Emily Dickinson

March 23, 2010 | To hear selected excerpts from the interview with Roger Lundin, click the play button on the audio player at the right of this screen. Download this clip for free on iTunes U.

To Roger Lundin, words and language -- even the language of poetry -- are essential tools of leadership. “A leader who has an ability with language can make a person feel that his or her experience has been taken and articulated and then given back as a gift,” Lundin says. In a recent conversation with Faith & Leadership, Lundin discusses the evangelical movement toward interior reflection and the relationships between good literature and good leadership.

Lundin is the Blanchard Professor of English at Wheaton College in Illinois, where he has been on the faculty since 1978. Among his published works are “Literature through the Eyes of Faith;” “Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief;” and “The Culture of Interpretation: Christian Faith and the Postmodern World.”

Q: You describe Emily Dickinson’s work as part of a stereotypically Protestant move away from talking about God with regard to external things toward focusing on internal things. Do you think the move toward looking for God internally is related to a modern distrust for institutions?

Several years ago I wrote an essay out of my desire to understand the move away from public life in America. I focused on Henry Adams and Emily Dickinson. Emily Dickinson was the daughter of a United States congressman who was also a leading figure in higher education. Henry Adams was the grandson and great grandson of presidents. Why did these two people retreat so dramatically from public life?

As a woman in the mid-19th century, Dickinson was not going to run for congress, of course. But it was not only a matter of gender for her. For Adams gender didn't play a role. They both deliberately turned away from public life and turned inward to what Robert Gross, a good Dickinson critic, called “the grand theatre of the mind.” This is where Emily Dickinson played out her life. That move to interior space takes place dramatically even in the 19th century.

It has to do with something that Alexis de Tocqueville wrote almost 200 years ago in “Democracy in America.” He said that the American is either occupied with a very puny and insignificant thing, i.e. himself, or with some vast subject: nature, society, God, the universe. He said the space between that small thing and that vast other is empty. Democracy drives people to an intensely inward focus. It looks at the outside world as this vast, indifferent other. That space between [the insignificant and the vast subjects] is mediating life: it’s churches, schools, politics and social communities.

Q: Does there need to be some cultivation of one’s own spirit in order to lead?

People who lead well are often people who have done that intense interior work, but you're never effective in public leadership if you're constantly reflecting and constantly, in a sense, absenting yourself. Thoreau said in “Walden,” “I'm aware of myself in a double sense.” He said, “I am both an actor in the human drama, and the one who stands back and observes myself and others in action, so that I'm both in the stream of life and standing outside of the stream of life.”

The double sense that comes from intense inward reflection can lead one to difficulties in public life. When I tell this to my students, I call it the existential rebound. I was a very big kid in the 6th grade, about 5'8 or 5'9. I was twice the size of most of the kids I played basketball against, but when I played under the basket I'd get a rebound, and instead of putting it up if I was on the offensive end, or throwing an outlet pass if I was on the defensive end, I tended to stand with the thing in front of me, like Hamlet contemplating Yorick’s skull. I’d look at it and say this is a basketball; you can do so many things with it. And as I was meditating on all the possibilities, some guy half my size would steal the ball from me.

Q: Could you talk about the contrast between Dickinson, one of our great poets, who guarded her words so carefully, and our present age of intense chattiness?

I've never thought about whether Emily Dickinson would have had a blog. I imagine the answer is no. Like so many great writers in the 19th century, Dickinson had an incredible ear and she knew, as Mark Twain said, the difference between the right word and the almost right word, which is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. Until you’ve got the right word, you probably don't want to put it down.

I don't have any statistics on this, but it's a good bet that the more we talk, the fewer words we use. The fund of commonly used words has to be down culture-wide. Once that fund of useable words is down, so too is much of the surprise and nuance. These come from words that you don't commonly use, but they're in your quiver.

Q: Is there a parallel between being a good poet and being a good leader?

Dickinson’s poem “After Great Pain a Formal Feeling Comes” is about responding to pain. The poem closes:

This is the hour of lead
Remembered if outlived
As freezing persons recollect the snow--
First chill, then stupor, then the letting go.

I read that poem, and it brought to mind my experience of grief in losing a brother and grandmother at a very early age. She got it exactly right. A hundred years before I came along she was describing my life for me.