I Wrote My Own Deliverance

July 4, 2020, I didn’t care about fireworks. Disney+ started screening Hamilton that day for the first time. A filmed version of the historic Broadway smash hit, Hamilton is Lin Manuel Miranda’s singular vision of a founding father with a lot to prove.

The Alexander Hamilton of history is portrayed as a big-hearted striver, a romantic with a ruthless side. Hamilton was a penniless immigrant who became an aide to George Washington during the Revolutionary War. He was the first US treasury secretary, founded the Federal Reserve, defended and shaped the Constitution.

The Hamilton of the musical was all about stretching beyond his reach.

In contrast, the Emily Dickinson of Dickinson must go so far in, to protect her art and her sense of herself as an artist.

Emily Dickinson was a person outside of time. She transcended history. She slipped the surly bonds of womanhood in the early 19th century to become an incomprehensible talent whose words are guides, now and evermore, to our dreams, our struggles and our immortality.

I was slow to warm up to Dickinson. (Actually, this was also how I felt about Hamilton at first.)

The show plays fast and loose with how people might have talked back then in Amherst, Massachusetts. Surely Emily Dickinson would not have thrown a party in her parents’ absence that featured opium and grinding. It seems doubtful she would have greeted her brother with, “Sup?” And we cannot imagine Emily sneaking out back to smoke with the person her mother considers her best suitor.

I came to take these imaginings as representations of the wildness that was present in Emily Dickinson’s mind. Only someone very passionate and original could write the way she did.

A beautiful example of this is in the first episode. A carriage carrying Death appears throughout the episode, pulled by a ghostly team of horses. Scraps of handwriting appear repeatedly in the frame, showing Dickinson’s struggle to write one of her most famous poems.

Because I could not stop for Death –

He kindly stopped for me –

The Carriage held but just Ourselves –

And Immortality.

At the end of the episode, Dickinson’s vision is complete, and we see her step into Death’s Carriage. Death is played by the rapper Wiz Khalifa with a stately and sly grace. He is happy to see Emily step into his carriage in a red dress and red lipstick and he is courtly as he gives her a tiny glass of wine. He peers over tiny sunglasses to welcome her to their date, but then he speaks ominously of the war that he knows is coming.

And he tells Emily that in 200 years, her name is the only of her family that people will still be talking about. Like in Hamilton, Dickinson has her eyes on history and her place in it.

The main theme of the second season though is Dickinson’s struggle with the idea of fame. She realizes that she cannot seek fame for her writing. Only by focusing her writing on one person, her dear Sue (her brother’s wife), who lives next door, is able to distill her purest feeling, to alchemize them into poetry.

Wild nights - Wild nights!

Were I with thee

Wild nights should be

Our luxury!

Emily Dickinson was plagued with premonitions and haunted by future death.

I'm Nobody! Who are you?

Are you - Nobody - too?

The Nobody of the show is one of her brother’s friends. He visits her as a ghost and she doesn’t know who he is. Finally, she meets one of her brother’s friends, alive and well and realizes that the Nobody of her imagining is a portent of his coming death, and the Civil War.

The show is not all dreariness. Any show that manages to quote the movie Pretty Woman in the opera scene is pretty brave in its comedy. The cast includes Jane Krakowski, a comic genius, who holds nothing back as Emily’s mother. Toby Huss, one of my favorite actors from Glow and Halt and Catch Fire, stands out as Emily’s father. Anna Baryshnikov is a stunner, especially in the second season as Emily’s newly feminist sister, Vinnie.

While Dickinson and Hamilton are very different experiences, they both show us what’s painful and joyful in America. Their art makes history real.