Emily Dickinson and her transcendentalist philosphy...?

Question

Anyone know anything?

Answer 1

we know very little about emily dickinson's philosophy: the only writings of hers which deal with belief or ethics are the poems themselves. and she is not normally counted among the transcendentalists.

the american transcendentalists for the most part taught that the world was to be apprehended mainly through the intellect (ie not through faith (as one would in religion) or through the senses (as one would through science)). emerson, thoreau and hawthorne believed that to grasp the world one had to understand it.

when one looks at poems like 'going to heaven' or 'because i could not stop for death' dickinson seems a very long way from transcendentalism. in fact she seems to be saying that the way to apprehend the world is to see it, to feel it, to taste it, and to be in the moment.

you could also look to a poem such as 'after great grief' which suggests that a purely reason-based approach to knowledge is a kind of numbness, a sort of death.

so overall i'd say that dickinson is probably anti-transcendental in her sympathies, if you read the poems.

you probably need to check with your teacher though: teachers don't always like you to read the poems.

Answer 2

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Emily Dickinson and her transcendentalist philosphy...?
Anyone know anything?

Answer 3

Emily Dickinson's nearly 2000 poems covered the themes of life and death, immortality and the grave, solitude and society, nature and mankind, isolation and the landscape of a human soul, whose self-imposed confines conversely became agents of imaginative transformation - all concerns associated with oriental transcendental philosophy which she shared with Walt Whitman and others in the North-East. Concorde, MA was the seat of transcendalist thought.