Emily Dickinson and the Religious Imagination

Freedman, Linda. Emily Dickinson and the Religious Imagination. New York: Cambridge UP, 2011. $95.

Ever since Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson designated a section of the 1890 Poems by Emily Dickinson "Time and Eternity" and readers responded by speculating on the author's degree of Christian orthodoxy, her poems have sparked interest in Dickinson's religious concerns. Much of that discussion has focused on the revivalist evangelical culture of the Connecticut Valley, on Romanticism's countervailing influence, and on Dickinson's friendships with both believers and skeptics. Now Linda Freedman enters into this critical conversation by largely dissociating issues of religious culture from biography. Her goal is to advance "a way of reading the allusive complexity of Dickinson's work that recognises we do not need to decide whether or not she believed in God to understand the way in which religion fed her imagination and her sense of poetic purpose" (2). Freedman takes a broadly inclusive view of the religious culture that shaped Dickinson's poetics, drawing classical mythology, Shakespeare, Milton, and George Eliot into her discussion along with Jonathan Edwards, Charles Wadsworth, Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Friedrich Strauss, and even twentieth-century theologians - notably Jürgen Moltmann. With regard to Dickinson's understanding of her own creative role, Freedman draws upon recent manuscript scholarship to recognize the provisional, open-ended character of this writing and the poet's tendency to engage her readers in the poem's unfolding. The book's thesis holds that "there is a vital relationship between Dickinson's ideas about poetry and her ideas about religion which encourages a critical flexibility between literature and theology," a "reciprocally informing relationship" (3).

Freedman includes disparate sources of stimuli to...