Emily Dickinson And Religion

Dickinson, who grew up in a Puritan environment, rejected many core tenants of Christianity such as sin and damnation, and her idea of eternity greatly diverged from the typical materialistic view of Heaven. However, she also did not conform to the tenants of Transcendentalism as her emphasis on the incomprehensibility of one’s spirituality and after-life clashed with the traditional belief in the full participation and absolute knowledge of the universe. As witnessed in much of her poetry, Dickinson is obsessed with the idea of transcendent reality and her relationship to it, however as Glenn Hughes points out, Dickinson is still aware that transcendent reality is beyond her capacity to comprehend its boundless and infinite nature. In “LOVE, …show more content…
In Glenn’s perspective, Dickinson never contradicts her belief that there is a transcendent reality, however the ambiguity concerning its nature gives way to her conflicted emotions which can be witnessed in her poetry. Concerning her famous poem, “The brain is wider than the sky”, Hughes argues that Dickinson’s description of the “Brain” as the “weight of God” emphasizes her purpose in finding her relationship to divine reality, since the brain is the sole means of the human to find this transcendent reality, therefore making the human consciousness and transcendent reality inseparable. However, Hughes points out that “… while divine reality is distinctively constitutive of human consciousness, it is not contained by consciousness. So it is that in many of her poems Dickinson is at pains to convey how imperishable divine reality immeasurably transcends, with overwhelming mysteriousness, the finitude and limitations of human consciousness and …show more content…
In, "Dickinson and the Divine: The Terror of Integration, the Terror of Detachment", Carton surmises that though some of Dickinson’s poetry exudes a positive outlook that may seem to solidify her belief in a transcendent reality, it may have merely been a conscious effort to cover up her fears in the hopes that it would not cause her to completely fall out from pursuing her purpose. In Dickinson’s famous poem, “The brain is wider than the sky”, the first few stanzas are utilized to seemingly solidify the speaker’s direct connection with the transcend reality, which would justify her efforts to pursue it, however in the last few lines, the poem subtly points out an imperfection of the “Brain” by comparing it to the imperfections of a “Syllable” versus “Sound”. “The difference between ‘Sound’ and ‘Syllable’ is… ‘the difference between the thing itself and its imperfect, itemized explanation.’8 Syllables ‘absorb’ and ‘contain’ sound, just as the brain absorbs the sea and contains the sky; but such mastery, as the poem's last two lines subversively intimate, may constitute