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Experience and Faith: The Late-Romantic Imagination of Emily Dickinson

review by Brian Charles Clark

Experience and Faith: The Late-Romantic Imagination of Emily Dickinson
by Richard Brantley
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004

Richard E. Brantley’s Experience and Faith is a wide-ranging consideration of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, letters and prose fragments in the context of transatlantic Romanticism. The book is a thematically arranged exploration of Dickinson’s evangelical experientialist method. Brantley uses three broad themes in his approach to Dickinson’s work: “experimental trust” (chapter two), “nature methodized” (chapter three), and the “Romantic to Modern arc” (chapter four). Brantley situates these thematic concerns within deeply informed readings of Locke, Wesley and other nineteenth-century empiricists. I’ll return to these thematic considerations after first briefly describing the contextual ground within which he explores them.

Dickinson deployed a “method,” Brantley writes, rather than a “system” because, in A. Dwight Culler’s words, we must distinguish “between system and method, two words which many people take to be synonymous but which seem to [F.D. Maurice, in The Kingdom of Heaven] ‘not only not synonymous, but the greatest contraries imaginable: the one [i.e., system] including that which is most opposed to life, freedom, variety; and the other [i.e., method] that without which they cannot exist.’…. The terms are, indeed, useful for making distinctions throughout the century (8).” I think most readers will be struck by the appropriateness of the distinction as regards Dickinson in particular, but also by the wide applicability of the distinction across the nineteenth century. This, in short, is how Brantley justifies his transatlantic contextualizing approach to Dickinson: “Dickinson’s modest, non-totalizing practice of method…. defines her Late-Romantic imagination on the broadly experiential, skeptical yet testimonial, common ground between British empirical philosophy and free-will evangelical religion” (8). Read the rest of this entry »

Dante in Love: The World’s Greatest Poem and How It Made History

review by Brian Charles Clark

Dante in Love: The World’s Greatest Poem and How It Made History
by Harriet Rubin
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2004

Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy is arguably the greatest poem written in any language, ever. Harriet Rubin has written a wonderfully passionate account of the back-story of La Divina Comedia: how it came to be written and the world Dante wrote it in. Indeed, the book is passionate to the point of devolving into emotional mayhem.

Alighieri was a minor Florentine politician who ended up on the wrong side of Roman papal power in 1302. For the purpose of staying alive, he went, in essence, into hiding. It is no coincidence that the Divine Comedy is the story of an exile in Hell, and that it is full of political intrigue and revenge. Read the rest of this entry »

Pynchon's Mason & Dixon

review by Brian Charles Clark

Mason & Dixon
Thomas Pynchon
Picador, 2004

“Snow-Balls have… their Arcs,” Thomas Pynchon’s fifth novel begins. Trying to calculate the arc of the narrative of Mason & Dixon is as difficult as the calculus involved in calculating the arc of a thrown snowball. It’s a huge book, not just in number of pages, but in ideas, both comic and profound, and in erudition.

The story involves the lives, travels and adventures of two globe-trotting Brits, an astronomer and a surveyor, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, as they travel south to the Cape of Good Hope and then west, into North America. Mason and Dixon survive, of course, into the present as the name of the line that separates North from South (the southern boundary of Pennsylvania). But Pynchon, as ever, is never only writing biography or history; indeed, he writes that “Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir’d, or coerc’d, only in Interests that must ever prove base.” Read the rest of this entry »