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What Is Emily Dickinson's Influence On Religion

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Emily Dickinson was one of the greatest female poets to ever live. She left us with many poems that show us her secluded world and life. Like other major nineteenth-century authors, Dickinson used her hesitations between doubt and faith to make amazing works of literature that will remain popular for many years to come. The style of her first writings was mainly conventional, but after years and years of practice she began to leave some room for experiments. Often written the same way that hymns are, her poems dealt with not only issues of death, faith and immortality, but with nature, domesticity, and the strengths and limitations of language. Emily’s faith is clearly seen in her poems 155, 342, and 508. Dickinson’s Christian education …show more content…

At different times she took different positions on such important questions such as the goodness of God, the reality of heaven, or the presence of the divine in nature. As a student of her culture, the fixed positions of her local Calvinism were inscribed in her mind and heart, while at the same time she did not trust them and sought after an alternative faith that would be truer to what she felt was right. Since she took such different positions on religious questions, it has proven hard for commentators to summarize her religious …show more content…

Using both the language of the physical world and the language of the spiritual, Dickinson recognized a symbolic experience of rebirth and spirituality. This experience, of course, lies outside the walls of the church, and it is a revolutionary form of sacrament. Here, the material "sign and seal" is not sanctioned by doctrine, but is nevertheless experienced intimately by the poet as a sacred moment. For Dickinson, connection to the natural world was a connection to her true self, and ultimately a connection to the Divine. Here, divine promise becomes real in the cycles of nature rather than at the Lord’s Supper. In Poem 508, Dickinson overtly rejects the sacraments of the Calvinist church, embracing instead the "self" (Duchac). Her direct spiritual language paralleled the emptiness of the church's baptism with the greater meaning of her own unique baptism. As an expression of nature and what is "natural," the individual consciousness was celebrated here. Individual power and free will, in direct opposition to the Calvinist doctrine, was embraced as an alternative baptism as a sign of salvation. The covenant with the divine, and acceptance into the community of the elect, came only by valuing the individual

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