Emily Dickinson's Translation of Christain Words

In Emily Dickinson's poems, the most sacred figures and words Protestant-Calvinist church tend to symbolize the exact opposite of the intended meaning and challenge its conformity to religion. The powerful connotations of words like Redemption; images of baptism and crucifixion; the theological and cultural ideals of Christian faith and sacrifice—all are recast to serve her revolutionary poetics. Richard Wilbur has said of Dickinson, “She inherited a great and overbearing [Calvinist] vocabulary which, had she used it submissively, would have forced her to express an established theology and psychology. But she would not let that vocabulary write her poems for her”(Critics on Dickinson, 127). Dickinson’s refused to submit to the vocabulary of Calvinism (she referred to its dogma as having “defrauded” her family [Letters of Dickinson, Letter 391] and she expressed this through her creation of a poetics that also acknowledges value and beauty in that vocabulary.

Dickinson’s use of Puritan-Calvinist language is not only complex and filled with tension, but it is purposive. In “Better – Than Music” (Poems of Dickinson, Poem 503), she defines her poetics in terms

Eden – a legend – dimly told –

Better – than Music! For I – who heard it –

So – Children told how Brook s in Eden –

Humming – for promise – when alone –

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