Regardless, Emily Norcross Dickinson would have been unlikely to provide perfect resilience under any circumstances, partly by dint of her innate temperament and partly due to her recurrent illnesses, which crimped her domestic role and abilities. Her steadfast resilience was demanded and perhaps not rewarded. His growing distance from the family also isolated Emily Norcross Dickinson, his wife and their mother. Yet Edward's many absences also threw the younger Dickinsons into a greater dependency on their mother than might have been true otherwise. Merely by reading aloud to his family regularly from the Bible, he may have helped to assure his elder daughter's fascination with richly aphoristic language in particular and with rhetoric in general-with the full, roving scope of it, from scrupling understatement to rumbling hyperbole. Thanks to Edward's drive to succeed, the Dickinson home in Amherst was handsomely appointed, the children were well provided for, and their father's presence on Sundays could be counted on. The early burden of financial responsibility may have affected adversely the development of her father's character.Įdward Dickinson was for Emily, her older brother, Austin, and her younger sister, Lavinia, a distant though powerful figure whose law practice, various investments, political ambitions, and devotion to community service often combined to keep him from home during extended forays to Boston, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. As his firstborn son, Edward Dickinson was naturally compelled to make amends for his disgraced father, particularly after Samuel left Amherst in 1833 following foreclosure on his mortgages. In its absolute compression of form, the poem also supports its own claim of spiritual sufficiency.Īlthough Emily Dickinson's paternal grandfather served instrumentally in founding Amherst College, Samuel Fowler Dickinson did so at great cost to himself, neglecting his other affairs to his own financial injury and embarrassment: While still engaged in seeking funds for Amherst, he mortgaged all his property and then was unable to pay off the mortgages. The uncanny unity of Dickinson's five lines embodies, with a selflessly ghostly reverence, both the divine unity of a god and the solitary, helpless unity of the lone congregant of one. Johnson, 1951.)įew, yet enough, Enough is One- To that etherial throng Have not each one of us the right To stealthily belong? (All quotations in this article are taken from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. The following example delicately considers a supplicant's potential claims and merits before a singular and all-sufficient judge. His granddaughter Emily, although she did not profess the faith with his unbounded zeal, often concerned herself in her poems with the spiritual life. In his dedication to higher learning and the Protestant faith, Samuel Dickinson, lawyer and businessman, reflected the preoccupations of his neighbors in Amherst, a Puritan stronghold subject to periodic evangelical revivals. 76–77) who wished with outstanding ardor for “the conversion of the whole world” (Bianchi, pp. Emily Dickinson's father, Edward, was the eldest son of Samuel Fowler Dickinson, a “flaming zealot for education and religion” (Bianchi, pp. Dickinson was born on 10 December 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, a part of the New England region that often witnessed “the blazing up of the lunatic fringe of the Puritan coal,” as the contemporary American poet and essayist Adrienne Rich has commented (McQuade, p.
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