Michael Ryan: Vocation According to Dickinson (July 1998)

Michael Ryan explores Emily Dickinson’s concept of poetic vocation, and how this vocation—both in moral and aesthetic terms—can be traced in her poems. Dickinson differed from others of the Victorian age, Ryan suggests, in that for her the relationship between art and morality was “implicit not explicit, private not social, and neither pious nor privileged but enmeshed with gritty, difficult daily life”; he offers her devotion and seriousness as a model for the writing life.