20 pages • 40-minute read
I Felt a Cleaving in my Mind
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Background
Historical Context
Because Dickinson published only seven of her more than 1700 poems during her lifetime, providing any one of her poems with an appropriate (and accurate) historical context is challenging. Dickinson herself in filing her unpublished poems tended to bunch them by category—poems about nature, poems about love, poems about death—rather than in any chronological ordering. As her poems began to find their way to publication long after her death in 1886, it became something of a parlor game to try to find some keys in the poems themselves to when they might have been written.
That endeavor underscores the nature of the historical context of Dickinson’s poems in that they almost entirely lack that reassuring anchorage in the times and era of their composition. The most likely year of composition for Poem 937 is 1862—ish. The year is remarkable in that the poem does not appear to reflect the reality of her nation in the process of coming apart at the seams, a metaphor potentially applicable to the poem itself. It is not as if Dickinson was unaware of her historical moment. Although long framed as some kind of haunted recluse, Dickinson was in fact much engaged with her world, through correspondence and through her role as the kind of de facto administrator of her father’s household. Massachusetts itself was a hotbed of abolitionist agitation, and Dickinson was well versed in both the heated poems and uncompromising essays of fellow New Englanders appalled by the institution of human slavery in the South. Certainly, had Dickinson been compelled by her historical context, a nation coming apart, giving in to passionate rhetoric and abrogating the cool rationality of argument and logic, could easily have fit her metaphor of the mind being so completely cleaved from the heart. The reality is that Dickinson sought in poetry an expression of her identity, her experience. The poem lacks the stature and posturing of public poetry because Dickinson perceived the person—the heart, the intellect, the soul—came before the era that shaped it. Thus, the poem speaks to a kind of universality—the heart in conflict with the intellect is a timeless theme—that poems shaped by and argued against their historical context, inevitably ladened with explanatory footnotes, lack.
Literary Context
Emily Dickinson was both a part of her literary era and apart from it. Although it may seem a bit too neat, the emergence of American poetry during the 19th century can be triangulated from three towering figures: Walt Whitman, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Emily Dickinson. Alone of those three, Dickinson stayed in elected obscurity, never pursuing with any vigor the publication of her poems. Her place would not be defined until nearly 75 years after her death. Indeed, at the time of her death, The New York Times did not even run an obituary—the newspaper ran a “delayed” obituary in 1973. If Whitman represented the aggressive, radical, idealistic new American spirit, restless and energetic, and answering to no authority, and Longfellow the staid, inherited sense of the dignified position of a public poet offering wisdom and insight into how to live a moral life, Dickinson introduced the concept of the deeply feeling, terribly imperfect, very vulnerable poet exploring the inclinations and experiences of the heart in tension with the intellect and often against the argument of the soul. For her poetry, there simply was no literary context.
Dickinson, although certainly aware of both Whitman and Longfellow, followed her own inclinations in her verse. Thus, the literary context for Dickinson reflects not so much her contemporaries as her library in Amherst. She was fascinated by the plainsong richness of the Old Testament Psalms, reflecting her upbringing in the strict Protestantism of the New England Puritans. But she was as taken by the dazzling symbolisms of the Book of Revelation. She responded to the daring and often eccentric kaleidoscopic effects of the cascading metaphors and strikingly inventive rhythms and subtle sonic effects typical of English Renaissance poetry, particularly the metaphysical poets George Herbert and John Donne. Although she publicly (and frequently) disdained Whitman’s controversial Leaves of Grass (1855), she found in his “splendid grossness” the invitation to reconstruct inherited poetic lines and license to find her way to the integrity of a poem that reflected her own sensibility: both in her ludic word play and in her striking sense of independent thought, an idea she found as well in the 1840 essays of fellow Bostonian Ralph Waldo Emerson. Indeed, Poem 937 reflects Emerson’s nascent Transcendentalist movement with its courageous investigations into the spiritual dimension of the heart in conflict with the intellect without burdening that investigation with dogmatic religious concerns.
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