ion, where his attempt naturally fails to comprehend existence rationally. In weary reaction, his imagination makes one last desperate effort at some kind of explanation in form of a consoling dream-vision whose powerful, dynamic imagery is drawn from wondrous immensities of nature or tragic confrontations with human finitude represented in Romantic art. (Byron's Manfred or Goethe's Faust are best examples here.) By lapsing into a semi-conscious reverie, solitary individual tries to impose a local habitation and a name upon that point of blank desertion where ultimate questions chronically go unanswered. (This is what Kierkegaard means by Hegelian formulation, the pantheism of imagination.) When his voyage of discovery also founders, skeptical young man makes an idol of unknown itself, ultimately giving it a human countenance formed in image of an idealized authority figure, most often father, whose infinite creative power radiates like sun and sanctions human child's speculation that one can overcome by transcending time. The ironic imagination thus repeatedly substitutes an increasingly exorbitant vision of its own (veiled) omnipotence for its experiences of finitude or what one could call an essentially Romantic interpretation of sublime for experience itself. Whether or not Kierkegaard's understanding of unmastered irony applies to Dickinson's poetry, it certainly seems to illuminate much of Tate's or modernist interpretation of her poetry. Much as other Critics did with Hopkins at same time, Tate reduces Dickinson's poetry to a schema of historical, psychological, and stylistic antitheses before he attempts to define its essence as irony, as it appears in such representative poems as 'The Chariot. Yet in process, his own antithetical framework and language, as they mediate his dread, force him to look into poetry for a principle of ideal synthesis or fusion to resolve formally antitheses of his own interpretation. He cannot rationally justify this procedure, nor can he allow his interpretation to suffer complete breakdown or little death an admission of its radical limitations would entail, so he valorizes Dickinson's imaginative power to coerce experience and make it conform to imaginative form of desire. In this way Tate symbolically overcomes all limitations, even those prescribed by certainty of our to come. By having Dickinson triumph ironically over itself, Tate reads into her poetry an idealized image of his own interpretive methodology. Dickinson thus becomes another holy name, another idolatrous effigy of divine authority figure at center of critic's dream of creative, symbolic omnipotence a view of writer and her relationship to language and to life which covers over very fear and trembling, painful experience of Negative Capability, at heart of authentic creativity. I have analyzed Tate's New Critical interpretation of Dickinson primarily to expose its illegitimate substitution of poetry for religion and