Religious Influences on Emily Dickinson: Puritanism and Transcendentalism in Her Poetry.

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1830. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was a prominent lawyer in Amherst and a well respected trustee of Amherst College (Blankenship 576). Emily Dickinson was educated at Amherst Academy and, for only a single year, at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College) under Mary Lyon (Hart 224). Emily Dickinson was considered to be a high-spirited and energetic young woman until her withdrawal from society in 1850. After her withdrawal, …

…God in the sanguine, essentially 'centered' or logocentric terms Emerson borrows . . . from Augustine . . ." (New 4). For Kierkegaard, as for Dickinson, "the very nature of religious experience requires that we yield up our sense of God as centered in our world, yield up the logos or knit of Reason that makes God's order explicable through Revelation. Replacing the centre, then, is the 'unknown,' a limit distinctly outside the boundaries of what the mind can grasp . . ." (New 4).