Of the settlers who sailed to this country on the Mayflower in 1620, the majority came to America

because they did not hold the same religious beliefs as the official Church of England, and they could not
practice religion freely there. Their beliefs focused upon what becomes of the soul after death, when,
they thought, the elect will go to heaven and the damned will go to hell. They were successful as
pioneers, bringing European-style civilization to the new land, because they did not let suffering stop
them. To these Puritans (so called because they rejected anything they saw as not being part of the pure
religious experience), God was revealed through the events that took place in one’s life: therefore,
suffering was accepted as part of God’s plan. The Puritans maintained a strict social order and were not
tolerant of people whose beliefs were different than their own. At first, this might seem strange, given
that they themselves had left England because their beliefs had not been tolerated there, but it makes
sense that a group that had suffered persecution and the hardships of a strange land would only survive
by keeping close together. Pilgrims thought of poetry, as they thought of everything else in their world,
as a way of revealing the order that exists in the universe. A poem therefore had a structure in order to
show that God had made the universe structured, not to be enjoyable. American culture has retained
several elements from the Puritan experience: a strong love of freedom; a need for justification for
one’s actions, whether they are private, public or political; and a fear of death and a simultaneous
fascination with it. Today we use the phrases Puritan Ethic and American Work Ethic to mean the same
thing: the idea that hard work will be rewarded, leading to the idea that lack of reward indicates that a
person has been lazy and has not worked hard enough. These are not beliefs of all cultures, and they
relate directly to the Puritans’ experience when they came to America.

When she was twenty, Dickinson discovered Emerson’s essay “The Poet,” which describes his theories of
how poetry can help us understand nature and how nature helps us understand the world. From the
start, she related to Transcendental ideas, choosing this new form of philosophy as her religion. Her
poetry shows its influence: natural objects are observed, not explained, because she allows their
significance to speak for itself. But Transcendentalism was not able to deal with the large questions that
traditional religion raises about sin, guilt, and the afterlife, so when Dickinson’s poetry approaches these
moral questions, her Puritan upbringing shows through.