Emily Dickinson (1830-86) recasts British-Romantic themes of natural and
spiritual perception for an American audience. Her poems of science and
technology reflect her faith in experience. Her lyrics about natural
history build on this empiricism and develop her commitment to natural
religion. Her poems of revealed religion constitute her experience of
faith. Thus Dickinson stands on the experiential common ground between
empiricism and evangelicalism in Romantic Anglo-America. Her double
perspective parallels the implicit androgyny of her nineteenth-century
feminism. Her counterintuitive combination of natural models with
spiritual metaphors champions immortality. The experience/faith
dialectic of her Late-Romantic imagination forms the heart of her
legacy.