Emily Dickinson’s Spiritual “Letter to the World”

Promotional cover art for the film, My Letter to the World, directed by Solon Papadopoulos (2017).

“Home is the definition of God,” Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) once wrote, in an 1870 letter to her cousin Peter (Perez D. Cowan), upon the occasion of his marriage Margaret Elizabeth Rhea. (Letter in Delphi Complete Works of Emily Dickinson (Illustrated), p. 2566).

Here, the extraordinarily prolific and ultimately reclusive American poet, who spent her life unmarried and writing away in her family’s home, appeared to be reflecting upon the comfort, fortitude, and even bliss of marital union when blessed by the graces and the fates, so to speak.

She eschewed a conventional union of marriage, which was unusual for a woman of her time. She also penned nearly 1,800 poems over the course of her lifetime. None were accepted for publication while she was alive in human form. Her sister found the multitudes of poems Dickinson had been writing only after the poet had passed back to spirit. She found them scrawled on an amazing array of materials, including envelopes, napkins, and chocolate wrappers. According to many scholars of Dickinson, her family appeared to have known that she was writing, but they did not seem to have a clear sense of the amount or the significance of her work. Both were discovered, even by those who lived with her, after she transitioned back to spirit.

Perhaps the absence of worldly involvement when she was alive even helped to furnish the conditions for her astonishing productivity and ingenuity. Dickinson is also one of the only female nineteenth-century poets whose legacy has endured.

What was her inspiration? What did she mean when she wrote, “Home is the definition of God”? How spiritual were her creative impulses and processes?

Of course, we cannot know ultimate answers to these things if we are left only to divine from the poems, letters, and other creations she left here in the human physical realm. She did leave us many keys for interpretation, though.

To my mind, one of her most revelatory poems addresses her inner ear, or her hearing by the spirit, a feature for which she is justly famous and admired.

“The Spirit is the Conscious Ear.

The Spirit is the Conscious Ear.

We actually Hear

When We inspect — that’s audible —

That is admitted — Here —

For other Services — as Sound —

There hangs a smaller Ear

Outside the Castle — that Contain —

The other — only — Hear —"

(Poem in Delphi Completed Works, p. 1902.)

A beautiful 2017 documentary biopic on Emily Dickinson, My Letter to the World (directed by Solon Papadopoulos), offers some further fascinating clues to Dickinson’s spirit, life, and processes. The film features dramatic scenes that are interspersed with readings of her poems and letters, alongside scholarly commentaries on her work and life.

One commentator called Dickinson a “female Prometheus.” Another, a music scholar and composer, extolled the inspired hymnal nature of her poems. The words, with the punctuations and spacing, provide the surface of the piece, he remarked, while the “foundation” of the poem is the musical structure that lies beneath the words, even though Dickinson did not explicitly write or remark upon a musical base underlying her words. There are hints of this in the words, however.

Cynthia Nixon, the narrator, reads from Dickinson’s poem, “This World is not Conclusion”:

“This World is not Conclusion.

A Species stands beyond - 

Invisible, as Music -

But positive, as Sound -

It beckons, and it baffles - 

Philosophy, dont know - 

And through a Riddle, at the last - 

Sagacity, must go –”

The reading of the poem drops off, but I find the rest of the poem to be revealing of Dickinson’s appreciation of the world or worlds beyond this one, invisible – perhaps referring to spirit.

“To guess it, puzzles scholars -

To gain it, Men have borne

Contempt of Generations

And Crucifixion, shown -

Faith slips - and laughs, and rallies - 

Blushes, if any see - 

Plucks at a twig of Evidence - 

And asks a Vane, the way - 

Much Gesture, from the Pulpit -

Strong Hallelujahs roll - 

Narcotics cannot still the Tooth

That nibbles at the soul –”

This poem seems to speak to the irrepressible nature of the spirit that seeks to know the realms beyond conventional notions of evidence and knowledge. There is no way to subdue – or to sedate, as “Narcotics cannot still the Tooth” – the soul on a quest all its own.

Terence Davies, the writer and director of A Quiet Passion, a 2016 biographical film on Dickinson, shared in My Letter to the World:

“She was obsessed with mortality. She was obsessed with the nature of spirituality. Is there a God? Is there not? Most of her great poems oscillate between doubt and wanting hope.”

Nixon reads another Dickinson poem that speaks to a fierce vacillation between ecstasy and desperation. In the Delphi Collected Works, the poem bears the title “Compensation” (p. 99):

“For each ecstatic instant

We must an anguish pay

In keen and quivering ratio

To the ecstasy.

For each beloved hour

Sharp pittances of years,

Bitter contested farthings

And coffers heaped with tears.”

Although Dickinson was raised in a family of faith, she wrote in a letter that is featured in the film:

“All are religious, except for me.”

She frequently queried topics such as God, an afterlife, the divine, spirit, and inspiration. She wrote of her experiences and observations, but she would not declare a religious creed.

Dickinson often remarked on the divine around her in nature, and the natural world nourished and informed her poems. She also worked with her poems as though in a garden or field. As scholar Elisa New reflected:

“How can a poet write almost 1,800 poems? How can someone do that? And I thought: she tends poems the way she tends flowers, the way she tends perennials. Nurturing them. So, what we feel in her work is the absolutely uncompromising process of an artist living in the making of the work. And one still feels that. I feel it is especially in poems that sometimes don’t quite work or seem a little bit off, and you think, ‘Oh, she was going to get back to that one at some point, but she hadn’t gotten around to it.’”

Dickinson wrote of poets’ lighting lamps that extinguish, but the flames may contain “vital Light” that can work to illumine the broader realms of ages, each with their distinctive lenses.

“The Poets light but Lamps —

The Poets light but Lamps —

Themselves — go out —

The Wicks they stimulate —

If vital Light

Inhere as do the Suns —

Each Age a Lens

Disseminating their

Circumference —"

(Poem in Delphi Collected Works, p. 1244.)

However Dickinson conceived of the lighted lamps of her poems, her inspired words continue to carry forth that torch of “vital Light” well into the twenty-first century.

-

The film takes its title from a powerful Dickinson poem:

“This is my letter to the World

This is my letter to the World

That never wrote to Me —

The simple News that Nature told —

With tender Majesty

Her Message is committed

To Hands I cannot see —

For love of Her — Sweet — countrymen —

Judge tenderly — of Me”

(Delphi Complete Works, p. 779.)

About the Author

Lauren Coyle Rosen is a cultural anthropologist, artist, and author who focuses on the roles of spirituality and creative inspiration in art, music, and culture. She is the author of The Spirit of Ani (with Ani DiFranco, forthcoming), Hannibal Lokumbe (with Hannibal Lokumbe, Columbia University Press, 2024), Law in Light (University of California Press, 2024), and Fires of Gold (University of California Press, 2020), as well as eight volumes of poetry. Coyle Rosen is currently a fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at the Hutchins Center at Harvard University. She was a cultural anthropology professor at Princeton University, where she received the President’s Award in Distinguished Teaching. She lives in Washington, DC, and in Philadelphia with her husband, Jeffrey Rosen. She has a JD from Harvard Law School and a PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago.