
originally published 3/1/1999
For critic Roger Lundin, Emily Dickinson stands among the first people in the West to realize the modern malaise. Thus, her understanding of love, nature, religion, and mortality are modern in content. Lundin speaks to the Dickinsonian understanding of both death and Creation. In the pre-modern period, life was bounded by the judgment of a loving God for man’s sin. In the modern era, Dickinson saw that life is bounded and frustrated by death which is put on man for an unknown reason by an indifferent, uncaring, and perhaps malevolent God. Dickinson was also frustrated in her relationship to Creation. She felt that Creation was silent and impervious and did not compare to the world within herself. Thus, she was plagued by doubt and tempted, as were the Gnostics, not to affirm the Creation as good.
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