20 pages • 40-minute read
The Only News I Know
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Background
Literary Context
Dickinson was well-versed in the literary canon from a young age and was thoroughly educated in traditional texts like the Bible, Shakespeare’s tragedies, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and George Herbert’s religious poetry, but her influences greatly diversified and broadened in her twenties when she had completed her classical education. Dickinson read works from English contemporaries like the poets Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Brontë sisters, and novelist George Eliot, all of whom she found artistically inspiring.
Even more influential than those authors, however, were John Keats and the Romantic poets. While Dickinson’s poetry does not completely align within the Romantic Movement, it does incorporate elements of that philosophy. Although she was fascinated by the natural world and plant life in particular, Dickinson’s primary concern was not the separation of humankind from nature which Romantics like William Wordsworth and William Blake lamented. Dickinson was more concerned with the “sundering of the human and the divine” (Brantley 159), not unlike the Romantic poet Keats. In “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Keats addresses an ancient Greek urn, describing and reflecting on the images painted on it. The poem considers issues of legacy, immortality and mortality, and art. The poem demonstrates Keats’ belief that art can create immortality and can become a kind of spiritual experience.
Similarly, much of Dickinson’s poetry acts as a kind of meditation on spiritual things, questioning and exploring the reality of eternity, God, the resurrection, and immortality. As exemplified in poems like “The Only News I know” and “Because I could not stop for Death,” Dickinson has minimal interest in her physical world and is eager to understand and know death and the immortality after the resurrection on an intimate level. In “The Only News I know,” the only person Dickinson meets with and speaks to is God (Line 8), and in “Because I could not stop for Death,” the personified and gentlemanly Death escorts Dickinson’s speaker on an almost romantic coach ride. These poems, like the Romantic poetry that attempted to unite humanity and nature and like Keats’ spiritually moving poetry, blur the line between physical existence and the spiritual world.
Philosophical Context
Another strong influence on Dickinson’s spiritual beliefs and poetic aesthetics was the contemporary Transcendentalism movement in America. Pioneered by fellow New England poets like Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Ralph Waldo Emerson (who met Dickinson on more than one occasion), Transcendentalism was a poetic and spiritual movement during the early 19th century which taught that all human beings were innately good and interconnected. Inspired by the Romantic Movement, Transcendentalists believed that all human beings were pure until corrupted by the evils of society and its institutions and that a return to such purity was possible through a close union with nature and a reliance on the self, as opposed to any religious institution. Subjective observation and experience eclipsed traditional religion and belief systems for the Transcendentalists, who believed it was possible to experience divine phenomena and obtain spiritual revelations in their everyday lives. A frequently atheistic movement, Transcendentalism was less interested in Heaven than the power of an isolated individual to achieve spiritual enlightenment on Earth.
While Dickinson never left the Calvinist faith of her family and community, she embraced and embodied many of the tenets of the Transcendental philosophy. Like Thoreau who removed himself from society and lived in the woods near Walden Pond when writing, Dickinson similarly embraced a kind of social seclusion to pursue her writing ambitions. Furthermore, in poems like “The Only News I know,” Dickinson demonstrates her belief in the divine inspiration of the everyday. Each day she meets with God (Line 8) and learns new information and revelations from subjective meditations—uninfluenced by organized religion—on death and eternity. Her poems express a “sense of the intimate proximity of transcendent experience” (“Presence and Place in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry,” Douglas Anderson, pg. 209). For Dickinson and the Transcendentalists, the barrier between “daily existence” (Anderson 206) and transcendent, heavenly revelation was often nonexistent. Prone to vacillate between religious questioning and spiritual rapture, the reclusive intellectual Emily Dickinson in many ways modeled the transcendental lifestyle.
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