A Companion to Emily Dickinson

Notes on Contributors viii

Abbreviations of Frequently Cited Sources xv

Acknowledgments xvi

Introduction 1
Martha Nell Smith and Mary Loeffelholz

Part I: Biography – the Myth of “the Myth” 9

1 Architecture of the Unseen 11
Aife Murray

2 Fracturing a Master Narrative, Reconstructing “Sister Sue” 37
Ingrid Satelmajer

3 Public, Private Spheres: What Reading Emily Dickinson’s Mail Taught me about Civil Wars 58
Martha Nell Smith

4 “Pretty much all real life”: The Material World of the Dickinson Family 79
Jane Wald

Part II: The Civil War – Historical and Political Contexts 105

5 “Drums off the Phantom Battlements”: Dickinson’s War Poems in Discursive Context 107
Faith Barrett

6 The Eagle’s Eye: Dickinson’s View of Battle 133
Renée Bergland

7 “How News Must Feel When Traveling”: Dickinson and Civil War Media 157
Eliza Richards

Part III: Cultural Contexts – Literature, Philosophy, Theology, Science 181

8 Really Indigenous Productions: Emily Dickinson, Josiah Holland, and Nineteenth-Century Popular Verse 183
Mary Loeffelholz

9 Thinking Dickinson Thinking Poetry 205
Virginia Jackson

10 Dickinson and the Exception 222
Max Cavitch

11 Dickinson’s Uses of Spiritualism: The “Nature” of Democratic Belief 235
Paul Crumbley

12 “Forever – is Composed of Nows –”: Emily Dickinson’s Conception of Time 258
Gudrun M. Grabher

13 God’s Place in Dickinson’s Ecology 269
Nancy Mayer

Part IV: Textual Conditions: Manuscripts, Printings, Digital Surrogates 279

14 Auntie Gus Felled It New 281
Tim Morris

15 Reading Dickinson in Her Context: The Fascicles 288
Eleanor Elson Heginbotham

16 The Poetics of Interruption: Dickinson, Death, and the Fascicles 309
Alexandra Socarides

17 Climates of the Creative Process: Dickinson’s Epistolary Journal 334
Connie Ann Kirk

18 Hearing the Visual Lines: How Manuscript Study Can Contribute to an Understanding of Dickinson’s Prosody 348
Ellen Louise Hart, with Sandra Chung

19 “The Thews of Hymn”: Dickinson’s Metrical Grammar 368
Michael L. Manson

20 Dickinson’s Structured Rhythms 391
Cristanne Miller

21 A Digital Regiving: Editing the Sweetest Messages in the Dickinson Electronic Archives 415
Tanya Clement

22 Editing Dickinson in an Electronic Environment 437
Lara Vetter

Part V: Poetry & Media – Dickinson’s Legacies 453

23 “Dare you see a soul at the White Heat?”: Thoughts on a “Little Home-keeping Person” 455
Sandra M. Gilbert

24 Re-Playing the Bible: My Emily Dickinson 462
Alicia Ostriker

25 “For Flash and Click and Suddenness–”: Emily Dickinson and the Photography-Effect 471
Marta L. Werner

26 “Zero to the Bone”: Thelonious Monk, Emily Dickinson, and the Rhythms of Modernism 490
Joshua Weiner

Index of First Lines 496

Index of Letters of Emily Dickinson 500

Index 503