'A house not made with hands': Natural typology in the work of Jonathan Edwards, Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore

Edwards' natural types have distinctive ontological, teleological, phenomenological, semiotic and epistemological properties that distinguish them from trope, symbol, or allegory. His typological system provides an affective language of images to describe the experience of the numinous in nature without collapsing the boundaries between nature, God, and self. It demonstrates that in American letters there are alternative ways to write about connections between Heaven and Earth than subsuming the two realms into one or severing the sacred and secular once and for all. In their various representations of the artist's relationship with nature, Dickinson and Moore draw on their common source with Edwards—Calvinist typological hermeneutics—to create their own, idiosyncratic renditions of natural typology; their types retain many of the characteristics that Edwards sets forth in his own philosophy.; While Dickinson frequently preserves the Edwardsean tension simultaneously connecting and separating type and antitype, her God is as likely to be known by absence and inscrutability—and His signs as a trace of that inscrutability—as by any kind of tangible presence. Dickinson's diverse typologies explore a variety of possibilities for how, or whether, Earth and Heaven might still be in reciprocal relationship. Tracing the typological threads in her work illumines how she affirms both immanence and transcendence, how she posits a self both intimately connected to and separate from God and nature, and how she constructs a divided subject position that has both positive and negative effects on the speaker.; By aligning the discursively-based “realm of the spirit” with an ethical “reverence for mystery,” Moore creates a spiritually thing-infused poetry without reliance on the symbolic or on essentialist assertions about the transcendent. Moore's natural objects function as types which embody ontological difference; a dynamic, semiotic relation with their antitypes; and an ethical, epistemological category of “in-betweenness” and “integration.” Moore's poetic shifts in emphasis from an early poetry concerned with thingness, individuation, and objective demonstration, to a poetry stressing generativity and contiguous connectivity, and finally to a poetry that assumes the internalization of all of these values and hence...