Inner Life

I wasn't sure I wanted to watch A Quiet Passion, a movie about the life of poet Emily Dickinson, whom I've admired since the first time I read her work. Sometimes you can know too much about your heroes. Yet I was curious about what influenced her and the sort of family she had.

Emily lived in Amherst, Massachusetts all her life, and was one of three children born to a prominent lawyer with strong religious convictions that likely dated back to his Puritan roots. She was raised, as most girls during that time were, to be modest, thoughtful and pious. Despite her upbringing (and here I can directly sympathize) she had an intense and often fierce curiosity about life, death and the meaning of it all. At the same time she lived a very closeted, isolated existence as if to keep the world at a distance, perhaps finding it too painful to stray beyond the familiar and familial.

What seems like a colorless and uneventful life allowed Emily to pen almost 1800 poems, a body of work of such importance that she's now considered one of the finest American poets of all time. I came away thinking she was a terribly shy person who feared rejection so much she never took many chances to put herself out there. We came close to never knowing a single word of her gorgeous verse, either, as she made her sister Lavinia promise to burn her papers after her death. Lavinia read the poems and realized how important they were, and did not keep her word but brought Emily's beautiful, poignant and sometimes troubling work to the world.

Actor Cynthia Nixon does a fine job of portraying the poet, and I thought all the performances in the movie were inspired, especially Jennifer Ehle as sister Lavinia. It was still hard to watch at times, as I saw too many reminders of unhappy memories from my own childhood and teens reflected in Emily's story. Is it possible that many prolific writers and artists are the wounded refugees of well-intended yet unhealthy and ultimately scarring religious browbeating? Even if they agree and go along with it to make an obsessed parent happy? That's what I came away with from this movie, possibly because that was my life until I escaped my parent. Poor Emily never did.

A Quiet Passion is a thoughful and sad film about a wonderfully gifted poet who never had a chance to live beyond her work. I can't say now that I'm sorry I watched the movie, either, but the depiction of Emily's death was quite harrowing, so sensitive people, beware. Available to watch for free with ads on Tubi.