Deep Mapping in Edward Hitchcock's Geology and Emily Dickinson's Poetry

The vernacular of deep mapping provides a valuable resource for comparing Edward Hitchcock's geology textbooks — particularly Elementary Geology — with select geology-based poems by Emily Dickinson. Although Dickinson's poems that reveal a clear understanding of nineteenth-century science (especially geological findings) have already been critically analyzed by scholars such as Richard Sewall, Hiroko Uno, and Robin Peel, Dickinson's verse has not yet been assessed from the vantage point of the complex layerings of literary deep mapping. Moreover, Dickinson's poetic explorations of distinct timelines and phenomena in both human and natural history can be aligned in many instances not only with the language of Hitchcock's textbooks, but also with the drawings, maps, charts, and cultural contexts embedded in these volumes. The language, imagery, inquiries and conjectures in poems by Dickinson that are explicated in this essay all have clear (as well as more nuanced) ties to Hitchcock's Geology. My study proposes that even with their different genres and diverse authorial intentions, both Hitchcock and Dickinson engage in similar rich and multivalent approaches to what is clearly an incipient version of modern deep mapping.