The extreme, peculiar poles of the American psyche have come to be represented by Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, two of the greatest visionary poets of the nineteenth century in the United States.

Dickinson, like Rainer Maria Rilke and Gerard Manley Hopkins, is the great poet of inwardness, of the indefinable region of the soul in which we are, in a sense, all alone. She never shied away from the great subjects of human suffering, loss, death, or even madness, but her perspective was intensely private.