Emily Dickinson the Unspoken Transcendentalist

Emily Dickinson is one of the most widely read and well known American poets. While she doesn't exactly fall into the category of the Transcendentalists, she was well-regarded by Emerson and she read his work thoughtfully. In 1850 her friend Benjamin Newton gave her Emerson's first collection of poems whose style and subject seem to resonate in her poetry. Later she expressed admiration of the writing of Thoreau. Dickinson kept her writing, as well as her writerly intentions, as simple as possible. According to Roy Harvey Pearce, "she is simply and starkly concerned with being herself and accommodating her view of the world to that concern." Ironically, for wishing only to be herself, Dickinson was following a transcendental ideal; she was being true to herself and being an individual at all costs, as opposed to conforming to a world of followers. Keeping Dickinson's famous reclusively in mind, one could say that in her lifetime she was neither a leader nor a follower. Dickinson never tied herself to a specific school of thought or philosophy, she was simply herself. Perhaps that was transcendental.

Some poems of Emily Dickinson seem to be transcendental, yet not quite. She appears to search for the universal truths and investigate the circumstances of the human condition: sense of life, immortality, God, faith, place of man in the universe. Emily Dickinson questions absolutes and her argumentation is multisided. The poetic technique that she uses involves making abstract concrete, which creates a striking imagery like that of a hand of the wind combing the Sky. One could perceive Emerson's transcendentalism's, influence in these poems but the profound difference here is that Emily Dickinson does not take a role of a prophet, redeemer and teacher of the world. Instead, hers is the lonely search for the truth; she dismisses conventional faith as the easiest way toward salvation. Self-analysis, self-discipline, and self-critique are the tools of her search.

Emily Dickinson was a woman who lived in times that are more traditional, born in Amherst Massachusetts; a small farming town that had a college and a hat factory. There, she was raised in a strict Calvinist household while receiving most of her education at a boarding school that followed the American Puritanical tradition. She seldom left her hometown; virtually, her only contact with her friends came to be made through letters. As a young woman, Dickinson rejected comforting traditions, resisted male authority, and wrestled alone with her complex and often contrary emotions.

The many losses she experienced throughout her life, the death of her father, mother, close neighbors, and friends influenced her life largely and led her to write about death to an enormous amount. Dickinson made a few attempts during her life to be taken as more than an amateur poet; on one occasion, she sent a collection of her poems to a correspondent who was a published poet. His criticism of her poetry devastated Dickinson, and she never made another attempt towards publishing her works. Evident through her letters and poems, her poetry records intense devotion, sharp, skeptical independence, doubt, and what repeatedly reflects her happiness and despair. Even later on in life, many were skeptical about publishing her poems.