SOURCE: "'Chastisement of Beauty': A Mode of the Religious Sublime in Dickinson's Poetry," in American Transcendental Quarterly, University of Rhode Island, Vol. 1, No. 3, September, 1987, pp. 247-56.

In the following essay, Leonard considers Dickinson as a Romantic poet, arguing that her emphasis on emotion in her poetry (like that of other Romantic poets) is rooted in the eighteenth-century notion of the sublime.

Emily Dickinson shared with other Romantic poets, American and European, the intuition that the age of reason had run its course and had failed to bring the hoped-for illumination and order. In the new century, as the focus turned toward the self, the feelings of the individual tended to replace authority and schema in the measure of truth and beauty. From the beginning, Dickinson's poetry reflects the poet's awareness that emotional sensations occur in various dimensions within the consciousness, so that joy and grief, for example, or...