Scholars no longer see Jonathan Edwards as the fire-and-brimstone preacher who deemed his parishioners "sinners in the hands of an angry god." Edwards now figures as caring and socially conscious and exerts increased influence as a philosopher of the American school of Protestantism. In this study, he becomes the progenitor of an alternative tradition in American letters.

In Knowing, Seeing, Being, Jennifer Leader argues that Edwards, the nineteenth-century poet Emily Dickinson, and the twentieth-century poet Marianne Moore share a heretofore underrecognized set of religious and...