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“Emily Dickinson’s religion was Poetry,” Susan Howe states in My Emily Dickinson (48). Emily Dickinson's use and style of language have been much debated by critics, as have her actual ideas of what language is and her thoughts on its relationship to poetry. The religious influence on her poems is undeniable; she often references Gethsemane, Calvary and Christ himself. One of her most well-known poems about language, "A Word Made Flesh," unabashedly borrows from the first verse of the Gospel John, in which John refers to Christ by saying "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" and later in the chapter calls him "the word made Flesh." Dickinson, raised in a time and environment saturated with Calvinist doctrine, often referenced Christianity in her poems—for Dickinson, it seemed impossible not to. While Howe’s statement seems a little presumptuous and doubtless romanticized, the correlation between Dickinson’s philology and the religious fervor surrounding her is worth analyzing. In examining criticism of Dickinson's poems about philology and the poems themselves, one may find that connections can be made between this Christian idea of "word made Flesh," Dickinson’s thoughts of her own poetry, and language as a whole.
The religious landscape of Dickinson’s New England was one heavily influenced by Jonathan Edwards. Edwards, a Congregationalist minister, wrote and delivered riveting sermons and was thus one of the fieriest participants in the “Great Religious Awakening” (Howe 47) of the mid-1700s. Edwards wrote many treatises on religious topics, including grace, redemption, free will, and communion. In addition to his prolific writings on Christian doctrine, Edwards wrote on philosophical and so-called scientific ideas such as atoms, rainbows, the mind, and being. Edwards is often cited as being very influential in Emily Dickinson’s own writing. In the eighteenth section of his essay entitled “The Mind,” Edwards writes,
Words. We are used to apply the same words a hundred different ways; and ideas being so much tied and associated with the words, they lead us into a thousand real mistakes; for where we find that the words may be connected, the ideas being by custom tied with them, we think the ideas may be connected likewise, and applied every where, and in every way, as the words.
Here is where we begin. Edwards’ own questioning philology is rooted in the language of the Bible, where often one cannot afford to make mistakes in interpretation—entire denominational doctrines are, after all, founded on such individual interpretations. Here, Edwards is questioning the role of language as representational of ideas. In making “a thousand real mistakes,” we can slip into a seemingly dangerous territory where words do not mean what they are supposed to, where ideas are connected flimsily across the borders of language.
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