SubscribeAugust 8th, 2009
Critics of Emily Dickinson
Much of what I have been reading of late are things to do with Emily Dickinson, mostly criticism with a little biography thrown in. The critics can’t seem to agree on anything, except maybe that she was a poet, and that might be because her lines are usually so short and often fractured that there is no way to see it as prose.
Whether or not Emily was a mystic, for example: lots of people write about her “mystic poetry” and her links to the metaphysical poets by virtue of her obsessions, but then Sister Humiliata (in College English., Vol. 12, No.3, 1950) writes that she isn’t a mystic because she doesn’t renounce life as, according to her, a Christian mystic must. And of course Emily was a Christian, at least her thought patterns, obsessions, and spiritual doorways sought were trained and framed by the Christian doctrine of the Puritan and Transcendental sort.
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August 3rd, 2009
Alchemy and American Letters
Project Gutenburg has a copy of Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts by Dr. Herbert Silberer. This famous rendition pictured here of the goal of alchemical practice has always been one of my favourite emblems of human desire and the western European narrative that tries to make sense of the experience of wanting. The whole project of alchemy as it pertains to the human psyche is fascinating.
Silberer lived between 1882 and 1923. He was four years old when Emily Dickinson died. Dickinson had been influenced in her thinking by many things but one of them was Transcendentalism, or at least Emerson’s writings about it. Emerson was influenced by the various magical traditions of the west largely through Swedenborg (1688-1772) just as Ethan Allen Hitchcock (1798-1870) was. Although Hitchcock and Emerson focused on different things, one thing stayed the same, they were both obsessed by the notion of the transcendence of the individual human being, as was Dickinson in her own fashion.
Hitchcock was fascinated by alchemy. In fact, it seems as if the finest literary collection of early alchemical works in the United States was his. Hitchcock knew Emerson, and certainly Emily Dickenson had access to Emerson’s essays in her daily papers. Emerson and Dickinson: arguably two of the most influential writers in American history. And of course there are the Great Awakenings, the first occuring between the (approximate years) 1730 and 1775 and the second between 1790 and 1840. The third rolled around only 10 years after that, between 1850 and 1900. I don’t think it can be underestimated how woven a magical world view is in American society and Letters.
