Vision of Heaven in the Poetry of Dickinson Essay -- Biography Biograp

Vision of Heaven in the Poetry of Dickinson      Ã‚  Ã‚   Emily Dickinson never became a member of the church although she lived in a typical New England Puritan community all her life. The well-known lines, "Some - keep the Sabbath - going to church - / I - keep it - staying at Home -" (P-236 [B]; J-324),1 suggest her defiance against the existing church and Christianity of her time in particular. And her manner of calling the Deity by such terms as "Burglar," "Banker" (P-39; J-49), and "a jealous God" (P-1752; J-1719) clearly discloses her antagonism against the Christian God. In fact, she insistently rejected being baptized even when her family members and intimate friends at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary had chosen to bow in faith before the Christian Lord. It is no exaggeration to say that Dickinson tried to deviate from the orthodox religious belief prevalent in the society she lived in.    Nevertheless, Dickinson was an avid reader of the Bible, and as Fordyce R. Bennett states in the preface to A Reference Guide to the Bible in Emily Dickinson's Poetry, "Dickinson found story and situation, syntax, symbolism and imagery, inspiration, and much more in the King James Bible" (xi). That is to say, no matter how much she felt uncomfortable among the Christian circle of the New England community of her day, she endeavored to "keep the Sabbath" (P-236 [B]; J-324) in her own way through the most reliable source, the Christian Scripture, which came to her hands quite easily.    The purpose of this paper, then, is to discuss Dickinson's poetry with reference to the Bible†¹especially, the Book of Revelation. One of her poems poses a question: "To that etherial throng / Have not each one of us the rig... ...sachusetts, 1985. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979. Sewall, Richard B. The Life of Emily Dickinson. 2 vols. 1974. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980. Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. Emily Dickinson. 1986. Reading: Addison, 1988. Works Consulted Capps, Jack L. Emily Dickinson's Reading 1836-1886. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1966. Dickinson, Emily. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. 3 vols. Cambridge: Belknap-Harvard UP, 1955. McIntosh, James. Nimble Believing: Dickinson and the Unknown. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2000. Mounce, Robert H. The Book of Revelation. Rev. ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998. Rosenbaum, S. P., ed. A Concordance to the Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1964.