immortal because it is acceptable to God. In another body of litera-
ture, she patterns her work on the wisdom literature of the Bible and
calls the resulting "Meditations" first "Divine" and, second, "Morall."
Likewise, Stowe draws on nineteenth-century sermon techniques in
Uncle Tom's Cabin, speaking a political-religious message that is so
persuasive in part because she employs sermonic strategies. Given
the practices of these two noteworthy female writers who share with
Dickinson the broadly Calvinist tradition of the Puritans, I began to
explore the idea that Dickinson, too, looked to that New England
tradition for an authoritative voice even as she revised much of the
dogma of nineteenth-century evangelism.

Emily Dickinson, Daughter of Prophecy is the result of that explora-
tion. Dickinson, aware that the biblical, classical, and romantic tradi-
tions identify the figure of the poet with the prophet, could find usable
and adaptable models of a prophetic voice--an authoritative, wise
religious voice--in the Bible. She could also find accessible models of
that voice in the customary homiletics of her time, which she knew
extended the scriptural prophetic mode into her own era and locale. In
adopting and making innovations upon those Judeo-Christian pro-
phetic models, Dickinson allied herself with a tradition of American
female writers who sought to express a religious vision within a con-
text of male claims on religious authority.

Indeed, a sensitivity to a female writer's womanhood and to her
understanding of her religious surroundings will prove to be key, I
believe, in developing theories through which we can best read Amer-
ica's nineteenth-century female poets. More and more of these poets'
works are being rediscovered and recovered, yet we still do not have
adequate ways of reading their verse. These poems, some of which are
anthologized in Rufus Griswold The Sacred Poets of England and
America ( 1849), a text that Dickinson herself owned, and in his The
Female Poets of America ( 1848), as well as in Caroline May The Ameri-
can Female Poets ( 1848), demand new ways of reading that take se-
riously the poets' experiences both as women and as inheritors of
religious traditions. Although Dickinson may be more daring than
some of her poetic sisters, her strategies and themes may illuminate
those poets' religious verse. If she is understood as a daughter of
prophecy, her poetry may even inspire female religious speakers of our
time, showing them rhetorical possibilities as well as speaking wisdom
across the ages.

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