Sacred Texts Transformed

Abstract

Emily Dickinson read voraciously all of her life: Among the writers of her own century, she had an intimate acquaintanceship with Keats, Byron, Wordsworth, the Brownings, the Bronte sisters, Dickens, George Eliot, Hawthorne, Emerson, Longfellow, Tennyson, Ruskin — and others. But her most passionate involvement was with the sacred texts of the Renaissance and eighteenth century: Shakespeare; the King James Version of the Bible; Isaac Watts’s vast outpouring of hymns; the devotional prose of Thomas a Kempis and Sir Thomas Browne; the devotional poetry of George Herbert and Henry Vaughan. This passionate involvement was accompanied by an equally intense determination, in her own writings, not to borrow from those she read and admired. ‘I marked a line in One Verse — [she informed Higginson] because I met it after I made it — and never consciously touch a paint, mixed by another person’ (L271). Instead, Shakespeare, the King James Bible, Watts, and some notable seventeenth-century writers of devotional prose and poetry served as catalysts to release Dickinson’s distinctive voice and vision — a voice and vision that transformed these sacred texts to serve her own religious quest and dedicated artistry.