“Religious feeling without religious images”: E.B. White’s Essays and the Poetics of Participation

Abstract

The great familiar essayist Elwyn Brooks (“Andy”) White, New Yorker writer, author of Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web, one of the most agreeable prose masters in English, one of the most engaging and sympathetic makers of story fictional and nonfictional, participated in, embodying, what he ascribes to his mentor Henry David Thoreau a century earlier: he too renders “religious feeling without religious images.”¹ The feelings are there, the ideas too, but absent are the familiar and conventional religious images, doctrine, and dogma.