Experience and Faith: The Late-Romantic Imagination of Emily Dickinson [Hardcover]

Emily Dickinson (1830-86) recasts British-Romantic themes of natural and spiritual perception for an American audience. Her poems of science and technology reflect her faith in experience. Her lyrics about natural history build on this empiricism and develop her commitment to natural religion. Her poems of revealed religion constitute her experience of faith. Thus Dickinson stands on the experiential common ground between empiricism and evangelicalism in Romantic Anglo-America. Her double perspective parallels the implicit androgyny of her nineteenth-century feminism. Her counterintuitive combination of natural models with spiritual metaphors champions immortality. The experience/faith dialectic of her Late-Romantic imagination forms the heart of her legacy.Achknowledgments Introduction Distinguishing Mode Experimental Trust Nature Methodized Romantic-to-Modern Arc Final Refinement Conclusion Notes Bibliography

In Experience and Faith Richard E. Brantley accomplishes a rich and deep recontextualization of Emily Dickinson's mind and art. Focusing on her experiential approach both to fact and to faith, Brantley moves from 'the village to the world' in tracing out the poet's weblike connections with major figures in native as well as transatlantic nineteenth-century religion, literature, and culture. One of his most surprising discoveries is Dickinson's dialectical testing out of a private religion of the heart, stiffened by the tradition of British empiricism and cushioned by John Wesley's redactions of the difficult theology of Jonathan Edwards. Both of these formidable intellectual explorations are done with knowledge and grace. This is a scholarly yet personal study of the entire Dickinson corpus, packed with fresh close readings of major poems and animated by a philosophical thrust that demonstrates an admirable sensitivity to the creative heft of the past as well as a lively sense of the complex present. - Barton Levi St. Armand, author of Emily Dickinsl³(