Conclusion

Abstract

To recapitulate: Emily Dickinson’s rich conversation with her precursors and contemporaries in Anglo-American belles lettres, first of all, counts as her dialogical inspiration. In effect, she took her cue from the lower case orthography and the inductive modesty of Charles Lamb’s scientific label for William Wordsworth’s poetry: “natural methodism.” Accordingly, she turned down the volume of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s revival idiom and grounded his Transcendentalism in the senses. More succinctly than her counterparts in Anglo-American Romanticism, she laid the strengths and weaknesses of sifting and weighing data (“I ponder, and I cannot ponder,” as William Blake’s Thel puts it) alongside subjective and intersubjective values for doing so (“yet I live and love,” as Blake’s Thel adds; compare The Book of Thel [1789], Plate 5, line 6). Thus, before Wallace Stevens, Emily Dickinson discovered “what will suffice”—that is, again to apply the language of Blake to her case, she found religion “Too much” and science just “Enough!”¹