Emily Dickinson and Photography

Abstract

This essay locates aspects of Emily Dickinson's writing and writing-system as it registers and participates in the disturbance or emergence of photography. It is not only that the materials and discourses of photography were present to the poet and used to poetic effect, as I describe in the first section of this essay. In addition, Dickinson's writing, especially about loss and "sundered things," analogized and competed with the uses of photography as a sentimental technology of preservation and revelation in mid-nineteenth-century United States. Dickinson's writing and larger writing-system, I argue here, negotiated the new value of publicity attendant on a photographic dissociation of "self," a value that continues to set the terms for the poet's reception.