Questions of faith and travels in poetry
Syed Badrul Ahsan admires a scholarly work
Launched into Eternity A Study of Emily Dickinson's Poems and Letters Masud Mahmood Writers.ink
A major problem involved in dealing with Emily Dickinson is the essentially reclusive nature of her individuality. In death she has been what she was in life, a symbol of obscurity and distance for those who would study her poetry and with it her personality. And then comes another problem. And that is fundamentally the difficulty in an understanding as well as appreciation of her poetry. Scholars of American literature, and not just in the United States, have gone to various lengths in attempting explanations of her poetic works and yet, in more instances than one, have quite been unable to present Dickinson in clearly outlined dimensions before readers. That has been quite a tragedy. But, again, not quite. Now, here before us, we have an exhaustive study of Emily Dickinson by Masud Mahmood. This work, as the writer makes it obvious in the sub-title, is a study of Dickinson's poems and letters. That is a difficult calling owing to the pretty vast correspondence as well as the large body of poems she has left behind. But Mahmood, for all that clear statement in the sub-title, goes for something beyond the letters and the poetry. And yet who can argue with confidence that it is through the letters and the poetry that he seeks to discover Dickinson? There is, after all, the old truth that a writer is to be discovered in his or her works. Mahmood makes it plain in the preface that Emily Dickinson's creative self was but an outgrowth of the Calvinist branch of orthodox Christianity. He is thus dismissive of all the arguments that have been placed over time to explain the poet in terms of modernity or post-modernism. There can be little question that Mahmood takes a broader view of the times that Dickinson lived in. That certainly stems from the writer's view that an intellectual figure cannot be studied in isolation or even in the context of his or her own times. There is always something of heritage, something of history, which explains the presence of a creative personality at a given point of time. Which is why Mahmood travels back to old times, to the Puritanism propounded by Oliver Cromwell in the mid-17th century. It was this Puritanism that was to be transported to the New World, indeed to New England, and to turn into a powerful assertion of faith there. Could Dickinson have been a repository of such ideals? You might try answering the question in terms of the religious fervour of the times. You might even suggest, having plodded through Dickinson's works, that religiosity lay at the core of her poetic beliefs. It most assuredly did, but not in quite the simplistic way one sometimes might make it out to be. Observe Dickinson's poetry again. There are the illogicalities, as she perceives them, in an exposition of the faith she is born into. From such a perspective, it is a certain eclecticism she puts herself in. You spot it in the poems and in the letters. Masud Mahmood's good fortune, apart from it being an arduous enterprise, is in his ability and sheer willingness to study all the 1,775 Dickinson poems and related items (coming to him by way of Thomas H. Johnson's The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson). And then there were the letters, more than a thousand of them, that serve as an incredible insight into the life the poet led. Out of these poems and letters Mahmood proceeds to a reconstruction of the societal circumstances which defined life in Dickinson's era. He delves deep in New England eschatology, as he calls it, and holds up for readers a comprehensive picture of the religious sentiments and proselytizing that shaped life and its attendant concerns in the area. The Puritan eschatological concerns, the writer informs us, in his words, were basically these: 'transcending profane time, neurotically keeping a vigil against death (and, therefore, perpetually living in death anxieties) and indefatigably asking questions to learn about the life after death . . .' And these concerns served as the underpinning of Dickinson's creativity. There was in her 'a continual sense of the End and an obsessive interest in the process of ending in life and nature.' The chapters following the one on eschatology only serve to deepen the Dickinson persona in relation to the social and religious circumstances that concretized her thoughts and indeed her view of her place in the cosmic scheme of things. The hints are broad. Observe the chapters as Mahmood fashions them --- The Shaping Circumstances, Degreeless Noon, Problems of the Dust, The House of Supposition --- and you get a fairly good idea of the profundity that comes alive in the discussion. Launched into Eternity is a reflective journey into Dickinson land. It takes you closer to the world the poet inhabited. On a larger scale, it makes you part of that world through that certain identification with the poet. The landscape is cause for sheer spiritual pleasure. Masud Mahmood's work is a splendid instance of scholarship.
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