The Definition of Beauty is
That Definition is none –
Of Heaven, easing Analysis,
Since Heaven and He are one.
– Emily Dickinson
Beauty: it's one of those basic terms that gets invoked frequently as if everyone agrees on what it means, but no one really does & there is no real definition. I've had more than one conversation with people who dislike "modern" music (by which they mean modernist, as in specifically Arnold Schoenberg, who died 73 years ago), in which I am plaintively asked, "But what about beauty?" I explain that I find Schoenberg's music beautiful, an argument which never gets very far (& how could it? we disagree on the meaning of basic terms). I once attended a play about Schoenberg vs Gershwin whose whole argument depended on finding Schoenberg's music "ugly". It was a small artsy theater so the actors lined up to meet us as we left. I made a point of telling the actor at my door that I found Schoenberg's music beautiful & enjoyable. He seemed quite startled but said he was glad to hear I felt that. Once someone countered my Schoenberg with Mozart (whom I also love), & asked again, What about beauty? Apparently you can't genuinely feel both types of sound are beautiful. But when Mozart's music was new it was considered modern & difficult ("too many notes!"), so the net people throw over items with the term beauty differs with time. Perhaps beauty is linked for many to familiarity. And I'm sure we've all heard people say something is beautiful when what they seem to mean is more accurately it is pretty & pleasing.
Probably the most celebrated attempt in English-language poetry to define Beauty is in Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn, with its oracular ending: Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all you need to know. But this doesn't really help, as Truth is perhaps an even more ambiguous term than Beauty. When you find one, you will have found the other, though there still is no good definition for either, which, in the context of Keats's poem, is probably the point. It's even ambiguous, depending on how the editors have punctuated these lines, who is speaking: is it the poem's narrator, swept up, at least for the moment, by his contemplation of the eternally unchanging action depicted on the urn, or is it the urn itself, offering its formal perfections as a kind of solution to those endless problems, How do we live? And what do we live for? (Is Beauty = Truth really all we can know on earth? And is it really all we need to know?) If something that initially strikes us as ugly makes us realize something important about ourselves or the world, does that mean the ugly thing is, in fact, beautiful? Like all the most useful terms, Beauty is, & must be, slippery & capacious.
In her gnomic style, Dickinson deals with this question, forthrightly telling us that there is no definition of Beauty: or, more precisely, as she then proceeds to give a definition in the last two lines, that any definition we come up with will be too limited, too lacking in too much. It's certainly an arresting opening, & seems implicitly in dialogue with Keats's Grecian Urn: Truth doesn't enter into it, & this isn't all we need to know on earth, as Dickinson positions Beauty outside of Earth, in Heaven. Heaven can mean many things, from the upper atmosphere to a religious conception of the dwelling place of God to an unearthly state of bliss (check out the various definitions for the word given in the Emily Dickinson Lexicon), but it clearly means something beyond our world & therefore, to some extent, unknowable by earth-bound mortals, making her attempt at a definition the opposite of the one Keats gives: in the Grecian Urn, beauty is truth, truth beauty, & is all we can or need to know on earth; in this poem, Beauty is not of our world, & not knowable through our world. In this very short poem, two words are emphasized: Definition appears in each of the first two lines, balanced (& . . .explained? rebuked?) by the appearance of Heaven in each of the concluding two lines.
After the direct phrasing of the first two lines, the next two become more complicated, which is probably inevitable for any attempt to define Beauty. Of Heaven, the opening phrase, seems to come out of the blue (which is another way of saying from Heaven), & it takes a moment for the phrase to settle in (to the extent that it ever does): what is of Heaven? and what exactly does of convey here? (Again, check the Emily Dickinson Lexicon for this fluid word.) Beauty is born to, linked with, contains, Heaven. The phrase strikes us abruptly & with a fruitful ambiguity, as Dickinson, with her terse, elliptical, & arresting lines, must feel Beauty would: it certainly seems to be the effect she aims for in her work. Beauty's effect is whole & entire; with no need for the breakdown & dissection of analysis. Heaven-born & Heaven-sent, beauty doesn't need analysis, as we feel it when we see it – we just know. Yet the experience of this wholeness can only be conveyed with abrupt & broken phrases (perhaps that is how heavenly things must came to earth). Analysis is eased, unnecessary, but the word conveys more gracefully than would removed or relieved of what is happening here: with a certain lightness, Beauty manifests.
It's arresting that Dickinson refers to Beauty as He, rather than It. Did she want to make Beauty more human, warmer than an It? There is endless, mostly pointless speculation about her sexuality, but we can't rule out her use of He for a romantic, physical, connotation. Or is she, as they would say now, queering the word by making it masculine, when Beauty was often seen as the role & duty of women? Or perhaps she just liked the connection between He / Heaven.
Dickinson said, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” (And for a poet, what is beauty but poetry?) Clearly she felt an overwhelming & physical sensation when she saw something she considered beautiful, & perhaps this poem's broken & abrupt phrasing conveys how the experience made her feel. She counters Beauty = Truth with Beauty = Heaven. This gives us a different sense from the one in Keats's Ode: Heaven seems more glorious, more ethereal, more ecstatic than Truth, which has something moral & lawful about it – but beyond those implications, does it really offer a definition? Heaven is another slippery term, & ultimately not really more knowable that Truth, which may be Dickinson's point: you know them when you see them. Ultimately, it's all in the eye (or mind, or soul) of the beholder.
This is Poem 988 in the Thomas Johnson edition of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson.
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