Howe 49: "The decision not to publish her poems in her lifetime, to close up an extraordinary amount of work, is astonishing. Far from being the misguided modesty of an oppressed female ego, it is a consummate Calvinist gesture of self-assertion"
Calvinist thinking, via Howe's summation of Jonathan Edwards: "To be in the world but avoid serving Mammon, I must renounce attachment to friends and worldly accomplishment. Recognition by the world is not recognition by God, and is therefore a delusion. Worry and regret over lack of recognition are empty and a snare"
51: "Emily Dickinson [...] applied the freshness of [Jonathan Edwards'] perception to the dead weight on American poetry as she knew it"