The Children of Wrath
“God executeth his decrees in the works of creation and providence.” --Westminster Shorter Catechism
Cycle One:
Harold Bloom argued in The American Religion (1992) that gnosticism pervades religion and literature in America. Gnosticism, according to his definition, “is a knowing, by and of an uncreated self, or self-within-the-self, and the knowledge leads to freedom. . . .” Ralph Waldo Emerson is a key to this “American religion,” knowing as he did, “that religion is imagined, and always must be reimagined,” an act that may be accomplished through gnostic perception.
Philosophical idealism, however, is inadequate to understanding Thoreau, Dickinson, and their literary descendants. They achieved their work in ways assuredly gnostic, but not in the sense Bloom details. Gnosticism for them was and is firmly rooted in the argument, common in antebellum America, that the material world is a “text” which, correctly read, reveals a higher truth. There was ultimately nothing mysterious or unknowable in the material world for those who believed that they held the interpretive key, which was science as the term was then understood. Science, like theology, was exegesis; science and theology were two branches of the same tree.
The notion of a direct personal route to truth, an unmediated knowing, without reference to empirical evidence is, within the literary tradition discussed here, an absurdity, prized by solipsists who in fact do not know and who simply imagine and assert. Truth is, rather, known through empirical observation, not through a refreshing inflow of divinity. Emerson’s notion of transcendent truth is an invitation to solipsism, fantasy, and self-delusion, resting on imagination rather than on, say, a socially shared document, understanding, or perception.
Emily Dickinson’s poetry requires that moment of gnosis when a set of words — which, as poetry, are as yet nothing in themselves — becomes the trajectory that is the poem. Her poetry has origins in the “two books theory” and philosophical induction. Her poetry is foundational in a tradition that remains characteristically American.
Cycle Two:
Interpretations of God’s presence and purpose relied, in Dickinson’s generation, on the “two books theory” — the theory that God revealed himself both in scripture and in the natural world. The scientist studied the natural world in order to map its “truths” much as a theologian studied the Bible. The celebrated geologist Edward Hitchcock (1793-1864), president of Amherst college and friend of the Dickinson family, wrote, “[S]cience is only a history of the divine operations in matter and mind.” What one found in nature confirmed and illuminated what one found in scripture. The material world, like scripture, was a text to be read and interpreted.
Mark A. Noll summarizes: “Christian apologetics grounded in common sense rapidly developed into a flourishing of what T. D. Bozeman has helpfully described as Baconian theology. In divinity, a rigorous empiricism resting on facts of consciousness and facts from the Bible became the standard for justifying belief in God, revelation, and the Trinity.” Noll quotes Archibald Alexander, Princeton theologian (1772-1852), “[W]e must be sure that we exist, and that the world exists, before we can be certain that there is a God, for it is from these data that we prove his existence.”
Hitchcock, a professor of natural theology as well as of geology, an ordained minister, the state geologist of Massachusetts, and the author of numerous works on science and theology, assured his generation that the natural world was a revelation from God. As a world famous geologist, he gave science a credibility and respect deeply within the religious sensibilities of his time. His theological views were shared unreservedly by his friend Mary Lyon, whose curriculum at the school she founded, Mount Holyoke Seminary, strongly emphasized science. It was here that Dickinson was taught how to understand the natural world.
Hitchcock studied the geology of the Connecticut River Valley inductively. Hypotheses and speculation were not trustworthy; one had to depend on the senses. He did not look for evidence to support or refute a theory but took what he perceived and looked for coherence embedded in it. The great organizing principles of the universe were God’s, and the geologist’s work was to uncover whichever of those principles he could and show that they corresponded to that which could be found in scripture. The geologist collected specimens much as the theologian gathered linguistic, cultural, and historical data that would help to explicate biblical texts.
A fusion of religion and science is seen in Edward Everett’s “An Address Delivered before the Literary Societies of Amherst College” (1835), which argued that Hitchcock’s work was grounded in “the great master-principle of the philosophy of Bacon, — the induction of truth from the observation of fact.” This entailed “a study of the great book of nature, whose pages are written by the hand of God.”
Emerson and his associates were the rivals. Transcendentalists, wrote Hitchcock in 1845, blundered in taking a “fog bank” for a “planet.” Declaring their “discovery of new worlds, unknown to the Bible or to science,” they were masters of “an absolutely unintelligible jargon.” Bacon and other great scientists, on the other hand, were led inexorably to “the inductive principle, [forming] . . . the true basis on which to build the whole fabric of natural religion. . . so that upon the whole, the inductive sciences are of all others most favorable to religion, and the most intimately connected with it.” Hitchcock spoke for the world as a text seen with clarity: decisive, logical, lucid.
Hitchcock’s argument reflected the practicalities of life as those among whom he lived knew it. He spoke from experience as one who had grown up in the country, and his empiricism would have seemed as sound and conclusive among farmers in his community as among scientists at his school: fog banks did not help clear a field or harvest crops. Deerfield, Massachusetts, where he spent his boyhood, was built on some of the most fertile land in the Northeast but was subject to spring floods, summer droughts, and autumns that could turn bitter before the crops were in. People living in the neighboring hills brooked worse conditions. Farmers who prospered were hardened and cool-headed.
This was a culture Dickinson knew well. Her town of Amherst was, like nearby Deerfield, a farming community. If she did not share Hitchcock’s theological certainties, she knew the value of a mind predicated in fact and not ungrounded speculation. Famously, Dickinson found in Emerson an exit from convention, but, this aside, his work was no substitute for practicality.
Cycle Three:
Where in Dickinson’s pragmatic culture was there room for poetry except, say, as a diversion for cold winter nights, as material for recitation in the classroom, or as subject matter in the study of rhetoric?
For many in the three or four centuries before the 1900s, poetry might indicate correspondences between the two books. This is, for instance, a common trope in metaphysical poetry. Edward Taylor used it that way in, to cite an famous example, “Upon a Spider Catching a Fly.”
The “two books” theory and correspondence were not American in origin. They were as fundamental to Newton and Swedenborg as they were to Taylor, but in America, they contributed to a literature that is visionary, gnostic. This occurred when scripture no longer had for some, such as Thoreau and Dickinson, unequalled authority. For Baudelaire, correspondence was synesthetic, but for Thoreau and Dickinson, this would not have been sufficient.
Correspondence is the essential term. Correspondence has always been primary to poetry. The tradition outlined in this essay branches from that and does so while evading stasis, that death-like, imagined, falsely named materiality of language.
Cycle Four:
Compare Emerson’s “naked eyeball” with Thoreau’s intense observation of natural fact. In the chapter entitled “Spring” in Walden, Thoreau famously finds “the forms which thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a deep cut on the railroad through which [he] passed on [his] way to the village.” These forms lead him through a series of observations and meditations to recognize, “There is nothing inorganic. . . . The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book . . . but living poetry . . . .” He reaches his conclusion inductively, not, as had Emerson, because “the currents of the Universal Being circulate through [him].” The strata of the earth are “like the leaves of a book,” but the book is not the Bible. It is “living poetry.”
For Dickinson, correspondence between empirically defined fact and a “higher” truth was no less critical than it was for Hitchcock and Lyon. Like them, Dickinson was no Emersonian, merging with the great all. Rather, beginning with a firm sense of materiality and fact, her work found correspondence and the trajectory that is the poem itself in gnostic realization. Thus her poems commonly begin with an observation or statement of fact (“The most triumphant Bird I ever knew or met”) and embark on a trajectory that ends with an equivalence, often spiritual or intangible (in this case, “finest Glory”). The poems in effect propose their own scripture.
As is well known, Emerson's Poems was liberating to Dickinson. It bravely rejected tradition. But what he did with that liberation was to chart a course that Dickinson did not follow.
Cycle Five:
In antebellum America, history seemed purposeful. Jonathan Edwards’ The History of Redemption, the capstone text for students at Mount Holyoke, presented the past as an arduous journey that would culminate in the Millennium, the thousand years of peace and harmony foretold in the book of Revelation. Edwards' successors believed that it was incumbent on the individual to do what he or she could to move society toward perfection – through abolitionism, women’s rights, prison reform, and so forth – in preparation for the Millennium.
History was enacted much as a revelation. An object or an act in time revealed its meaning insofar as it corresponded to, or found its place in, revealed truth. Within the cosmic drama, an individual participated in bringing about the Millennium. The trajectory of his or her life was upward toward ultimate meaning. The individual moved through time like words in a poem.
The correspondence between experience and poetry was itself gnostic.
Cycle Six:
"There are no ideas in things." --William Bronk
Our secular culture is rooted in belief systems and is itself a belief system. What passes as a means to “truth” is grounded in notions that survive from a religious past. These notions have qualified American poetry. They are rooted not in logic but in gnosis.
To move from perception through the poem itself, a key or secret knowing is needed. Sometimes that key is provided by "science" or “pseudo-science” (such as Freudian theory) or linguistics, but this is not true gnosis. Rather, gnosis may involve, for instance, compulsion (“the poetry of dictation”) and never, in any case, intention. The poem may entail a perception of something in the world experienced inductively rather than imagined. Gnosis occurs when language becomes more than itself, and correspondence is established.
Thus understood, gnosis remained, and remains, central to American poetry. It underlies the work of Hart Crane as much as it does the work of Thoreau, the work of Robert Creeley as much as it does the work of Dickinson.
Gnosis can be imitated but not learned and is uniquely inflected by the poet’s world and being.
Thus, gnosis can be said to have a history but is not itself within history.
Whatever the vocabulary, the poem is essentially androgynous.
It is devoid of materiality. Discussed as if this were not so, the poem no longer exists.
If not understood as gnostis, the poem cannot be known. It will be misconceived as a rhetorical device.
Gnosis is as integral to the poem as is water to land.
“God executeth his decrees in the works of creation and providence.” --Westminster Shorter Catechism
Cycle One:
Harold Bloom argued in The American Religion (1992) that gnosticism pervades religion and literature in America. Gnosticism, according to his definition, “is a knowing, by and of an uncreated self, or self-within-the-self, and the knowledge leads to freedom. . . .” Ralph Waldo Emerson is a key to this “American religion,” knowing as he did, “that religion is imagined, and always must be reimagined,” an act that may be accomplished through gnostic perception.
Philosophical idealism, however, is inadequate to understanding Thoreau, Dickinson, and their literary descendants. They achieved their work in ways assuredly gnostic, but not in the sense Bloom details. Gnosticism for them was and is firmly rooted in the argument, common in antebellum America, that the material world is a “text” which, correctly read, reveals a higher truth. There was ultimately nothing mysterious or unknowable in the material world for those who believed that they held the interpretive key, which was science as the term was then understood. Science, like theology, was exegesis; science and theology were two branches of the same tree.
The notion of a direct personal route to truth, an unmediated knowing, without reference to empirical evidence is, within the literary tradition discussed here, an absurdity, prized by solipsists who in fact do not know and who simply imagine and assert. Truth is, rather, known through empirical observation, not through a refreshing inflow of divinity. Emerson’s notion of transcendent truth is an invitation to solipsism, fantasy, and self-delusion, resting on imagination rather than on, say, a socially shared document, understanding, or perception.
Emily Dickinson’s poetry requires that moment of gnosis when a set of words — which, as poetry, are as yet nothing in themselves — becomes the trajectory that is the poem. Her poetry has origins in the “two books theory” and philosophical induction. Her poetry is foundational in a tradition that remains characteristically American.
Cycle Two:
Interpretations of God’s presence and purpose relied, in Dickinson’s generation, on the “two books theory” — the theory that God revealed himself both in scripture and in the natural world. The scientist studied the natural world in order to map its “truths” much as a theologian studied the Bible. The celebrated geologist Edward Hitchcock (1793-1864), president of Amherst college and friend of the Dickinson family, wrote, “[S]cience is only a history of the divine operations in matter and mind.” What one found in nature confirmed and illuminated what one found in scripture. The material world, like scripture, was a text to be read and interpreted.
Mark A. Noll summarizes: “Christian apologetics grounded in common sense rapidly developed into a flourishing of what T. D. Bozeman has helpfully described as Baconian theology. In divinity, a rigorous empiricism resting on facts of consciousness and facts from the Bible became the standard for justifying belief in God, revelation, and the Trinity.” Noll quotes Archibald Alexander, Princeton theologian (1772-1852), “[W]e must be sure that we exist, and that the world exists, before we can be certain that there is a God, for it is from these data that we prove his existence.”
Hitchcock, a professor of natural theology as well as of geology, an ordained minister, the state geologist of Massachusetts, and the author of numerous works on science and theology, assured his generation that the natural world was a revelation from God. As a world famous geologist, he gave science a credibility and respect deeply within the religious sensibilities of his time. His theological views were shared unreservedly by his friend Mary Lyon, whose curriculum at the school she founded, Mount Holyoke Seminary, strongly emphasized science. It was here that Dickinson was taught how to understand the natural world.
Hitchcock studied the geology of the Connecticut River Valley inductively. Hypotheses and speculation were not trustworthy; one had to depend on the senses. He did not look for evidence to support or refute a theory but took what he perceived and looked for coherence embedded in it. The great organizing principles of the universe were God’s, and the geologist’s work was to uncover whichever of those principles he could and show that they corresponded to that which could be found in scripture. The geologist collected specimens much as the theologian gathered linguistic, cultural, and historical data that would help to explicate biblical texts.
A fusion of religion and science is seen in Edward Everett’s “An Address Delivered before the Literary Societies of Amherst College” (1835), which argued that Hitchcock’s work was grounded in “the great master-principle of the philosophy of Bacon, — the induction of truth from the observation of fact.” This entailed “a study of the great book of nature, whose pages are written by the hand of God.”
Emerson and his associates were the rivals. Transcendentalists, wrote Hitchcock in 1845, blundered in taking a “fog bank” for a “planet.” Declaring their “discovery of new worlds, unknown to the Bible or to science,” they were masters of “an absolutely unintelligible jargon.” Bacon and other great scientists, on the other hand, were led inexorably to “the inductive principle, [forming] . . . the true basis on which to build the whole fabric of natural religion. . . so that upon the whole, the inductive sciences are of all others most favorable to religion, and the most intimately connected with it.” Hitchcock spoke for the world as a text seen with clarity: decisive, logical, lucid.
Hitchcock’s argument reflected the practicalities of life as those among whom he lived knew it. He spoke from experience as one who had grown up in the country, and his empiricism would have seemed as sound and conclusive among farmers in his community as among scientists at his school: fog banks did not help clear a field or harvest crops. Deerfield, Massachusetts, where he spent his boyhood, was built on some of the most fertile land in the Northeast but was subject to spring floods, summer droughts, and autumns that could turn bitter before the crops were in. People living in the neighboring hills brooked worse conditions. Farmers who prospered were hardened and cool-headed.
This was a culture Dickinson knew well. Her town of Amherst was, like nearby Deerfield, a farming community. If she did not share Hitchcock’s theological certainties, she knew the value of a mind predicated in fact and not ungrounded speculation. Famously, Dickinson found in Emerson an exit from convention, but, this aside, his work was no substitute for practicality.
Cycle Three:
Where in Dickinson’s pragmatic culture was there room for poetry except, say, as a diversion for cold winter nights, as material for recitation in the classroom, or as subject matter in the study of rhetoric?
For many in the three or four centuries before the 1900s, poetry might indicate correspondences between the two books. This is, for instance, a common trope in metaphysical poetry. Edward Taylor used it that way in, to cite an famous example, “Upon a Spider Catching a Fly.”
The “two books” theory and correspondence were not American in origin. They were as fundamental to Newton and Swedenborg as they were to Taylor, but in America, they contributed to a literature that is visionary, gnostic. This occurred when scripture no longer had for some, such as Thoreau and Dickinson, unequalled authority. For Baudelaire, correspondence was synesthetic, but for Thoreau and Dickinson, this would not have been sufficient.
Correspondence is the essential term. Correspondence has always been primary to poetry. The tradition outlined in this essay branches from that and does so while evading stasis, that death-like, imagined, falsely named materiality of language.
Cycle Four:
Compare Emerson’s “naked eyeball” with Thoreau’s intense observation of natural fact. In the chapter entitled “Spring” in Walden, Thoreau famously finds “the forms which thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a deep cut on the railroad through which [he] passed on [his] way to the village.” These forms lead him through a series of observations and meditations to recognize, “There is nothing inorganic. . . . The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book . . . but living poetry . . . .” He reaches his conclusion inductively, not, as had Emerson, because “the currents of the Universal Being circulate through [him].” The strata of the earth are “like the leaves of a book,” but the book is not the Bible. It is “living poetry.”
For Dickinson, correspondence between empirically defined fact and a “higher” truth was no less critical than it was for Hitchcock and Lyon. Like them, Dickinson was no Emersonian, merging with the great all. Rather, beginning with a firm sense of materiality and fact, her work found correspondence and the trajectory that is the poem itself in gnostic realization. Thus her poems commonly begin with an observation or statement of fact (“The most triumphant Bird I ever knew or met”) and embark on a trajectory that ends with an equivalence, often spiritual or intangible (in this case, “finest Glory”). The poems in effect propose their own scripture.
As is well known, Emerson's Poems was liberating to Dickinson. It bravely rejected tradition. But what he did with that liberation was to chart a course that Dickinson did not follow.
Cycle Five:
In antebellum America, history seemed purposeful. Jonathan Edwards’ The History of Redemption, the capstone text for students at Mount Holyoke, presented the past as an arduous journey that would culminate in the Millennium, the thousand years of peace and harmony foretold in the book of Revelation. Edwards' successors believed that it was incumbent on the individual to do what he or she could to move society toward perfection – through abolitionism, women’s rights, prison reform, and so forth – in preparation for the Millennium.
History was enacted much as a revelation. An object or an act in time revealed its meaning insofar as it corresponded to, or found its place in, revealed truth. Within the cosmic drama, an individual participated in bringing about the Millennium. The trajectory of his or her life was upward toward ultimate meaning. The individual moved through time like words in a poem.
The correspondence between experience and poetry was itself gnostic.
Cycle Six:
"There are no ideas in things." --William Bronk
Our secular culture is rooted in belief systems and is itself a belief system. What passes as a means to “truth” is grounded in notions that survive from a religious past. These notions have qualified American poetry. They are rooted not in logic but in gnosis.
To move from perception through the poem itself, a key or secret knowing is needed. Sometimes that key is provided by "science" or “pseudo-science” (such as Freudian theory) or linguistics, but this is not true gnosis. Rather, gnosis may involve, for instance, compulsion (“the poetry of dictation”) and never, in any case, intention. The poem may entail a perception of something in the world experienced inductively rather than imagined. Gnosis occurs when language becomes more than itself, and correspondence is established.
Thus understood, gnosis remained, and remains, central to American poetry. It underlies the work of Hart Crane as much as it does the work of Thoreau, the work of Robert Creeley as much as it does the work of Dickinson.
Gnosis can be imitated but not learned and is uniquely inflected by the poet’s world and being.
Thus, gnosis can be said to have a history but is not itself within history.
Whatever the vocabulary, the poem is essentially androgynous.
It is devoid of materiality. Discussed as if this were not so, the poem no longer exists.
If not understood as gnostis, the poem cannot be known. It will be misconceived as a rhetorical device.
Gnosis is as integral to the poem as is water to land.