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The work of Emily Dickinson can be identified with Expressionism, Symbolism, and Transcendentalism. Expressionism is
a style of art in which the intention is not to reproduce a subject accurately, but instead to portray it in such a way as
to express the inner state of the artist. Symbolism mined mythology and dream imagery for a visual language of the soul. Transcendentalism
was a group of new ideas in literature, religion, culture, and philosophy that emerged in New England in the early-to mid-19th
century.
Much of Emily Dickinson's life was lived through her wide-ranging imagination. She communicated with the world through her
poems, which were crafted as dialogs, conversations between her inner self and a silent outside listener, an other. Her poems
were her letters to a world that did not answer back.
By choice, Dickinson lived in solitude. But her inner landscape, the filter through which she experienced, viewed, and
communicated with the world, was an incredibly rich universe, full of complexity, intellectual astuteness, intense passion,
and provocative, vibrant metaphorical visions.
Emily's theological orientation was Puritan - she was taught all the premises of Calvinistic dogma - but she reacted
strenuously against two of them: infant damnation and God's sovereign election of His own. There was another force alive in
her time that competed for her interests: that was the force of literary transcendentalism. This explains a kind of paradoxical
or ambivalent attitude toward matters religious. She loved to speak of a compassionate Savior and the grandeur of the Scriptures,
but she disliked the hypocrisy and arbitrariness of institutional church. In one of her poems she approached God in prayer,
but she could only worship, she could not pray. At times she came to God in great confidence as in. In another she addresses
Him progressively as "Burglar, Banker, Father."
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