The Bible Through a Poet’s Prism - The BAS Library
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Home > Magazines > Bible Review > April 2001

The Bible Through a Poet’s Prism

Reading Emily Dickenson’s poems as Revelation continued

By Cliff Edwards

The Bible,” wrote American poet Emily Dickinson, “is an antique Volume…/ Written by faded Men / At the suggestion of Holy Spectres.” Condemning contemporary pastors for rendering the sacred texts lifeless, the poet urged that Scripture be sung in a manner relevant to everyday life: “Had but the Tale a warbling Teller…/ All the boys would come…/ Orpheus’ Sermon captivated…/ It did not condemn…” (Poem 1545).1 As a young girl growing up in western Massachusetts, where she was born in 1830, Dickinson alone among her family refused to join the prestigious Amherst Congregational Church and eventually stopped attending […]

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Endnotes

1.

Emily Dickinson provided titles for very few of her poems. For the sake of convenience, later editors have assigned them numbers. Today her poems (1,775 of them) are most accessible in a paperback volume edited by Thomas Johnson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Little Brown, 1958), so I have followed the numbering system used in that volume. More recently, R.W. Franklin has edited a more complete collection (1,789 poems) with another numbering system, The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, Belknap Press, 1999).

2.

For more on the poet’s religious perspective, see Roger Lundin, Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), and Beth Maclay Doriani, Emily Dickinson: Daughter of Prophecy (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1996).

3.

The poet’s letters may be found in The Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. by Johnson and Theodora Ward, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, Belknap Press, 1958); the letter numbers cited in this article refer to that edition.