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Dickinson was well-versed in the literary canon from a young age and was thoroughly educated in traditional texts like the Bible, Shakespeare’s tragedies, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and George Herbert’s religious poetry, but her influences greatly diversified and broadened in her twenties when she had completed her classical education. Dickinson read works from English contemporaries like the poets Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Brontë sisters, and novelist George Eliot, all of whom she found artistically inspiring.

Even more influential than those authors, however, were John Keats and the Romantic poets. While Dickinson’s poetry does not completely align within the Romantic Movement, it does incorporate elements of that philosophy. Although she was fascinated by the natural world and plant life in particular, Dickinson’s primary concern was not the separation of humankind from nature which Romantics like William Wordsworth and William Blake lamented. Dickinson was more concerned with the “sundering of the human and the divine” (Brantley 159), not unlike the Romantic poet Keats. In “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Keats addresses an ancient Greek urn, describing and reflecting on the images painted on it. The poem considers issues of legacy, immortality and mortality, and art. The poem demonstrates Keats’ belief that art can create immortality and can become a kind of spiritual experience.