Emily Dickinson's rich conversation

"Emily Dickinson's Rich Conversation: Poetry, Philosophy, Science is a comprehensive account of Emily Dickinson's aesthetic and intellectual life. Through her letters and poems, Richard E. Brantley identifies Dickinson's dialogue with John Locke's rational empiricism, Charles Darwin's evolutionary biology, Wordsworth's "natural methodism," Ralph Waldo Emerson's idealism, and European and American intellectual traditions. Contrary to the image of the isolated poet, this ambitious study reveals Dickinson's agile mind developing through conversation with a community of contemporaries"--Page four of cover.