Domesticating Delphi: Emily Dickinson and the Electro-Magnetic Telegraph

In terms of style, Emily Dickinson's poems have often been described as "telegraphic." And yet to date no one has looked closely at what this might mean. To what extent is such a description useful? Is it limited merely to stylistic mannerisms? Or are there larger issues at stake? By considering the impact of the telegraph on mid-nineteenth-century America, this paper seeks to restore to Dickinson's enterprise a lost cultural context. The new technology was not implemented in a void. Apparently annihilating the barriers of time and space, the telegraph was quickly adopted by the current religious craze, that of Spiritualism, as a model for the transmission of voices from the Beyond. Thus, in boldly appropriating this new technology, Emily Dickinson also took on a whole range of cultural expectations which effectively transformed conventional notions about the nature of authorship, authority, and audience