Michael Ryanexcerpt from Vocation According To Dickinson
Despite her notorious slant tellings, proverbs, paradoxes, riddles, enigmas, deflections, self-protections, and indirections, Dickinson is first to last and above all earnest. Sincerity was to her a supreme value; the final measure was the Heart. "To be made alive is so chief a thing all else inevitably adds": she meant to be quintessentially alive on this earth and she most certainly was. This was her greatest success. Her poems are its instruments and products. Her genius, as she herself defined the term, was "the ignition of affection--not intellect, as it is supposed--the exaltation of devotion, and in proportion our capacity for that, is our experience of genius." Her capacity for the "exaltation of devotion" was extraordinary. The devotion she exalted was to friends, family, loved ones, the natural world, home, "sermons on unbelief," Books, and--especially--poetry: poetry that made her feel as if the top of her head were taken off, reading it where she could find it in Shakespeare, Keats, Herbert, the Brownings, the book of Revelation, the Psalms, the Gospel of Mathew, and also--very luckily for us--writing it herself. Writing poems was life-sustaining, even life-creating. It created the place in which she fully experienced her experience. What she made in her poems she used in her life. The process of writing and all it involved grew her soul. It was a spiritual discipline, the lifelong practice of a craft, and an entertainment. When after a few years out of touch, Higginson asked if she was still writing, she responded, "I have no other Playmate." The idea that either poetry or religion was separable from life was repugnant to her. Art for art's sake would have struck her as a ludicrous, debased idea. The foundation and purpose of art was moral and religious, as it was for every poet of her time except Poe, but unlike the Victorian sages for her the relationship between art and morality was implicit not explicit, private not social, neither pious nor privileged but enmeshed with gritty, difficult, daily life, and every crack and crease in their connections was open to exploration. God ("I know him but a little") was not so much to be praised as called into account for human suffering, including her own, but her own only as a representative, "a supposed person" (she reminded Higginson, "When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse--it does not mean--me--but a supposed person"). She is often playfully and affectionately ironic (she was known locally for her wit and humor), but the few scornful words of hers that have survived are directed at fops, atheists, liars, seekers of fame, and women who regard themselves as "soft creatures." "'Tis a dangerous moment for any one when the meaning goes out of things and Life stands straight--and punctual--and yet no content(s) (signal) comes(s). Yet such moments are. If we survive them they expand us, if we do not, but that is Death, whose if is everlasting": Open your eyes, she says again and again, "the heaven below" is right here right now right in front of you, despite grief and loss so intense it threatens madness. "O Vision of Language": all one has to do is see--or, more accurately, as she wrote it, "see to see."
Michael Ryan's books include God Hunger, winner of the Lenore Marshall Award, and Secret Life, a New York Times Notable Book in 1995. He teaches in the MFA Writing Programs at Warren Wilson College and the University of California at Irvine.
