I Told My Soul to Sing: Finding God with Emily Dickinson - Paperback

by Kristin Lemay (Author)

Many readers think that Emily Dickinson rejected religion and wanted nothing to do with God. And yet her poetry and life tell a deeper story. Looking closely at twenty-five rare and resonant poems, this intimate portrait reveals how Dickinson occasionally believed, thoughtfully doubted, and in her divine wrestling, met God. In chapters on belief, prayer, mortality, immortality, and beauty, Kristin LeMay uncovers the riches of Dickinson's spiritual life and tells of her own search for God between the lines of the poems Dickinson called "hymns."

Back Jacket

A surprising patron saint for all who seek or wrestle with God

A journey through faith and doubt with America's greatest poet

Many readers think that Emily Dickinson rejected religion and wanted nothing to do with God. And yet her poetry and life tell a deeper story. Looking closely at twenty-five rare and resonant poems, this intimate portrait reveals how Dickinson occasionally believed, thoughtfully doubted, and in her divine wrestling, met God. In chapters on belief, prayer, mortality, immortality, and beauty, Kristin LeMay uncovers the riches of Dickinson's spiritual life and tells of her own search for God between the lines of the poems Dickinson called "hymns."

"Through her deep engagement with Dickinson's poems--by turn prayers, partners, revelations, songs--LeMay has written a book that is, in Dickinson's words, 'the Heart's portrait - every Page a Pulse, ' every page a kind of faith." -Sarah Sentilles, author of Breaking Up with God: A Love Story

"Part spiritual autobiography, part homage to Dickinson's inexhaustible poetic genius, and part exuberant close readings of the astonishing poems in which she wrestles with questions of faith and belief, I Told My Soul to Sing is a valuable study of the poet's heterodox imagination. LeMay does not shackle Dickinson to a procrustean bed of doctrine and piety, dilute the poet's astringent ironies, or flatten the provocative ambiguities. She has a gift for choosing unfamiliar poems from the canon and for judiciously quoting and interpreting them. A smart, seriously playful, winning, and readable commentary on a quintessentially elusive, thorny, and linguistically daring American poet." -Herbert Leibowitz, editor, Parnassus: Poetry in Review

Author Biography

Kristin LeMay studied at Harvard Divinity School and Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She teaches writing at Ohio University in the Appalachian foothills. Visit her website at kristinlemay.org.