ABSTRACT
Walker, Cheryl, The Nightingale's Burden: Women Poets and American Culture before 1900, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982
Watts, Emily Stipes, The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977
Religion and Poetry "Faith is doubt," wrote Emily Dickinson to her sister-in-
law in 1884, forecasting the temper of religious poetry in modern times (including her own). Faith was doubt also for the Psalmists and for Herbert and Donne, and a reader seeking unquestioned faith in 20th-century poetry would find little to delight her. Many academic critics, supposing that doubt is incompatible with faith, have missed the spiritual dimension in modern poetry. Nevertheless, religious poetries have persisted through the years of the modern, and "nevertheless" is their operative word.
