the life seems forthcoming, whereas the cultural and psychological explorations continue to be the most exciting of any current studies in American literature. Feminist criticism has justifiably appropriated Emily Dickinson to both its own interests and the larger literary interest.

Emily Dickinson lived and died inAmherst, Massachusetts, without having gone much further west than her own village precincts, further east than Boston, or further south than Philadelphia, where she met the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, untowardly claimed by some to have been the most important of her several unrequited loves. She traveled less in Amherst than Henry Thoreau had boasted of traveling in Concord. She drew a circle around herself not so much in emulation of Emerson as to accommodate her own notion of circumference. Domestically, she was a subject in the kingdom of her father's house, and in her last years scarcely moved outside her own bedroom. And yet, though often characterized as a nineteenth-century spinster, with all that implies, Emily Dickinson was one of the most passionate women in America.

The intensity of her personal relationships,however tenuous they may now seem in time and manners so far removed, is clearly revealed in her first meeting with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a panjandrum of the literary establishment in those days, to whom she had sent a packet of her poems. "Mr. Higginson,' she wrote in one of her incomparable letters, "are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?' It would not have made any difference whether Higginson was too busy or not, for he was simply incapable of recognizing her almost revolutionary worth. He had no idea of what she was doing with a new and compact sort of verse that took for its model, but frequently abused, the prosody of the Protestant hymnal. Actually, his failure of recognition may have been due as much to a sexual inhibition as a literary one. Writing about his encounter with Emily, he later said, "I never was with anyone who drained my nerve power so much. Without touching her, she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her.' Colonel Higginson, it turned out, would face a regiment of Confederate infantry with more poise than he had shown in his confrontation with the poet-spinster of Amherst.

Cynthia Wolff's biographical studyattempts to deal more with this inner, more private and dynamic Emily Dickinson than with the one generally known to her family and neighbors. The attempt doesn't work, however, because it assumes a greater burden than it can bear. Mrs. Wolff's insistent theme is that Emily Dickinson bitterly contested the prerogatives of an angry God all too readily accepted by both the townspeople of Amherst and the members of her own family. Cultural historians usually describe Amherst as a Trinitarian town--that is, as distinguished from a Unitarian one like Concord --but the dominant theology, in either case, was a pervasive and pessimistic Calvinism. So it seems just as likely that the individualistic Emily simply rejected this order of unremitting rigidity as unbearably solemn and lacking in native wit.

Less than halfway through EmilyDickinson, it becomes clear that Mrs. Wolff is out to construct a biography of the poems rather than of the poet. However, although several of Mrs. Wolff's readings are remarkable, her evaluations of many key poems are not at all well founded. As a biographically oriented critic, she seems incapable of calling a bad poem a bad poem; for, clearly, among the 1,775 poems that Emily Dickinson wrote, there are many that have little redeeming value. It is important to recognize that the most fully realized of Emily Dickinson's poems have a life--an all but palpable elan--apart from the biography as such. One should also read, on this score, Paula Bennett's outstanding essay on the poet included in her My Life a Loaded Gun (1986), with its interpretations of difficult poems that become stunningly clear in the light of her readings.

Finally, Mrs. Wolff does not let usknow that the most perplexing vacuum in Emily Dickinson's life was not her want of love--or her aversion to it? --but rather the historical amnesia she displayed regarding the Civil War. It is supremely ironic that the poet along with whom Emily Dickinson encompassed the whole of American poetic form, Walt Whitman, would alone provide us with an exquisitely feminine consciousness of our greatest tragedy. Some of Emily Dickinson's letters and a few of her poems do show a certain stinging awareness of the conflict, but there is nothing even close to a real sense of our nation's anguish and the causes of it.

Leaving aside this grim omission,however, an unencumbered reading of Emily Dickinson's poetry must take into full account its irrepressible play of mind and words. Her great subjects were also her obsessions: love, and its rejection; nature, and its sacramental presence; death, and its almost desired inevitability; and, of course, immortality. She perceived the natural world in far lovelier and more vivid images than had Thoreau, and she circumscribed the darknesses that enclosed the guilt-ridden fictions of Hawthorne and Melville. Emily Dickinson was unique, an American original, and arguably our purest poet. Unfortunately, for all its appearance of substantiality, Cynthia Griffin Wolff's biography fails to advance the best of Dickinson studies today.