Emily Dickinson and Transcendental Thought

There is a definite struggle between the materialist and the transcendentalist. These two waves of thinking are in complete conflict with each other because they display opposite views. The materialist believes that physical matter is the only reality and that everything can be explained in terms of matter, while the transcendentalist asserts the existence of an ideal spiritual reality that transcends the empirical and is knowable through intuition. As we read through the poetry of Emily Dickinson, it may be easy to classify her as materialist. But by looking at three of her poems: “I taste a liquor never brewed”, “There’s a certain Slant of light”, and “I died for Beauty”, we can see that Dickinson evidently displays some of the characteristics of transcendentalist thought: nature, transcendentalist language, and spiritual wellbeing.
A language or “vocabulary list” that coincide with the beliefs of a way of thinking has accompanied each new wave of thought that...