Experience And Faith

The empirical/evangelical dialectic of Romantic Anglo-America culminates in the poetry of Emily Dickinson (1830-86). For example, just as her poems of science and technology reflect her faith in experience, and just as her lyrics about natural history build on this empiricism and develop her commitment to natural religion, so too do her poems of revealed religion constitute her experience of faith. Thus, for an American audience, Dickinson recasts British-Romantic themes of natural and spiritual perception. This double perspective, this counterintuitive combination of natural models with spiritual metaphors, parallels the androgynous ideal of her nineteenth-century feminism and champions her belief in immortality. The experience/faith paradox of her Late-Romantic imagination forms the mind and soul, as well as the heart, of her legacy.

Emily Dickinson (1830-86) recasts British-Romantic themes of natural and spiritual perception for an American audience; her poetry builds on the experiential common ground of empiricism and evangelicalism in Romantic Anglo-America.

Richard E. Brantley is Alumni Professor of English at the University of Florida, where he has taught since 1969. He is the author of Wordsworth's "Natural Methodism" (1975) and Locke, Wesley, and the Method of English Romanticism (1984), which won the Conference on Christianity and Literature award for best book of 1984. His Coordinates of Anglo-American Romanticism: Wesley, Edwards, Carlyle, and Emerson (1993) and his Anglo-American Antiphony: The Late Romanticism of Tennyson and Emerson (1994) pioneered the recent boom in the study of transatlantic Romanticism. He serves on the board of Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations.