“The Missing All”: Emily Dickinson's Apophatic Poetics

Abstract

The words the happy say Are paltry melody But those the silent feel Are beautiful-- --Emily Dickinson Emily Dickinson has long been regarded as a peculiarly enigmatic figure for her puzzling and oftentimes paradoxical poems, as well as for her evidently idiosyncratic religious faith. I will make no attempt to investigate that faith, except as it is expressed in the poetry. (1) However, if we focus on the faith together with the poetry as having the character of a negative theology, much that is enigmatic, without ceasing to be so, begins also to make a clear kind of sense. I contend that Dickinson's poetry is best understood as a form of negative theology, or as what I will call discourse. My guiding idea is that Dickinson's exploration of modes of negation in poetic language enabled her to discover and express what are, in effect, negatively theological forms of belief. I will use apophasis, the Greek word for negation, to designate the sort of radical negation of language per se, of any language whatsoever--rather than only of specific formulations and of certain types of linguistic content--that characterizes this outlook, or rather sensibility, which suspects and subverts all its own verbal expressions. This term and its adjectival form evoke in the first place the ancient Neoplatonic tradition of speculation concerning the ineffable One as supreme principle of reality. Likewise commonly designated as apophatic are certain traditions of medieval mysticism concerning an unutterably transcendent deity. In such traditions, the encounter, in incommunicable registers of experience, with the Inexpressible is marked by a backing off language (apo--away from phasis--speech or assertion). Of course, this backing off is itself then registered in language, language that in various ways unsays itself. (2) The resultant apophatic modes of discourse, in their very wide diffusion throughout Western culture, especially in the domains of philosophy, religion, and literature, can be seen to have had a decisive bearing on Dickinson's writing. This can be inferred the poetry itself, whether it is conscious and deliberate on her part or not. The apophatic tradition, I maintain, whether directly or indirectly, influences Dickinson's reflections on the limits of her ability to express the reality she endeavors to approach and the experience she aims to convey in her poetry. Precisely the impediments to expression become her central message in telling ways, for they tell obliquely of a beyond of language. Dickinson's highly original writing makes her a maddeningly difficult poet, one whom eminent critics confess baffles them. Yet her poems become startlingly readable when read according to their apophatic grammar and rhetoric: the words and phrases fall into place--the place they make for what they necessarily leave unsaid but let show up distinctly silhouetted in their hollows and shadows. The poems selected to illustrate Dickinson's apophatic poetics in this essay generally thematize a negative method of thought and perception, but they are only the most explicit representatives of a poetic corpus that is, throughout, profoundly apophatic in nature and inspiration and that rewards being read as such, while it stiffly resists readings that ignore this orientation. Dickinson Criticism and the Apophatic Paradigm Although the poems often proved impossible for her contemporaries to penetrate, they have won immense appreciation in more recent critical appraisals, particularly those attuned to apophasis and the poetics of the unsayable. Even if rarely with explicit acknowledgment of the apophatic tradition as a primary context, this framework has already been operative in scholarship aiming to illuminate Dickinson's poems. Readings of Dickinson pointing in this direction have insisted on compression and abbreviation as features that distinguish her style, especially as against the stylistic canons of her own time. …