"Sensible Knowledge" and the Language of Emotions : The Common Source of the Poetic Idioms of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson

The essay aims at demonstrating how the apparently opposite styles of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman are actually personal versions of the same “language of the emotions” which is at the core of a shared poetics in the American Renaissance, and has its roots in the tradition of oratory that can be traced back to the Puritan origins of American literature. This poetics rests on the conception of a direct, intuitive knowledge that comes from a religious and even theological culture in which – as in Jonathan Edwards’s “sensible knowledge” – the individual reaches an assurance of salvation through an almost sensual apprehension of truth. In particular, both poets’ answers to the existential issues of separation and death, and to their search for the transcendent, are articulated in a language that appeals to the emotions through a pretense of orality, either through a rebellious and moving eloquence or through the subtle and powerful unhinging of an apparently traditional, closed form.