In 1830, a birth in Fayette, New York, would change the face of religion. That same year, a birth 289 miles east in Amherst, Massachusetts, would change the face of literature.
The New York birthday, of course, was of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The Massachusetts “blessed event” was the arrival of poet Emily Dickinson.
A new movie about her, “A Quiet Passion,” has me thinking about the Belle of Amherst and what she did for letters in America. And though I know parallels between two events can sometimes sound contrived, I do see similarities in the advent of the LDS Church and the advent of Emily Dickinson.
Peter Whitmer farm in Fayette, New York, in July 2001. | Tom Smart
At the time, the church founded by Joseph Smith was a small spark in a bonfire of spiritual activity, a religious “reawakening” in America’s Northeast. But when the flames had died and the coals had grown cold, the religion begun by Joseph Smith would continue to glow and grow.
The same can be said for Emily Dickinson’s poetry. New England was awash in mighty writers and literature when she came on the scene. Her few drops went completely unnoticed. Bigger voices boomed — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Amy Lowell, William Cullen Bryant, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. and many others. Today, most of those celebrated names are forgotten. Whitman and Emerson have remained in high regard, though most people prefer to revere them rather than read them.
But Dickinson’s poetry seems to have sprouted wings. Every year brings "new converts." From a small room in a small house, she started something that has affected the world.
Ditto for Joseph Smith.
She didn’t live to see the success of her efforts. She likely died thinking, as did the poet John Keats, that her name “had been writ in water.”
But something organic and real in what she produced kept it alive, helped it sprout and caused it to flourish.
Today, like Joseph Smith, Dickinson is seen as an indispensable part of 19th-century America.
There are other comparisons that could be drummed up, of course.
This April 23, 2011, photo shows the tombstone in West Cemetery in Amherst, Mass., marking the grave of the reclusive 19th century poet Emily Dickinson, who lived and died in a house nearby that is now a museum. | Beth Harpaz, Associated Press
Dickinson’s father was a highly religious man.
So was Joseph Smith’s.
Joseph Smith was inspired by the Bible and thought long about the big questions.
Emily Dickinson, too.
But because Dickinson patterned much of her poetry on hymns she heard, I think what tickles me most is that you can sing her poems to the tune of “How Great the Wisdom and the Love,” an LDS hymn. The hymn was written by Eliza R. Snow with music by Thomas McIntyre, a handcart pioneer.
The hymn was written about the same time Dickinson was writing the following poem, one of her most famous.
Here’s part of the text of her poem.
Feel free to sing away.
Because I could not stop for Death —
He kindly stopped for me —
The Carriage held but just Ourselves —
And Immortality.