Belief and doubt in literature

Emily Dickinson was a poet who existed at the center of her nineteenth-century United States culture and yet wrote from a periphery located at the edge of her being. Integral to understanding her poetry is a contextual awareness of her spiritual struggle. The experience of cultural marginalization and the way it informs art through a peripheral perspective has been the focus of examination in much of modern and post-modern literary studies where attention is given as much to an author's cultural station as to his or her artistic creation. A close study of Emily Dickinson's poetry reveals a spiritually marginalized perspective which closely resembles the structural framework of cultural marginalization. While there are areas of Dickinson's poetic perspective where these two experiences merge, my examination of Dickinson concentrates on her personal spiritual liminality in her relationship with God as expressed in the context of her poetry and letters.