A Temple Carpenter: Emily Dickinson’s “Home” and Her Manners of Poetic Construction

Abstract

Emily Dickinson’s remark that “Nature is a haunted house ─ but Art ─ is a house that tries to be haunted” encapsulates her poetic philosophy. In juxtaposing “art” and “haunted house,” Dickinson suggests that, in her poetics, the poet must have both active and passive attitudes to create “true” art. Critics have long examined the theme of the “home/house” in Dickinson’s poetry, primarily highlighting the biographical and socio-cultural contexts. However, “house poems” are central to Dickinson’s poetics. Specifically, they constitute meta-poetry in that they incorporate her special technique for capturing poetry.
With her proto-modernist sensibility, Dickinson proposes that words are inadequate to fully convey what she wants to present. True poetry, according to Dickinson’s definition, can be identified by its inexplicable nature. As if challenging the antinomy of poetry writing which is to express something indescribable in words, house images represent Dickinson’s paradoxical approach to “writing without writing.” Dickinson considers herself as a “Carpenter” of “Temples,” thereby equating house building with writing. “House” and “carpenter” serve as metaphors for poetry and poet, or a linguistic construction and its builder/writer. Using this comparison, Dickinson communicates her philosophy that poetry is the “Circumference” that outlines the “center” of meaning. A carpenter builds the house, an external structure, but cannot fill its interior space with content on her own. Similarly, the poet’s role involves creating the poem as a form of linguistic architecture, but the essence of poetry emerges from outside of the poet’s control. Thus, the poet entices and welcomes the unknown that cannot be articulated, what she calls “shapeless friend,” as a guest, to make the “house” complete. Only when the poetic composition becomes “haunted,” or inhabited by visitors, does the poet capture poetry alive in the “linguistic house.”
What is especially insightful about Dickinson’s poetics is its implication that a poet cannot complete a true poem, but must let the words fill themselves with mystery and wonder. Therefore, poetry composition is the act of preparing an empty container or house, for something that transcends human understanding to emerge and occupy this emptiness. This process resembles the construction of a “temple,” a place for a divine presence, as suggested by the definition of “Art” as a house “haunted” by others. Instead of being a “creator” who monopolizes the language, the poet works as a modest “temple carpenter,” in awe of the mystical process of writing.