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.
