One of the tragedies of modern life is the division of intellectual labor into disciplines. “Tragedy,” though, is probably not the right word, for, while this situation is self-inflicted and filled with irony, it allows neither expiation for practitioners nor catharsis for readers. Rather, the rendering of thought and writing into discrete fields of study appears to be welcomed since it affords multiplied opportunities for cognoscenti to exclude uninitiated outsiders, aspiring authorities to set up fiefdoms, and the programs of annual learned societies to parade the latest fashionable clichés. The greatest loss occasioned by acquiescing to rigid disciplinary boundaries is the distortion of reality. In fact, poets pray, biophysicists take their kids to the movies, novelists cash their checks, financiers bake bread, missionaries propagate the species as well as the gospel, jocks read books. No single vocabulary, no single set of intellectual insights, can encompass the breadth and depth of lived existence. When academic discourses deny or underestimate the wholeness of life, they cheat their adepts. And they cheat the rest of us, for readers need all the help we can get, and from every resource imaginable, if we expect to have even a chance to understand even a portion of the world that whirls about us.
Thankfully, there are many exceptions to the short-sightedness of disciplinary despotism. Thankfully, many authors do exist who write out of broad learning and who do not consider it beneath themselves to be understood by a general audience. Thankfully, many books are still being published whose authors, however accomplished they may be in the latest and most technical questions of their disciplines, are able to bring that learning to bear on questions that transcend the narrow concerns of any one guild of scholars.
A surprisingly large number of such books that reach out beyond the boundaries of particular disciplines are biographies. Almost always, the subjects of biographies are written up because they have achieved distinction in a particular field — Feynman in physics, Ruth in baseball, Lippman in public discourse, Madame Curie in radioisotopes. To be sure, distinguished biographies provide authoritative translations for the laity of the particulars that made the subject renowned. Yet they also go much beyond to show how their subject’s life course illuminates the subject’s work. Usually they also relate the achievements of the person in his or her own sphere to parallel events, influences, trends, movements, and achievements connected to the subject’s times and places. The best biographies, in other words, combine learning in particulars with a concern for the general, and do so while also slaking our inexhaustible curiosity about the personal.
The life of Emily Dickinson, the reclusive poet of Amherst, Massachusetts, might seem less likely than other noteworthy subjects for a well-rounded biography. The woman, who was never comfortable in society and who spent the last half of her life within the confines of one relatively secluded house, does not at first appear to be a subject worth connecting to other things occurring throughout the American nineteenth century in which she lived. Moreover, her poetry is remarkable for its ability to translate with lightening metaphorical leaps the barest of particular observations into the loftiest and most abstract generalizations about The Human Condition. Concreteness abounds in her poems — the fall of snow, the flutter of a bird’s wing, a bridge spanning chasms. But those concrete images seem more devoted to Grand Conclusions than to a particular life.
The singular achievement of Roger Lundin’s biography is to show how profoundly connected Emily Dickinson actually was to so many of the grand developments of her century. Through his own remarkable range of interests as literary theorist, intellectual historian, and cultural critic, Lundin offers persuasive readings of her poems, but also opens them up as striking evocations of her age.
And what an age it was. Emily Dickinson witnessed firsthand the transformation of a rural New England village into a cog in a new world of international commerce and its stoutly Congregational college into a cosmopolitan institution participating fully in the great changes that transformed American higher education during the last half of the century. Through her family she experienced the newfound possibilities and perils of professionalization. Through a wider network of friends and correspondents she experienced the Civil War. Most importantly, she was a fully informed participant in the revolution of sensibility that overtook American letters during her lifetime. When she was born, the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, with their pioneering patriotism, and the poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, with its optimistic pieties, spoke for an intellectual landscape still ruled by a benevolent Deity. By the time of her death, the urban realism of Theodore Dreiser and the sublime egotism of Walt Whitman were pushing aside earlier literary conventions, and the argument from design lay shattered on the altar of Darwinian evolution.
In such a world, Emily Dickinson was a magnifying glass: her meticulously crafted poems force readers to see the aching depths created by that shift of sensibility; they are also devices focusing the rays of the sun into a fire of emotion.
By not treating Emily Dickinson as just a poet, or just a trophy to be won in the literati wars, or just a symbol of an era — but by treating Emily Dickinson and her times whole, and by doing so in prose as refined as the learning on which it rests, Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief will doubtless earn a place in the ranks of distinguished biographies. As such a biography of such a person, its appearance also strikes a welcome blow against the artificial academic divisions that so disfigure the intellectual life of our age.
MARK A. NOLL