The Eschatologicality in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry

Abstract

Emily Dickinson’s artistic self was an outcome of the Calvinist branch of mainstream Christianity and her intellectual descent from eschatological people, the seventeenth century, New England Puritans. This spiritual backdrop along with some elementary ecclesiastical propensity of her New England pedigree contributed to her work. One of those pre dispositions was to scrutinize everything underneath the shadow of the end of life. The sense of end characterizes Dickinson’s eschatological sensibility. Dickinson’s poems loom large with images like death, darkness, destruction, dissolution, doomsday, Day of Judgment, and the like. Since the study of eschatologicality is crucial in understanding Dickenson’s poems, the aim of this paper is to analyze different aspects of eschatologicality in Dickinson’s poems.

Keywords

• Eschatologicality
• Terminality
• Calvinism
• Puritanism
• Apocalypse
• Day of Judgment