ABSTRACT
Despite the popularity of Watts and the wide reaching influence of his hymns in nineteenth-century New England, Dickinson’s experience of hymnody would of course not have been restricted to Watts. Criticism on Dickinson and the area of hymnody as an influence upon her poems has focused exclusively upon Watts.1 Although illuminating work has been done on connections between Dickinson and other contemporary women writers, nothing so far has been done on the relation between Dickinson’s ‘religious’ poetry and that of the women hymn writers of her era.2 We know that Dickinson shared correspondence with Helen Hunt Jackson and was eager to learn of her contemporaries, seeking, as she did, information on the subject from Thomas Wentworth Higginson.3
