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Of Poetics and Praise
Emily Dickinson and C.S. Lewis in Conversation on the Romantic and
Sacramental Imagination
Ciera Horton
English Department, Wheaton College
ciera.horton@my.wheaton.edu
Abstract: In Emily Dickinson’s poetry, the use of the romantic imagination is driven by a
desire to contemplate and comprehend beauty and truth, both natural and metaphysical.
Dickinson emphasizes how intricately the imagination is intertwined with desire for spiritual
fulfillment, a principle Lewis extrapolates in The Weight of Glory. While Emily Dickinson’s
poetry paints a worldview that values the romantic imagination to the point of eclipsing
spiritual and physical reality for the sake of individualized perceptions, C.S. Lewis advances
the role of the sacramental imagination as it pertains to spiritual desire. Bringing these
instrumental writers into conversation together will enable us to reflect on the tension
between the romantic and sacramental imaginations and consider how the imaginative
contemplation of beauty can lead believers to see the role of praise in the art of poetics.
Definition of Terms
The romantic imagination refers to the creative power of the individual based on unique
experiences while the sacramental imagination recognizes spiritual purpose in the material as
incarnate realities that illuminate greater glory to come. The sacramental imagination is more
complex and is rooted in a Christological and trinitarian understanding of the incarnation. At the

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incarnation, there was the union of divinity and humanity in the embodied Christ. A sacrament is
the manifestation or transmission of that union to us in our materiality, in a manner that is
representative to how God came to us through the person of Jesus Christ. Therefore, a
sacramental imagination is one that sees materiality as the realm in which God comes to us.
James K.A. Smith defines the sacramental imagination as “the sense that God meets us in
materiality, and that the natural world is always more than just nature—it is charged with the
presence and glory of God” (Smith 143). We see this sacramental imagination take poetic and
artistic form in the writings of John Donne, George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins.
The Romantic Imagination in Dickinson’s Poetry
An alluring and deeply influential poet in her own right Emily Dickinson was born in
1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts during the age of Whig politics, fundamental moralism and
protestant revivals. Despite her intensely Christian upbringing, she was influenced by the
worldview discussions of the day that revolved around naturalistic thought and that seemed to
defy the hand of God. These discussions led her to question in her 1882 poem why “That Hand is
amputated now / And God cannot be found —” (4-5).
Emily Dickinson’s poetic discourse shows her grappling with the tension between the
romantic and arguably spiritual life of the mind and the grim realities of the present. Scholar
Joanne Diehl writes in Dickinson and the Romantic Imagination, “Repeatedly, [Dickinson]
insists upon her need to control and dominate the natural world. When such domination proves
impossible, Dickinson posits an alternative, internal landscape created and controlled by her
imagination” (42). Borrowing from the romantic tradition of writers like Wordsworth and
drawing inspiration from the highly individualized worldview of transcendentalists like Thoreau

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and his monolithic work Walden, Dickinson saw poetry as elevating the artist to a God-like
creator status. For the poet, the romantic imagination opened the door to an egocentric theology,
as explored in poem 466, “I dwell in Possibility - / A fairer House than Prose” which has “…for
an everlasting Roof / The Gambrels of the Sky -” and which allows the poet to spread “wide my
narrow Hands / To gather Paradise -” (1-2, 7-8, 11-12). The figurative imagery here reflects
divinity. To have all possibility is to have omnipotence; to have the sky as her roof is to imply
she can reach to the highest heavens; finally, her occupation is to “gather Paradise” together,
using paradisal language that evokes images of God gathering the church together in Revelation.
The danger with this emphasis on the romantic imagination is that it develops into the idolization
of the mind and the perceptions of a wishful but deceptive reality.
In his text Emily Dickinson And the Art of Belief, Roger Lundin writes, “Like God the
Father, the poet for Dickinson often seemed omnipotent and deathless, a divinely creative free
imagination. It was when she thought of poetry in this way that she was most likely to consider
God her rival, a threatening fellow creator” (167). With her emphasis on the mind and the
process of independent creation, the thought of a greater creator would seem to stifle the very
liberties her poetry strove to protect.
However, if the romantic imagination as the individual inspiration for creation, was the
most significant source of enlightenment, then there was a problem. One’s imagination could
only go so far. What about all of the beautiful things that were un-fathomable to the human
mind? This would mean there was a limit, and acknowledging limits would be the same as
admitting the need for something, or someone, greater. The poet would become like the mole in
poem 1240, who lives in the ground and therefore cannot comprehend the idea of the heavenly

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realm: “The Missionary to the Mole / Must prove there is a Sky / Location doubtless he would
plead / But what excuse have I?” (5-8) Without any sense of context, he must rely on another to
enlighten him, a concept which challenged Dickinson’s sense of self-sufficiency.
Stemming from this paradox, much of Dickinson’s struggle with Christianity was related
to an inability to grasp the infinitude of a spiritual domain outside of the physical world. What
was the point of the physical if one could not understand the metaphysical? Because the
immaterial was beyond the grasp of understanding, it seemed less real and thereby inferior. To
Emily Dickinson, the greatest beauty and fulfillment of desire could be found in the life of the
mind; her value for the individualization of the romantics formed an idolization of one’s
imaginings over physical reality. Poem 112 shows Dickinson exploring the power and extent of
the romantic imagination when she writes, “Success is counted sweetest / By those who ne’er
succeed. / To comprehend a nectar / Requires sorest need” (1-4). What Dickinson is saying here
is that those who can best understand the gravity of success are those who never achieve it, but
who only yearn for it. The greatest joy for Dickinson could only be found in the mind, for the
actual experience would always fall short. In other poems, she emphasizes hunger more than
satiation, yearning for love more than experiencing it, wishing for heaven more than glorifying in
eternality with Christ. The imagination, for Dickinson, was the culmination of something’s truest
existence.
One poem highlighted by Lundin is poem #439, “Nor was I hungry — so I found / That
Hunger — was a way / Of persons Outside Windows — The entering — takes away —
” (17-20). Lundin goes on to say, “One out of every ten poems written by Dickinson contains
imagery of food or drink, and most of those conclude that it is more satisfying to envision than to

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consume” (Lundin 119). This philosophy, borrowing perhaps from the Stoics, approaches
asceticism and creates a conflict between accepting the physical and yearning for spiritual
transcendence, a conflict later reconciled in Lewis’ acceptance of the sacramental imagination.
Dickinson’s belief, however, that something was always better in the abstract mind than in reality
also translated to her views of heaven, the ultimate metaphysical desire. Therefore, her poetry
alludes to the belief that the poet could imagine a more beautiful heaven than could ever exist
and, by extension, a more loving and perfect God than who could ever be. As stated in poem 437,
she refused to accept that a beautiful heaven beyond the scope of her imagination was possible or
desirable, for she says that “in the Handsome skies” she “shall not feel at Home - I know - / I
dont like Paradise - ” (2-4).
While she comes close to the Ignatian method of lectio divina, a meditative mode of
approaching the Scriptures through the use of the spiritual imagination, she misses the single
most important element. For St. Ignatius, the contemplation of the metaphysical is rooted in the
physical, leading to an sacramental imagination which serves as a sacramental breaking of the
temporal realm. While St. Ignatius posed that the imagination was a worshipful tool to see God’s
purpose through the patchwork details of materialism, she would have denied the potential for
spiritual realities to be greater than their existence as illuminated in the mind. This then leads us
to a key theological question: How can artists and intellectuals move from the romantic
imagination, which is focused on individualistic experiences, to the sacramental imagination
which transposes the imagined to its divine source?
Lewis and the Sacramental Imagination

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C.S. Lewis takes the theology of poetics and imaginative beauty to a different level,
reconciling the romantic imagination with the sacramental. Like Dickinson’s poem with the
missionary speaking to the mole, Lewis argues that “we are far too easily pleased”, partly
because he agrees that we cannot fully imagine a sky if all we know is ground (Lewis 26). But
this is not due to the imagination’s superiority to real experience; instead, it is ascribed to our
apathy, our rejection of the sanctified pursuit of the sacramental imagination. He found that the
truest joy comes from the full reward in completion, not the preliminary scrape of the
imagination. Lewis writes in the title piece for The Weight of Glory,
These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we
really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols,
breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only
the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from
a country we have never yet visited. (Lewis 31)
Emily Dickinson, in trying to seek spiritual fulfillment, idolized the desire and the imagination,
believing nothing could be better. Lewis worshipped the central source of what we should desire
and imagine. Beautiful things become idols when we seek them for their self-glorifying effects,
not for the sake of their own existence. He clarifies this in Surprised By Joy saying, “It is just
insofar as [one] approaches the reward that he becomes able to desire it for its own sake; indeed,
the power of so desiring it is itself a preliminary reward” (28). As our faith matures, we come to
see the act of desire through the sacramental imagination as a preview to the greater glory to
come. For Lewis, there is a worshipful place for the imagination; it sees the handiwork of God in

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the material stitches of our lives, if we pursue such a framework for its sake and not for its
effects.
Lewis, too, acknowledged the limitations of the imagination, though he saw this not as a
way to delegitimize the truth of what was being imagined, but to emphasize it further. In an essay
entitled “Transpositions” he tells an allegorical fable to illustrate this concept about the
imagination. A woman is thrown into a dungeon, where she gives birth to a boy who grows up
having never seen the beautiful outer world. The woman takes to drawing pictures of mountains,
streams and valleys for her son, trying to help him imagine the indescribable beauties of a world
he has never known. He gets along well until his mother realizes that the boy expects the real
world to be only made of pencil lines and marks, when in reality the drawings are mere glimpses
into a greater beauty. The pictures are never as real as the world above, for “In reality it lacks
lines because it is incomparably more visible” (110). In the same way, our human imagination
may be limited, but that does not make the immaterial realm less real or less beautiful. Instead, it
is a humbling reminder that we are not the source of its glory, but that there is One who is more
wonderful.
Enclosed within the worldview of the romantics, Emily Dickinson did not have this view.
Instead, to be a poet was to be a glorified creator; to value the romantic imagination was to
idolize oneself and one’s conceptions. For Lewis, success would not be counted sweetest “for
those who ne’er succeed”—instead, success was the truest in its most perfect and divine
existence, not in our futile and unsatisfied yearning. Furthermore, there were theological truths to
be gained from interaction with and artistic representations of the material world insofar as they
valued the material as incarnational and thereby sacramental. He understood that the sacramental

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imagination seeks to reflect upon the divine order, rather than create its own, as Emily Dickinson
did. It strives to see God in the mundane details of sacramental living, reflected and represented
in the material realm. This is why Lewis valued art, music, food, drink, and poetry, not for the
sake of their effects nor for indulgence or self-glory. He saw such physical realities as bridges to
understanding spiritual truths.
Perhaps George MacDonald, C.S. Lewis’ writing inspiration, best clarified the difference
between a self-serving romantic imagination and a God-worshipping sacramental one in his
essay “The Imagination: Its Function and Its Culture.” He offers a qualitative distinction, saying:
We must not forget, however, that between creator and poet lies the one un-passable gulf
which distinguishes…all that is God’s from all that is man’s…It is better to keep the word
creation for that calling out of nothing which is the imagination of God…The
imagination of man is made in the image of the imagination of God. Everything of man
must have been of God first. (101)
Therefore, no feat of the mind, be it didactic or aesthetic, could ever grant us the role of an ex
nihilo Creator. Furthermore, when we acknowledge that the sacramental imagination is
worshipful, putting us in a place of reverence as we see divine purpose in material existence,
then we find not that our desire for beauty and ache for something glorious is too strong, but that
it is too weak. As Lewis famously put it, “We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink
and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on
making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at
the sea” (Lewis 26). If we strive for the glorified sacramental imagination, then we have a better

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comprehension of what really is meant by that holiday at the sea, and we better understand that
the world outside a dungeon is not merely pencil marks but something far more beautiful.
Conclusion
Through analyzing the literary and theological implications of the imagination, we have
seen how Emily Dickinson’s poetry illuminates her struggle with the state of the physical and her
desire for transcendence. Dickinson’s worldview was self-focused to the point of promoting the
literary life of the mind, in the tradition of the romantics, above the greater truths represented
therein. Her view of the poet as a God-like creator led to a perceived rivalry between the artist
and her Lord. C.S. Lewis recognized the importance of the sacramental imagination, as a way to
worship in the weight of a glory that is not our own. Ultimately, for the Christian, the finite will
never be enough, as the flesh fades away. Despite this, we can worship through our interactions
with this world, through mediums such as poetry, which was formed through the imagination of
our Creator. With a healthy view of the sacramental imagination for the artist, we can then see
praise in poetics. Like Emily Dickinson and C.S. Lewis, we are to be nimble with belief,
imagining the impossible and hoping for the things unseen, yet without idolizing the poetic life
of the mind.

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Works Cited
Dickinson, Emily, and R W. Franklin. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge, Mass:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998. Print.
Diehl, Joanne F. Dickinson and the Romantic Imagination. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University
Press, 1981. Print.
Lewis, C.S. The Weight of Glory. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1942.
Print.
Lewis, C.S. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World,
1955. Print.
Lundin, Roger. Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief. Grand Rapids, Mich: William B.
Eerdmans Pub. Co, 1998. Print.
MacDonald, George. “The Imagination: Its Function and Its Culture.” The Christian
Imagination: The Practice of Faith in Literature and Writing. Ed. Leland Ryken.
Colorado Springs, Colo: Shaw Books, 2002. 101-103. Print.
Marshall, Cynthia. Essays on C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald: Truth, Fiction and the Power
of Imagination. E. Mellen Press. 1991.
Smith, James K. A. Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. 2009.
Print.