ABSTRACT
In a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson in 1880, towards the end of her life, Emily Dickinson describes her poems as ‘Hymns’. This emphatic choice of description employed alongside ‘faithful’ as a benchmark for quality in this letter is undoubtedly ironic.1 Whilst calling into question the extent to which her gleefully unconventional poems deviate from traditional hymnody is humorous, there is also a genuine challenge being presented: How do these poems differ from traditional hymns and in what ways are they (un)faithful? Her use of the term connotes an irreverence for religious tradition and its expressive forms, but conveys equally, the serious import of her project. Her caveat ‘They are short and I could write them quite plainly’ confronts openly the expectations and parameters associated with traditionally sacred forms of writing, and the emphasis on ‘plainness’ in Puritan spirituality specifically. It also mirrors the cultural limitations imposed upon selfexpression of the woman writer more generally in the mid-nineteenth-century. Dickinson’s ‘promise’ of a voice which speaks from the margins, occupying only minimal space, is a flimsy veil indeed for what is a bombastic negative enquiry which assertively envisions her art as an alternative new form of hymnody, carrying with it a new kind of ‘faith’ altogether. The letter to Higginson quoted above witnesses the extent to which Dickinson conferred spirituality upon her writing, where the two are inextricably connected. Whilst calling her poems ‘Hymns’ operates upon the level of irony, it is undoubtedly also a sincere statement about her relationship with her art. In this letter, and in the poems she produced throughout her life, Dickinson is reclaiming the hymn. In conferring the status of hymns upon her work, and by making the connection between spirituality and
writing explicit, Dickinson also aligns herself with other women hymn writers. Given her lack of concern with orthodox modes of publication, alluding to the inferior, ‘acceptable’ status of the female hymnist as opposed to poet was a risk that Dickinson was prepared to take.
