Experience and Faith The Late-Romantic Imagination of Emily Dickinson

The empirical/evangelical dialectic of Romantic Anglo-America culminates in the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Thus, for an American audience, Dickinson recasts British-Romantic themes of natural and spiritual perception. 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.

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.