Emily Dickinson's Vesuvius poems are Civil War poems. Given Vesuvius's eruption near the start of the Civil War in 1861, this essay argues that Dickinson registers Vesuvius less as a symbol for herself and more as the pervasive symbol of slavery and war proliferating across print and visual media. Since Dickinson's "Vesuvius dont talk" phrasing reflects a traceable pattern across her Vesuvius poems, this essay considers how Dickinson uses strategies like vernacularized speech to index and play with Vesuvius's larger significance during the same moment in which she writes the majority of her poems (1859-1865).
This essay examines Emily Dickinson's Herbarium and correspondence with Thomas Wentworth Higginson to reveal how pressed flowers function as indexical signs in her poetics. Drawing on Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotics, I argue that Dickinson created playful games binding words to material objects, establishing indexical relationships between poems, letters, and enclosed flowers. Through these games, she performed a disappearance of the human lyric subject, allowing nonhuman presences, particularly flowers, to emerge as speaking subjects. This substitution reveals Dickinson's ecopoetic sensibility for it decenters human figures while foregrounding environmental attention.
Scholars of Emily Dickinson make extensive use of manuscripts and other extant, material-culture objects. Immaterial culture, activities that leave few or no material traces, such as musical performance, receive less attention in literary studies or, when studied, prompt scholars to speculate. Such scholarship may face deeper scrutiny or skepticism, potentially foreclosing inquiry into ephemeral or fugitive creative practices. Contemporary play theory suggests an approach for studying immaterial culture. Classical play theory distinguishes between exploratory and serious play, with only the latter deserving critical attention. Jacques Derrida's writings suggest, however, that play transcends such traditional binaries. Dickinson's writings, like the improvised music she played and heard, are occasions for play, not following rigid rules but flexible, self-defined guidelines. Their ontological ambiguity creates a gap in which play is possible for the scholar, too, producing scholarship that is both exploratory and rigorous.
Although Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium has become a celebrated object for its beauty and singularly impressive diversity, there are other collections of plants attributable to the poet. This essay will focus on a neglected set of specimens, the Quire, furnishing a new suite of species associated with Dickinson while also providing a rare glimpse into her herbarium-making process. Combining the evidence of this process with previously overlooked clues from the Herbarium itself, I propose an emerging possibility that allows for the Herbarium’s meticulous construction—or composition—to have occurred during a later period in Dickinson’s life than traditionally assumed. This plasticity of timeframe may foster a new era of scholarship with the potential for fresh insights into Dickinson’s botanical and literary oeuvres.
This essay establishes original connections between Emily Dickinson and Margaret Fuller by situating Dickinson’s writings within the context of Fuller’s life, works, and U.S. reception. It uses print culture’s response to Fuller’s death at sea in July 1850 as a new interpretive lens for discussing Dickinson’s 1850s depictions of sea journeys as both liberating and perilous. It examines parallels between Fuller’s and Dickinson’s associations of Italy with quotidian and ineffable experiences and the feminine, and it highlights similarities between Fuller’s representation of revolutionary Italy in relation to U.S. culture and Dickinson’s use of Italian volcanoes to symbolize latent dangers beneath seemingly placid American landscapes.
This article examines the transformation of prosodic time into musical time and poetic form into song form. By looking at their similarities and differences, scholars can better examine their underlying relationships, and composers can better negotiate the challenges of creating songs from Dickinson’s poems.
Emily Dickinson's poetry aims to transcend the moment of its creation; the letters aim to intensify that moment. In her poetry, allusions participate in the production of something immortal by serving as reservoirs of thought and image, as springboards for her own creations, and as occasions for sustained reflection upon literary themes. In the letters, by contrast, allusions tend to help Dickinson heighten the fleeting present moment. Allusions in her letters additionally bring into focus gender pressures that made epistolarity an unsatisfying genre, directing Dickinson towards lyric poetry as her vocation.
This article offers new ways of interpreting Dickinson's maelstrom poems. I turn to recent critical interest in the word "Domingo" to argue that Dickinson's maelstroms reveal the gendered questions underlying revolutionary new concepts of personhood. Identifying various historical, political, and geographical referents for Dickinson's maelstroms, I argue these poems depict white femininity as an idealized, isolated, and often therefore horrifying condition. By demonstrating how Dickinson uses the maelstrom to think together the oceanic sublime and Gothic tropes of enslavement, I locate in these poems a repeated fantasy about the possibility of escape—however painful—from these gendered and racialized circumstances.
This essay explores how shared metaphors in the poetry of Emily Dickinson and A. R. Ammons, including fields, chaos, shades, and the melting of ice, evoke principles that can be associated with a "negative" wisdom characteristic of Daoism and Chan Buddhism. Additionally, the essay examines the bee/butterfly-flower trope used by both poets as an emblem of joyous oblivion, as well as their advocacy of non-action for self-cultivation and an indifference towards service. By situating these poets' figurative language within a literary lineage, the essay points toward a shared ground between Asian and American traditions.
