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.
Ghost Flowers:Leah Sobsey and Amanda Marchand Interviewed by Marta Werner Marta Werner (bio) Over the last three years, Leah Sobsey and Amanda Marchand have been making This Earthen Door, a work documenting their encounter with Dickinson's herbarium. The result of their artistic research is not a facsimile of the original, now furled within a faraway weave of time and space, or of its digital surrogate, but a wholly new and incandescent work of and for our time. To make This Earthen Door, Marchand and Sobsey came out of the dark room. They moved their studios outside, working en plein air in gardens in different latitudes, experimenting with anthotype, a delicate and nearly forgotten nineteenth-century photographic process of making images from emulsions of crushed leaves, stems, berries, petals—and light. Their "flower prints"—sixty-six unique images representing the sixty-six leaves of Dickinson's herbarium made by laying the negatives of the digital copies of that work on top of the pigmented paper—compose the color-wheel of her world. They possess an unearthly beauty and inhabit an uncanny temporality: Are they images of the herbarium's lost memories of the vernal earth of more than a century ago? Or are they after-images from the herbarium's dream of a world-to-come, a world, perhaps, without us? In Marchand and Sobsey's lyrical color-washes, each floral specimen—the crossed stems of the Oxeye-Daisy, the frayed leaves of Mad-dog Skullcap, the swirling roots of Common Smoketree—flickers with a hidden vitalism that affirms its quickened, entangled nature and its vulnerability and proximity to disappearance. Ultimately, the sunlight both creates and degrades the images: even when stored in near total darkness, both flower and print will fade to whiteness, the material will become immaterial. The tension between the intimate, sensory nature of the anthotypes and the advance of the spectral and anarchival both from deep inside them and from an Outside that never fully reveals itself is both a final source of [End Page 99] their beauty and an invitation to us to gladly forfeit a positivist, empirical response to Nature for a dilated, intuitive one. At last, This Earthen Door is an herbarium a'bloom in the dark mystery of the Anthropocene where color is still the substrate of the world. —Marta Werner MATERIALS & IMMATERIALS: A PARTIAL INVENTORY Sun • Dickinson • Time • Herbarium (digitized) • Seeds • Soil (potting) • Worms • Earth • Bees • Heat • Rainwater • Hoses • Gloves • Scissors • Shovels • Pencils • Brushes (foam) • Sponges • Money • Artist's tape • Permission • Patience • Collaborators • Computers • Mortar and Pestle • Pigments (plant) • Paper (acid-free, Strathmore) • Pigment inks (digital) • Paper (archival-digital) • Lemon Juice • UV light • Everclear • Vodka • Negatives, Positives (large) • Contact Frames • Scanners • Printers • Darkness • Reading Glasses • Moonlight • Intuition • Storage Boxes • Chance MARTA: The subject of your work is often the natural world and the philosophies and practices of collecting and displaying that shape our human views of nature. How did you find this focus? LEAH: My work has centered around archives and collections for over twenty years. I began working in museum collections by chance when a Tufted Titmouse crashed into my window. As a photographer, my first inclination was to photograph it, my second was to hold it. . . . That moment led me to work in the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences where I was able to photograph bird skins. I fell in love with the specimens. My then Step-Uncle, John Fitzpatrick, an ornithologist, had worked at the Field Museum when I was a child, and I remembered watching him opening the endless, dark drawers where those beautiful, tiny creatures now lay silent. I imagined bringing them to light, reanimating them through photography. Later, I was awarded a residency at the Grand Canyon, and this opportunity led me to photograph in the national park's museum collections rather than in the iconic landscape. . . . What could I learn from the micro rather than the macro? What could I learn from the scientists, collectors, and researchers who deemed these plants and animal specimens important enough to collect, study, and memorialize? It was a natural progression to move from the national park's archive to other institutional archives: Thoreau's, Dickinson's...
