TY - JOUR
AU1 - Tackett, Justin, C
AB - Abstract This essay focuses on a specific aspect of electric telegraphy in America—what I call ‘telegraphic acoustics’, which includes: 1) the sound of telegraph wires vibrating overhead and 2) ‘sound-reading’, the practice of transcribing Morse code by ear instead of transcribing it from a printout. Telegraphic acoustics started as a distinctively American technical evolution that emphasized sound and listening over sight and literacy. Because of this emphasis and because of increasingly universal poetic education, American telegraphers understood their technology in poetic terms. In turn, American poets, including John Greenleaf Whittier and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., also thought about poetry in terms of telegraphic acoustics. The essay focuses on Emily Dickinson as an in-depth case study because of her unusual familiarity with telegraphic acoustics in Amherst; her visual impairment, which heightened her awareness of sound; and her insights into the nature and future of networks and information flow. It concludes by examining the intersection of her poetry and telephony, which was perceived as an extension of telegraphy. I argue that thinking of these media acoustically, instead of in terms of literacy, reveals a rich separate discourse running through Dickinson’s poetry and American poetry generally. This discourse demands reinterpretations of several canonical Dickinson poems. There are three poems in which Emily Dickinson explicitly invokes the telegraph: ‘The Future never spoke -’ [F638A and B] (1863); ‘They put Us far apart -’ [F708A] (1863); and ‘Myself can read the Telegrams’ [F1049A] (1865).1 But this trio belies the fact that her life was enveloped by a telegraphic age and that a multitude of her poems use telegraphy to think with, though such allusions are characteristically obscured. Recent scholarship—such as the special issue on ‘networking Dickinson’ in The Emily Dickinson Journal and Caroline Levine’s Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network—has shown increasing interest in locating Dickinson within larger webs of nineteenth-century communication and culture.2 Previous studies of telegraphy, such as Jerusha Hull McCormack’s work, have focused largely on reading Dickinson’s poems within the context of the ‘linguistic compression’ and typography of telegrams, which ‘publicly employed (and thus gradually made almost respectable) Dickinson’s apparently erratic habits of punctuation and capitalization’, as well as her idiosyncratic dashes.3 Others, such as David Hochfelder, have claimed that ‘resemblance between her poems and telegrams was probably coincidental, owing to the rapidity of composition in both cases’.4 But as Cristanne Miller and Mary Loeffelholz have recently argued in conversation with the focus on manuscripts by Virginia Jackson and Marta Werner, ‘the aural Dickinson is overdue for a return, and along with the aural Dickinson, the lexical and philosophical Dickinson’.5 In this essay, I examine an aural Dickinson, one who wrote about sound as much as she exploited it in her experiments with hymn metre, slant rhyme, dashes, and other prosodic innovations, which have been scrutinized elsewhere. Taking a different tack, I argue that the acoustics of the telegraph—which consisted of both the sounds that telegraph wires made overhead and also the clicking of telegraphic instruments—have mostly been ignored in favour of tropes of printing and writing. In thinking of telegraphy primarily as a form of literacy, we miss not just its acoustic qualities—which at the time were, for telegraphers and laypeople, more omnipresent than telegrams themselves—but the ways in which telegraphy was imagined as co-extensive with other conceptual categories, such as hydrodynamics, synaesthesia, thermodynamics, and information. If we treat telegraphy as a form of sound or speech to be heard, in addition to a visual medium, we recover a separate discourse of communication practice, concurrent with modes of literacy, that binds poetry and telegraphy together in surprising ways that make poetry more telegraphic, telegraphy more poetic—a more accurate balance of what Roland Wenzlhuemer calls the ‘socio-determinist’ and ‘technological-determinist’ views.6 Via acoustics, telegraphy places Dickinson’s work within a much broader and richer network of signification than mere allusions to a new technology, revealing fresh frameworks she used to analyse and talk about sound, beyond her poetic mimesis. Though this essay will focus on Dickinson’s poetry and American telegraphy, its arguments cross-apply to other Anglophone traditions, including those of Britain, Canada, and Ireland. One good reason to focus on the United States, however, is that it popularized a practice known as ‘sound-reading’. I. ‘AN ÆOLIAN HARP’: VIBRATING WIRES AND SOUND-READING IN AMERICA Probably because of the particular device it originally denoted, ‘telegraph’ encourages discourses of writing: the French word ‘télégraphe’ was first published in English in 1793 to describe Claude Chappe’s optical telegraph, a complex of manipulable armatures that could be mounted atop a series of towers to signal visually from place to place.7 Allusions to the optical telegraph found their way into poetry such as Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head (1807); William Wordsworth’s ‘Epistle to Sir George Howland Beaumont, Bart.’, (1811); Thomas Hardy’s The Dynasts (1904–1908); and others. As Lily Gurton-Wachter has noted, this French invention impacted concepts of attention in British Romanticism, which influenced American Transcendentalism.8 Perhaps because Chappe’s system was visually encoded, it was called the ‘tele-graph’ (‘tele-phone’ appeared in English 40 years later).9 As David Trotter observes, ‘Representation media attract the “-graphy” suffix’; even when a device transacts sound, it is thought of as ‘writing […] in sound’ (as in the case of ‘phono-graphy’, or sound-writing).10 ‘Tele-graphy’, then, is simply distant-writing. Yet for a sizeable portion of the population, sound was the most prominent signal of the telegraph’s presence in their everyday lives, be it in the landscape, post office, or train station. As Richard R. John asserts, ‘Prior to 1910, the telegraph had, with a few minor exceptions, remained a specialty service for an exclusive clientele of merchants, lawmakers, and journalists’.11 Telegrams were relatively rare, though often momentous, especially during the Civil War. But telegraphy’s sound was impossible to ignore because its whistling wires and clicking instruments were new and multiplying. While the overhead wires were an incongruous addition to the countryside, American intellectuals nevertheless transfigured them as transcendental symbols ripe for poetic treatment. In an 1851 journal entry, Henry David Thoreau wrote, ‘I heard the telegraph wire vibrating like an Æolian Harp. […] It told me by the faintest imaginable strain […] that there were higher[,] infinitely higher[,] planes of life’.12 Thoreau was not alone in comparing the wire to an æolian harp, a potent Romantic symbol for poetry.13 Many Americans could not help but notice the odd humming of the wires, as this poet did in the Boston Journal in 1873: Over the marsh by the railroad,  The wild winds sweep today, And they touch the telegraph wires,  And a strange, weird tune they play, ’Till the air is sweet with harpings,  As of church bells far away.14 The comparison to the æolian harp was widespread enough that technicians saw fit to debunk it. Though many believed wind produced ‘soundings by direct vibration, similar to those of the Æolian harp’, one railroad officer asserted in 1869 that the vibrations were due to ‘the changes of amospheric [sic] temperature, and especially through the action of cold, as lowering of the temperature induces a shortening of the wires’, causing friction.15 Whether they thought it was the wind or the cold, American poets and telegraphers took note of the wires’ vibrations, the system’s most prominent sound outside the telegraph office. Inside the office the constant clicking of telegraphic instruments was peculiar and loud enough to be heard through such cacophonies as ‘the whirr of the wheels, the breaking of the weight cord and the howl caused by damaged toes’.16 Transcribing messages by listening to dots and dashes clicking from the receiver, instead of by reading them on a printed strip of paper, was known as ‘sound-reading’ or ‘acoustic telegraphy’. Sound-reading is one type of what Jonathan Sterne calls ‘audile technique’, ‘a set of practices of listening […] that encouraged the coding and rationalization of what was heard’, or what Pierre Bourdieu calls ‘habitus’, ‘a feel for the game’.17 Before it spread globally, sound-reading became ‘more and more distinctly what it now is, the American system’, even though it was sown into the foundations of electrified telegraphy generally.18 In 1753, ‘C. M.’ (purportedly Charles Morrison writing from Renfrew)19 proposed long-distance communication using ‘electric power […] propagated along a small wire’ in The Scots Magazine. He imagined a version of electric telegraphy operating on sound by suspending bells ‘gradually decreasing in size from the bell A to Z […] and the electrical spark, breaking on bells of different size, will inform his correspondent by the sound’.20 We have no verified evidence that C. M. executed this specific proposal, but his system’s mechanics provided the foundation for all electric telegraphy that followed. As Richard Menke observes, ‘the electric telegraph was invented again and again’, such that William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone in Britain and Samuel F. B. Morse and Alfred Vail in America, were effectively ‘the last to invent the electric telegraph’.21 Morse took it for granted that sound would be a telegraphic medium: his 1840 patent for the telegraph and Morse code calls his system a ‘new application and effect of electro-magnetism in producing sounds and signs, or either’.22 For many years Morse ‘“vigorously interdicted” the sound system […] to the extent of passing a law forbidding its use’ because he felt printouts were necessary for recordkeeping.23 Nevertheless, it became apparent not only that sound-reading was more accurate and efficient, it was instinctive and could not be suppressed among telegraphers. ‘From the very first use of a Morse instrument, signals and phrases by sound were familiar to the ear’, and soon after the aptly named John J. Speed Jr. tested sound-reading’s efficiency on the Buffalo-Cleveland line in 1847, the practice was permitted.24 Sound-reading became prominent in the Midwest, where Kentucky’s James Francis Leonard purportedly became the ‘first practical sound-reader’ and Andrew Carnegie ‘the third on earth who learned to take a message by ear’.25 Telegraphers’ proclivity toward sound-reading was insistent. This ‘reading’ and its accompanying audile technique led to a reorientation of telegraphy around sound, culminating in an acoustic device known as the ‘sounder’. As one historian wrote in 1869, ‘On the American lines the system most commonly employed is that of an acoustic telegraph known as the “Sounder.” A continued practice with Morse apparatus leads the employés involuntarily to recognise the signals by ear, and […] they seldom or never return to the more fatiguing one of reading by sight’.26Involuntarily, as if telegraphers had no choice but to hear the telegraph. For Americans, sound was so synonymous with telegraphy that its absence was disturbing. As Reid observes of one type of mid-century telegraph apparatus that made no sound at all, ‘To the American operator accustomed to the sound of his instrument in transmitting, the silence of the home relay in transmitting was confusing and unnatural’.27 The telegraph's sound was so insistent that it became an idiolect by which telegraphers could identify each other, without visual or verbal confirmation. Because of sound-reading’s undeniable advantages, it became the preferred practice globally, quickly replacing the printing telegraph in Britain. One British historian wrote that the ‘sounder is an importation from America, where scarcely any other form of instrument is used. In 1869 there were none in England; now there are 2,000 (1883)’.28 Because of its emphasis on sound, American telegraphic practice drew upon an unlikely source of skills: poetry. II. ‘DĬNG D AU¯NG’: TELEGRAPHIC ACOUSTICS AS POETIC PRACTICE Education in poetry and poetics was increasingly central to nineteenth-century American education generally, so while it might be surprising to us that telegraphers thought of telegraphy within the context of poetry—even as poetry—it came naturally to them. Sound-reading seemed so intuitive because Americans were already trained to hear and transcribe rhythms and words in their literary education. Soon after Morse’s famous 1844 demonstration, governments and corporations recruited amateurs to learn code quickly. One telegrapher recalled how ‘[w]e were first ordered to telegraph service, Sept. 14th, 1845’, having never seen a telegraph key. They immediately commenced practicing, using their hands as keys, ‘thumping out the dots and dashes on the table […] on the bed-post […] On the cars we drummed it out on the window pane, or on the back of the seat before us’.29 They learned to sound-read through this embodied, music-like rhythm, so they instinctively tapped out a poem on the key: [O]n reaching Washington, and being placed at an instrument for the first time, we at once wrote out these very euphonious lines without hesitation: “Butcher’s meat has riz, People say it will be rizzer; But ’tiz as ’tiz, And it can’t be no ’tizzer.”30 The verse is playful doggerel, so the adjective ‘euphonious’ is partly sarcastic. Yet the word reveals that listening to rhythmical sounds defined the language of Morse code in the minds of these telegraphers. ‘At once’ and ‘without hesitation’ further reveal that the code’s rhythms were instinctive. One historian claimed that the ‘telegraph, in its inception, had identified with it men of a high order of literary attainment’ and that ‘Telegraph writers of the early days undoubtedly gained inspiration from the writings of contemporaries, such as Halleck, Bryant, Whittier, Holmes, Lowell and Saxe’.31 Indeed, Leonard, the so-called earliest practical sound-reader, would likely have encountered the first three of these poets in William H. McGuffey’s Eclectic Reader series, which was required reading for his grammar school graduation in summer 1848, just before he became a telegrapher that autumn.32 McGuffey’s reader instructs, ‘Let the teacher sometimes read aloud a lesson to his class, […] and then let him require each pupil within a given, but sufficient time, to render in writing and from recollection, an abstract of what he has read. This exercise improves the attention, [and] practises the pen’.33 It would also have trained Leonard to be an excellent sound-reader since, as one contemporary noted, ‘Telegraphing is a species of dictation’.34 McGuffey’s reader further warned pupils against eliding words during recitation, exemplified in two botched lines from an Isaac Watts hymn: ‘Lou das his thunder shout his praise | And soun dit lofty as his throne’.35 This warning would have helped Leonard further in sound-reading since it was well known that words such as ‘that’ and ‘but’, ‘get’ and ‘meet’, ‘bad’ and ‘dead’ could be confused for one another by mishearing spaces between dots and dashes, thus altering a message like ‘Father is bad’ to ‘Father is dead’, a result known as ‘hog-Morse’.36 Leonard additionally studied Samuel Kirkham’s English Grammar, editions of which contained lessons on ‘Poetry transposed’, ‘Prosody’, and ‘Versification’, and presented the macron/breve system of annotating English meter:37 As Catherine Robson has shown, such poetic training was increasingly common in American classrooms.38 So Americans instinctively applied poetics to Morse code. An 1858 article in the Atlantic Monthly, to which the Dickinsons subscribed, propounded using Morse code beyond telegraphy. Edward Everett Hale, who wrote poetry and corresponded with Dickinson in 1854, observes of Morse’s ingenious alphabet, ‘Long and short make it all,—and wherever long and short can be combined, be it in marks, sounds, sneezes, fainting-fits, canes, or children, ideas can be conveyed’.39 Boston’s church-bells, for example, could notify the fire department of burning buildings through Morse code, thus being ‘made to sound intelligibly. D au¯ng dĭng dĭng,—dĭng,—dĭng d au¯ng,—d au¯ng d au¯ng d au¯ng, and so on’.40 The use of quantitative diacritical marks here suggests the author thought of Morse code metrically, and the notation would further suggest to any American who passed primary school that Morse code was poetic (with the most erudite among them recognizing a dactyl, iamb, and molossus in the tolls above). Beyond the advantages of poetic education for telegraphic training, many commentators believed that electric telegraphy descended directly from poetry. In 1849, the year Leonard began practicing sound-reading, Scientific American published ‘The Poetry of Discovery’, which argued that inventions like the telegraph ‘are the poetry of physical science and inventors are the poets […] they only strike different lyres’. Any scientific invention is a ‘ballad or […] epic in machinery’, and many scientists and inventors are ‘disciples of Homer, and often visited the shades of Parnassus’.41 The article further asserts that electric telegraphy was first proposed by an Italian poet in the seventeenth century, a claim repeated throughout the nineteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic. Among his Prolusiones Academicæ (1617), the Jesuit Famiano Strada (1572–1649) published ‘Rationem expeditissimam absentis admonendi nullis eo missis tabellis, nullis tabellariis’, verses imitating Lucretius that detail how two sympathetic loadstones could manipulate steel needles to transmit messages long-distance. The Latin poem was known to British scholars, including Joseph Addison, who wrote of Strada’s account in The Spectator in 1711.42The Student published an English translation in heroic couplets in 1750, timing that suggests it might have inspired C. M.’s 1753 letter. The translation explains that ‘Magnesia’s […] wond’rous stone’ can be used to construct a telegraph: To this apply few slender bars of steel, Sudden new motion and new life they feel: … But each fond needle mutual motion proves, Each to the rest in sure direction moves. Thus, if at Rome thy hand the steel applies, Tho’ seas may roll between, or mountains rise, To this some sister needle will incline, Such nature’s mystic pow’r, and dark design! These sympathetic needles can turn to indicate letters around the edge of a tablet to spell words: ‘To each the motion of thy steel dispense, | Lo, letters leap obedient into sense!’43Scientific American declares that Strada’s poem did nothing short of summon the electric telegraph into being: ‘Hitherto we have been talking about inventors being poets, but here is poetry becoming invention. Strada could not have described the signalling-magnetic telegraph more faithfully, if he had lived and examined that of Wheatstone in our own day. Was not this production of Strada the prophetic poetic invention of the Magnetic Telegraph?’44 Invoking Wheatstone’s grid-like register, the author goes further than suggesting the poem inspired the telegraph, arguing that it invented and even became the telegraph. However conflated the article’s language is, intellectuals agreed that Strada’s poem marked the ‘earliest anticipation of the electric telegraph’ and made ‘a profound impression on the master-minds of the day. There are citations of this remarkable poem in many works of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’. Other poems, such as ‘Mariani Parthenii Electricorum’ (1767) and Mark Akenside’s The Pleasures of Imagination (1744), which Reid cites in his sprawling The Telegraph in America (1879), versified telegraphy too.45 As the professionalism of telegraph operation increased, instruction manuals and vocational schools emerged in droves, and telegraphers insisted that ‘Telegraphy isn’t a science, but an art’.46 To support industry growth, they erected a poetic mythos around their skills. Articles with titles like ‘The Poetry of Telegraphy’ appeared in trade journals arguing that the ‘part which sympathy and imagination play’ in telegraphy—due to transaction of personal joys and crises—constitutes a poetry that ‘lifts our vocation out of narrowness and mere mechanical labor’.47 Thus, poets continually dreamt up new forms of telegraphy, and scientists repeatedly turned to poetry for inspiration and justification. As educated American telegraphers linked telegraphy to poetry, contemporary poets such as Dickinson did likewise. III. ‘BLESSED ETHER’: WIND, STORMS, AND OTHER POETIC TROPES FOR TELEGRAPHIC ACOUSTICS Emily Dickinson might first have encountered telegraphy in literature in the Homestead’s library. Charles Dickens’s American Notes (1842) and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables (1851), for example, mention optical or electric telegraphs. Dickinson’s documented interaction with telegraphy began in 1853, the same year her father Edward went to Washington to join Congress, her brother Austin went to Harvard to become a lawyer, the train arrived in Amherst, and she shared a poem (‘On this wondrous sea’ [F3A]) in a letter to Susan Gilbert, probably for the first time. Susan, who was visiting family at the time in Manchester, New Hampshire, was Dickinson’s closest confidante, soon-to-be sister-in-law and next-door neighbour (Letters, 105, 102). Immediately following this letter, Dickinson first mentions the telegraph to Austin on 12 March: ‘I have telegraphed to Sue. Dont say anything about it in the letter you write me next, for father reads all your letters before he brings them home’ (Letters, 106). Luckily for Dickinson, telegraph lines had reached Manchester from Boston in 1850, connecting the town with western Massachusetts.48 There was no telegraph in Amherst, however, so she either telegraphed from Northampton or sent someone there on her behalf. Telegraphy came to Amherst in 1861 from Palmer to the southeast, a development spearheaded by the Dickinsons. Edward first proposed a subscription of $500 with the American Telegraph Company at a town meeting in October. By November he informed the company that Amherst had raised the necessary funds, through Austin’s ‘untiring exertions’.49 Work to raise poles started later that month along the tracks to the rail depot, which Edward had also ensured would be built in Amherst.50 The telegraph installed seems to have been a sounder: ‘Amherst can now boast of a Telegraph. The enterprise was completed on Monday last [9 December], and at 5 o’clock, P. M., the first click was heard by the curious in waiting’.51 The Dickinsons were likely among them. Because of telegraphy’s arrival, Dickinson could write to her cousin Louise Norcross on 31 December about a ‘Telegram signed by Frazer Stearns’ reporting an Amherst acquaintance’s death from a Civil War wound in Annapolis (Letters, 245). This sombre letter is Dickinson’s first use of ‘telegram’, an indication of her tech-savvy, since the term had only recently emerged in the American lexicon. In 1852, the Albany Evening Journal first proposed the new word as a replacement for ‘telegraphic dispatch, or telegraphic communication’. Indeed, Dickinson herself used ‘telegraphic despatch’ in an 1853 letter to Austin (Letters, 126). But ‘telegram’ spread like wildfire, treated as an Americanism even as the rest of the Anglophone world adopted it. In 1857, for example, the Countess of Canning wrote from Calcutta, ‘“A telegram” is a new Yankee word for a telegraphic despatch’, and British intellectuals pleaded for several years to replace the ‘lawless’ word with the rightly constructed ‘telegrapheme’.52 The evolution of this Americanism is significant not just because Dickinson’s letters track it, but because it exemplifies the kinds of phenomena and discourses that reveal telegraphic acoustics in her poetry, as we shall see. The wires arrived as Dickinson was unleashing her most prolific poetic output. After several years of producing only one poem annually, she suddenly wrote more than 40 poems in 1858, the year of the transatlantic cable, when prominent Americans published celebratory poems in periodicals the Dickinsons read. John Greenleaf Whittier, for example, published ‘The Telegraph’ in the Atlantic Monthly (October 1858), which exhorted North Americans to ‘Lean, breathless, to the white-lipped sea | And hear the voice of God!’53 Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. made his own contribution to the magazine three months later with ‘De Sauty: An Electro-Chemical Eclogue’, a humorous dialogue between an American and a Canadian that records the subsequent failure of the 1858 cable.54 Shortly after, Dickinson’s output peaked in 1863, when she wrote nearly 300 poems. In 1880, she even wrote a poem on a dismantled Western Union telegram envelope, the very material of telegraphy: ‘Glass was the Street - in Tinsel Peril’ [F1518A], an acoustic poem set in winter (perhaps because the humming of wires, or ‘Tinsel’, was most obvious then) in which the ‘Air’ is filled with ‘vibrations’ and boys’ shouting. Though she had written about 200 poems since at least 1850, she told Thomas Wentworth Higginson that she ‘made no verse – but one or two’ until the winter of 1861–1862, insinuating she felt she began writing mature poetry around the time telegraphy arrived—perhaps even because of telegraphy (Letters, 261). Dickinson took up telegraphic acoustics in her poetry less than five months after Amherst’s first telegram, though her metaphors can be easily overlooked. She sent a poem chiefly about the pleasures of listening to the wind to Higginson on 25 April 1862 as an exemplar of her work, but its opening stanza uses telegraphic acoustics as a foil: Of all the Sounds despatched abroad, There’s not a Charge to me Like that old measure in the Boughs - That phraseless Melody -        [F334B] The first two lines evoke telegraphic sound-reading—‘Sounds’, ‘despatched’, ‘Charge’—to compare the sounder’s clicking to the wind’s musicality, which thrills her as music usually did. Simultaneously, the stanza alludes to wires aloft among the trees that vibrate as they transmit electrified phrases in telegrams; contrastingly, the wind’s melody is ‘phrase-less’. This wordplay is enriched in light of a Hampshire and Franklin Express article from the preceding February announcing the elimination of the ‘five cents extra charge’ for telegrams from Amherst’s ‘branch line’ because of efforts by ‘gentlemen […] in charge’, one of whom was almost certainly Dickinson’s father.55 This context helps unlock the complex comparison the opening stanza makes between a natural phenomenon and a telegraphic one, which (while Dickinson asserts that wind offers the ultimate acoustic experience) is still a thrilling ‘Charge’ to her. In addition to wind, Dickinson deploys what is perhaps the century’s most prevalent telegraphic metaphor, which was already codified by the 1860s: thunder and lightning. Especially following Benjamin Franklin’s experiments, lightning was electricity’s preeminent symbol—as Franklin proved, it is electricity. Franklin and his contemporaries thought of electricity as a kind of fluid, a model that continued into the nineteenth century even when experiments had shown it was at best an analogy. Professor of Technology George Wilson, who compared Morse code to ‘Edgar Poe’s raven—Tapping, gently rapping, | Tapping at your chamber door’, wrote in 1859 that electricity could be considered ‘analogous to an elastic fluid’.56 Holmes’s ‘De Sauty’ calls electricity the ‘stream galvanic’, depicting the telegrapher ‘Sucking in the current’ like a breast-feeding opossum. Because electricity was a fluid, current, or stream, it accrued analogies to other natural fluids, such as Dickinson’s wind, or oceans and rainstorms. Franklin’s electric fame meant that transference of tropes from one American invention to the next was immediate, as in this 1848 verse: That steed called “Lightning,” (say the Fates,) Is owned in the United States. ’Twas Franklin’s hand that caught the horse; ’Twas harnessed by Professor Morse!57 Dickinson uses the lightning trope for electricity frequently, as we shall see. But ‘thunder’ often referred to telegraphic acoustics, as well as to the importance of the system’s messages. Once sound-reading overtook printing, poets tended to focus on thunder; Whittier’s ‘The Telegraph’ and Holmes’s ‘De Sauty’, for example, explicitly invoke ‘thunder’ but not lightning. When Dickinson uses storm imagery to evince telegraphy she is therefore not inventing new and obscure metaphors but rather participating in the era’s technological parnassian. Her poem ‘Many a phrase has the English language -’ [F333A], which mulls the acoustics of English by comparing it to ‘Thunder’s Tongue’ during a rainstorm, exemplifies this register: Breaking in bright Orthography On my simple sleep - Thundering it’s Prospective - Till I stir, and weep - [F333A] The storm thunders its ‘Prospective’, forecasting the future as telegraphy and telegrams often did. Lightning is ‘Orthography’, an electric pulse that writes, just like telegraphy. ‘Breaking’, an unusual verb applied to lightning, was the term for repeatedly cutting a circuit, which allowed a telegraph to function. Three years earlier, physicist James Clerk Maxwell parodied Alfred Tennyson’s ‘The Bugle Song’ from The Princess (1847) using ‘break’ in his poem about the mirror galvanometer: ‘Break, contact, break, set the free light-spot flying; | Break, contact, rest thee, magnet, swinging, creeping, dying’.58 Altogether, Dickinson’s poem is not just celebrating the storminess of English, but telegraphy’s storminess, which was midwifing the global supremacy of ‘Saxon’ and the consolidation of British-American kinship.59 The 1858 transatlantic cable was an emblem around which this Anglophone triumphalism coalesced. The countless reports and celebrations of the cable, and her exposure to Whittier’s and Holmes’s poems, perhaps inspired Dickinson to compose her own cable poem in early 1862, since Amherst was finally integrated into the global system: The lonesome for they know not What - The Eastern Exiles - be - Who strayed beyond the Amber line Some madder Holiday - And ever since - the purple Moat They strive to climb - in vain - As Birds - that tumble from the clouds Do fumble at the strain - The Blessed Ether - taught them - Some Transatlantic Morn - When Heaven - was too common - to miss - Too sure - to dote opon!    [F326A] Ostensibly about heavenly bodies or migrating animals, the poem also figures Europe as ‘lonesome […] Eastern Exiles’ (a sarcastic inversion of New England’s colonization) who wish to connect to America’s wilds via an ‘Amber line’. While this phrase suggests the horizon, it also evokes telegraphy’s electric cables since ‘electricity’ derives from the Greek ἤλεκτρον (‘elektron’) meaning ‘amber’, because of the fossil’s ability to produce static electricity when rubbed. The second stanza portrays the Atlantic as a ‘Moat’, whose continental shelves engineers strove to climb ‘in vain’, alluding to the cable’s subsequent failure. The avian ‘strain’ connotes the cable’s acoustics, which pulse silently on the seabed but emerge chattering, clicking, vibrating at either shore—a paradox that Holmes’s poem calls ‘silent thunder’. Dickinson’s poem most echoes Whittier’s, however, where all ‘clime[s] […] shall hear the strain’ of ‘morning stars […] sing[ing] their song of old’. Whittier’s lines further connect to Dickinson’s final stanza, where the ‘Blessed Ether’ evokes his astral music, but also the hypothetical luminiferous ether thought to be electricity’s medium, drawing the two poems together via the existing cultural conflation between electricity and spiritualist or vatic utterance, which McCormack has extensively linked to telegraphy. Tellingly, this stanza marks the only instance of ‘Transatlantic’ in Dickinson’s corpus. Altogether, a poem we might not otherwise associate with telegraphy looks more like Dickinson’s customary cable poem and perhaps her earliest work about telegraphic acoustics.60 Telegraphic tropes help identify such poems, but there were unique reasons Dickinson was writing them at all. IV. ‘THEY TOOK AWAY OUR EYES -’: VISUAL IMPAIRMENT AND ACOUSTIC ENLIGHTENMENT Telegraphy’s arrival in Amherst in the 1860s coincided with Dickinson’s eyesight troubles, which necessitated extended stays in 1864–1865 for specialized care in Boston, a journey that probably exposed her further to telegraphic acoustics. Advised to keep her room dark and refrain from writing too much, Dickinson focused more on sound, as the sight-impaired often do. Within the 1862 telegraphic cluster I discussed earlier, ‘Before I got my eye put out’ [F336A] records her eye trouble by listing the natural phenomena she wishes she could see. The fourth stanza marshals telegraphic language she has used before: The Motions of The Dipping Birds - The Morning’s Amber Road - For mine - to look at when I liked - The News would strike me dead -    [F336A] The ‘Morning’s Amber Road’ evokes the sunrise or golden light upon Main Street, but the variant ‘Lightning’s jointed Road’ suggests Dickinson also thinks of telegraph lines bringing ‘News’ to Amherst. The letter she sent with this poem to Higginson reinforces this interpretation since it employs her existing idioms of telegraphic acoustics: ‘I can see Orthography – but the Ignorance out of sight – is my Preceptor’s charge –’ (Letters, 271).61 Dickinson infuses the poem with telegraphy perhaps because she laments the distance between her and her new mentor. She writes, ‘Then there’s a noiseless noise in the Orchard – that I let persons hear – You told me in one letter, you could not come to see me, “now”’ (Letters, 271). ‘Noiseless noise’ mimics Holmes’s ‘silent thunder’, and its parataxis with the ‘letter’ suggests Dickinson is thinking of the vibrating wires near the family properties, which she and Higginson could use to communicate ‘now’. Dickinson’s coupling of visual impairment with telegraphic acoustics intensified the following year with more explicit allusions to telegraphy. Reminiscent of Milton’s revelation that while some ‘post o’er land and ocean without rest: | They also serve who only stand and wait’, Dickinson’s ‘They put Us far apart -’ [F708A] segregates two lovers ‘As separate as Sea’ with ‘stapled feet’.62 But unlike Milton, Dickinson can avail herself of telegraphic metaphor, in which sound-reading permits communication, despite blindness: They took away our eyes - They thwarted Us with Guns - “I see Thee” Each responded straight Through Telegraphic Signs - [F708A] As McCormack notes, the ‘Telegraphic Signs’ used by the two lovers must be acoustic because they have been blinded.63 At the same time, the telegram is ‘I see Thee’ (nodding to Shakespeare’s forty-third sonnet),64 which implies a spiritual connection between them and the visual writing that sound-reading ultimately becomes.65 Their recourse to telegraphic acoustics finally renders communication so immediate that telegraphy becomes telepathy—an arc recalling Jane Eyre (1847), which Dickinson read in 1849 (Letters, 28). The novel’s most (in)famous scene depicts Jane stirred by a feeling ‘not like an electric shock; but it was quite as sharp, as strange, as startling’, summoning ‘eye and ear’: ‘I saw nothing: but I heard a voice’ crying, ‘“Jane! Jane! Jane!”’ She recognizes the voice as Rochester’s and his long-distance sounding as ‘the work of nature’.66 From the moment the novel was published, reviewers compared the scene to telegraphy. One 1848 review, published while Americans were developing sound-reading, observed that ‘the voice has not got a telegraphic communication direct to the ear at fifty miles distance, although intelligence by the magnetic wire may travel hundreds and thousands “in no time.” In this case it is not time, but sound, that makes the difference’.67 Indeed, sound makes the difference in ‘They put Us far apart -’ for a poet whose eyesight is worsening, just as Rochester is stricken blind. Telegraphy conjoined with poor eyesight coloured Dickinson’s impression of the novel for the rest of her life. About A. Mary F. Robinson’s biography of Emily Brontë, she wrote to Mrs J. G. Holland in 1883, ‘I wish the dear Eyes would so far relent as to let you read “Emily Bronte” – more electric far than anything since “Jane Eyre”’ (Letters, 822). Like this letter, Dickinson’s rendering of ‘Telegraphic Signs’ shrinks the global network, imagined by Whittier, Holmes, and others, down to just two individuals. It is an intensely private, rather than immensely public, iteration of telegraphic acoustics. In contrast to ‘straight’ responses and ‘perjury’ in ‘They put Us far apart -’, by 1872 Dickinson expressed a different attitude toward immediate communication in one of her most famous poems, upon which telegraphic acoustics offer new perspective: Tell all the truth but tell it slant - Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth’s superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind -       [F1263A] While the poem rebukes brutal immediacy, it does so by repurposing the language of telegraphy to champion gradualness, as if to defang the technology. Given links Dickinson has previously made with going ‘blind’, it is unsurprising to find ‘Circuit’ and ‘Lightning’ here, two eminently telegraphic terms. ‘Circuit’ implies circuitousness and the electric circuit required for telegraphy’s ‘Success’, but also the global network through which information circulates, a ‘Success[-ion]’ of poles, wires, and operators relaying messages around the world. The second stanza ‘De-light[s]’ truth, transmuting the dazzling sight of ‘Lightning’ into the gradual sound of enlightenment. The truth of telegraphy’s electromagnetic physics was bewildering to laypeople throughout the nineteenth century and was often explained to them by scientists in periodicals and lectures as if they were ‘Children’. ‘Slant’ might also imply an alternative reading of Dickinson’s dashes: McCormack observes these marks are, strictly speaking, ‘lines pointing up and down at various angles—impossible to replicate in typescript’, as well as being part of a ‘standard elocutionary symbol system’ used in ‘oral reading’.68 But this poem also uses sound-reading’s gradualness (McCormack says messages ‘staggered’ from telegraphs, word by word) as a model for avoiding a telegram’s ‘superb surprise’. That is, while visual similarity between Dickinson’s dashes and Morse code is apparent, her dashes are more similar to the ones telegraphers use to mark silence when transcribing telegrams, a pause in transmission just like the ‘slant’ terminating this poem’s first line, which creates ‘Success[-ion]’ in leading to the word itself. In May 1862, Dickinson wrote to Louise Norcross about the awful surprise of Lamira Norcross’s death: ‘[Y]ou must tell us all you know about dear Myra’s going, so sudden, and shocking to us all, we are only bewildered and cannot believe the telegrams. I want so much to see you, and ask you what it means’ (Letters, 263). News of Lamira’s death is ‘sudden’, ‘shocking’, and ‘bewilder[ing]’ not just because it is untimely, but because Dickinson can see telegrams and not ‘see you’. She begs for ‘explanation kind’ yet possesses nothing but terse ‘telegraphese’. Her scepticism surrounding telegraphy stemmed from these often devastating messages, the recto to the ability of telegraphic acoustics to overcome blindness. V. ‘WHEN HE SINGETH’: THE INCLUSION AND EXCLUSION OF TELEGRAPHIC ACOUSTICS In 1865, Dickinson explored technological suddenness in a poem whose metaphor, scholars have argued, is photography. But telegraphy’s idiom is just as strong here, revealing the poem’s acoustic commentary: The Soul’s distinct connection With immortality Is best disclosed by Danger Or quick Calamity - As Lightning on a Landscape Exhibits Sheets of Place - Not yet suspected - but for Flash - And Click - and Suddenness.     [F901A] Werner identifies the second stanza with photography: ‘Between the metallic shifting of the camera’s plates—the “Click” and “Flash” of “Suddenness”—we feel the frozen rush of time’.69 Eliza Richards links the poem to Mathew Brady’s Civil War photography and Holmes’s 1859 declaration that photography’s triumph is ‘the divorce of form and substance’.70 But ‘Flash’ and ‘Click’ were the parlance of telegraphic acoustics in periodicals and poetry by this time, which Dickinson emphasizes here by separating them with telegraphic dashes, such that the poem’s sensual experience is at least synaesthetic. One 1848 article likened the telegraph’s ‘tic, tic, tic’ to the ‘clicking of the escapement wheels of the universe’ and predicted that humans would soon ‘flash from point to point in polar magnetic chariots’.71 An 1851 poem declared, ‘The Telegraph is chattering, boys! […] Clicking and chattering’,72 and an 1873 quatrain in Scribner’s Monthly even attributed ‘lightning’ to telegraphy in contradistinction to photography: What more, presumptuous mortals, will you dare?  See Franklin seize the Clouds, their bolts to bury; The Sun assigns his pencil to Daguerre,  And Morse the lightning makes his secretary!73 In Dickinson’s poem, the variant ‘Developes’ for ‘Exhibits’ confirms she has photography in mind, but she also opts for ‘Click’ over ‘Bolt’, which emphasizes sound-reading. The result is a reconsideration of the poem’s technological complex: it is as much about telegraphy’s ‘Suddenness’, which equally pierced Americans far from Civil War battlefronts, as about photography’s. Given its speed and expense, telegraphy was prone to deliver dire news generally. Edward’s imminent death in 1874, for example, perhaps the greatest shock of Dickinson’s life, appears to have been announced suddenly by telegram: ‘We were eating our supper the fifteenth of June, and Austin came in. He had a despatch in his hand, and I saw by his face we were all lost, though I didn’t know how’ (Letters, 414).74 The telegram is so sudden it effaces Dickinson’s identity, as she wrote dizzily afterward, ‘I cannot recall myself’. Dickinson recognized early on this peril posed by telegraphic acoustics. The first poem that explicitly refers to telegraphy emphasizes that she thinks of telegraphy’s shock in acoustic terms: The Future never spoke - Nor will he like the Dumb Reveal by sign a Syllable Of his profound To Come - But when the News be ripe Presents it in the Act - Forestalling Preparation - Escape - or Substitute - Indifferent to him The Dower - as the Doom - His Office but to execute Fate’s Telegram - to Him -   [F638B] The Future is discourteous, presenting ‘News’ of ‘Doom’ suddenly, when it is too late for protection, in a temporal compression that is the opposite of succession or gradualness.75 A telegrapher himself, the Future has become so integrated with the network that the content of his messages no longer matters, and he becomes one of Fredric Jameson’s ‘vanishing mediators’. Or, as one 1884 guide about amateur sound-readers simply put it, ‘A telegraphist has no right to think’.76 The poem’s opening stanza places this telegraphic model within broader acoustics movements too. American Sign Language, for example, had been developed in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1817. And in 1849, Melville Bell foreshadowed his system of ‘visible speech’, which he subsequently developed and brought to the Americas.77 His son Alexander Graham Bell later patented the telephone in 1876 after tinkering with telegraphy for years and founded the Atlantic Telegraph and Telephone Company in 1885, just a year before Dickinson died. Akin to her meditations on visual impairment, the poem is Dickinson’s consideration of acoustic impairment within the telegraphic world. Dickinson depicts the shock of telegraphy as impairment not just because it causes injury but because it reveals the system’s fundamental power differential, or what Wenzlhuemer calls ‘the asymmetrical pattern of the nineteenth-century telecommunications network in both structure and actual information flow’.78 Contrary to poets who embraced telegraphy’s promise of global brotherhood, Dickinson’s experiences demonstrated that networks by definition exclude some individuals in the process of including others: operators are privy to sound-reading, customers are not; scientists understand electromagnetism, laypeople do not; towns with telegraphs became network nodes, towns without them do not. While some poems figure shock as impairment, the following 1863 poem figures network exclusivity as acoustic malfunction: The Lightning playeth - all the while - But when He singeth - then - Ourselves are conscious He exist - And we approach Him - stern - With Insulators - and a Glove - Whose short - sepulchral Bass Alarms us - tho’ His Yellow feet May pass - and counterpass - Opon the Ropes - above our Head - Continual - with the News - Nor We so much as check our speech - Nor stop to cross Ourselves -       [F595A] People ignore the news passing along the vibrating ‘Ropes’, which hang like ‘sepulchral’ nooses above their heads, because they are outside the network, not directly participating in it: without specialist knowledge of sound-reading or the wire’s ‘Bass’, sound is perceived as malfunction. Indeed, the peculiar adjective ‘short’ again suggests Dickinson knew that wires grew louder when cold temperatures shortened them. The metaphor of electricity as tightrope walker implies that telegraphy mystifies those below who do not share the expertise. In transit, telegraphy is mere noise to the patrons it serves. As Bernhard Siegert writes, ‘Whether something is noise or message depends on whether the observer is located on the same level as the communication system (for instance, as a receiver), or on a higher level, as an observer of the entire system’.79 The individual is forced to situate herself as either inside or outside the system, as either participant or observer. The single word ‘singeth’, which harkens to oral and musical cultures of Dickinson’s day, draws attention to this predicament of telegraphic acoustics. Dickinson uses this archaic verb only one other time, in her first extant poem, ‘Awake ye muses nine, sing me a strain divine’ [F1A] of 1850, which is not representative of her mature work.80 Her use of ‘singeth’ above, however, deliberately leaves open whether we should read the word as ‘sing-eth’ (‘sings’) or ‘singe-eth’ (‘singes’). ‘Sings’ invokes the telegraphic trope of the ‘singing wire’, while ‘singes’ denotes sparks that could fly from wires and burn people below. One word is aural, the other is visual, and they combine in the single homograph ‘singeth’, which thus becomes a locus of sound- and sight-reading, a synaesthetic experience similar to the one in ‘The Soul’s distinct connection’. Moreover, the word compels readerly recognition of synaesthetic experience: the ambiguity of ‘singeth’ obtains only while reading visually; if the poem is vocalized, the reader must pronounce the homograph as either ‘sing-eth’ or ‘singe-eth’, thus destroying one possibility for the listener. In the same way, the dashes in this line recall Morse code’s singing, but an oral reading silences them in favour of a pause (‘then’), also represented with a dash in telegraphers’ transcriptions. In both cases, visual reading ambiguates, aural reading disambiguates. The act of choosing aural or visual reading of this poem highlights exclusion produced by sound-reading, even as it rends that technique. In contrast to Sharon Cameron’s ‘choosing not choosing’, reciters are forced to exclude and diminish the homograph’s richness, thereby reproducing anguish caused by seeing telegraphic infrastructure but being excluded from its expertise. As the poem suggests, ‘we’ are all implicated in the network, whether inside or outside it. Telegraphy’s inclusion/exclusion paradigm raises the question: should one want to be included? Is integration desirable? While the rapturous answer from poets such as Whittier and Holmes was ‘yes’, there were dissenting voices. Though Thoreau transfigured telegraph wires as an æolian harp, in Walden he grouses that Maine and Texas might have ‘nothing important to communicate’, despite telegraphers’ eagerness to connect them. His compatriots want to install a transatlantic cable, ‘but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough’. Is our ultimate objective, Thoreau asks, merely ‘to talk fast and not to talk sensibly’?81 He diagnoses what Jean Baudrillard calls ‘a whole pornography of information and communication […] circuits and networks’.82 This pornography is a fetishization of communication where participation in the network, and constructing ever-sprawling infrastructure to prop it up, become ends in themselves. Dickinson recognizes telegraphy’s tendency toward triviality and the danger of networks’ becoming pornographic. Telegrams could deliver grandiose news of life or death, but those reprinted in newspapers (most people’s contact with daily telegrams) often circulated quotidian updates about the stock market and weather much of the time: Myself can read the Telegrams A Letter chief to me The Stock’s advance and retrogade And what the Markets say The Weather - how the Rains In Counties have begun. ’Tis News as null as nothing, But sweeter so, than none.      [F1049A] Hochfelder confirms that much mid-century telegram ‘news’, from locations like New York, consisted of ‘market reports’ and ‘were of little literary value’.83 Dickinson could enjoy such connectivity with the outside world while simultaneously admitting ‘’Tis News as null as nothing’. Her poem’s language, however, suggests an insight deeper than triviality because of its telegraphic idiom: Dickinson’s celestial and meteorological terminology insinuates telegraphy’s emergent information flow. Augmenting entrenched telegraphic tropes of divine mystery and storminess, she emphasizes continuous planetary movement and rainfall streaming from the heavens. N. Katherine Hayles, Menke, Hochfelder, and Wenzlhuemer note how nineteenth-century ‘hydraulic and fluvial language’ surrounding electricity helped reconceptualize knowledge, from discrete facts to information ‘flow’, a transformation that helped turn the industrial world into the modern one.84 As ‘Myself can read the Telegrams’ suggests, Dickinson detected how ambivalent this transformation could be. VI. ‘EVERY MESH’: TRANSPORTATION, COMMUNICATION, INFORMATION James W. Carey argues that telegraphy’s most important technical achievement was that ‘[i]t permitted for the first time the effective separation of communication from transportation’ in independent flows and rates of flow.85 One of Dickinson’s most peculiar words, however, leads to an integration of telegraphy and locomotion through acoustics. ‘Boanerges’ in ‘I like to see it lap the Miles -’ [F383A] was also part of the telegraphic parnassian, introducing telegraphy into a poem ostensibly about the train. The poem follows the train as it proceeds to lap miles, lick valleys, stop, feed, And neigh like Boanerges - Then - prompter than a Star Stop - docile and omnipotent At it’s own stable door - [F383A] Such imagery has usually been interpreted as Dickinson’s rendition of the ‘iron horse’ trope, infused with Christ’s Nativity, but as we have seen, electricity was also figured as a ‘steed’ to be ‘caught’ and ‘harnessed’. The train blasts its steam like ‘Boanerges’, a biblical term meaning ‘sons of thunder’. Holmes uses the term in ‘De Sauty’, calling the transatlantic telegrapher ‘Whispering Boanerges, son of silent thunder, | Holding talk with nations’ at Newfoundland’s terminus. Amherst’s wires—indeed, most American telegraph wires—hugged railroads because of what Wenzlhuemer calls ‘path-dependence’: the locomotive’s right-of-way to flow through geographic jurisdictions provided automatic routes for telegraph lines.86 We should therefore imagine the electric steed stepping and crawling amid the landscape as much as the iron horse.87 The ‘Complaining’ in ‘horrid - hooting stanza -’ is as much telegraphic acoustics as locomotive exhaust, especially since Dickinson’s variant lines, ‘I like to hear it lap the Miles -’ and ‘To fit it’s Ribs -’, suggest listening to the wires vibrating between their poles. And as Stephen Kern notes, while railroad companies initiated uniform time, telegraphy catalysed its codification, which allowed telegrams, as much as trains, to arrive ‘prompter than a star’—or ‘punctual as’ one, a variant suggesting telegraphy’s dot (‘punctum’).88 Communication and transportation were not so much separated as coevolving in new and unforeseen ways. Juxtaposition between the triviality of some Dickinson poems and the doom of others shows that connectivity—whether through transportation or communication—is risky. One predicament of the network is that we cannot know what news will be sent, or where, when, and to whom we will be connected. Any node of the network can be accessed by any other node at any time, making all nodes vulnerable and simultaneously volitional, immediate to one another and distant, accessible and obscured. Another 1863 poem explores this realization and makes it cosmic: I had not minded - Walls - Were Universe - one Rock - And far I heard his silver Call The other side the Block - I’d tunnel - till my Groove Pushed sudden thro’ to his - Then my face take her Recompense - The looking in his Eyes - But ’tis a single Hair - A filament - a law - A Cobweb - wove in Adamant - A Battlement - of Straw - A limit like the Vail Unto the Lady’s face - But every Mesh - a Citadel - And Dragons - in the Crease -     [F554A] The opening stanza alludes to the geographic fact that the ‘silver Call’ of Amherst’s telegraph could be heard about a ‘Block’ away from the Homestead, just beyond some intervening ‘Walls’. These physical circumstances lead Dickinson to contemplate metaphysical ones. If the universe were well-defined (‘one Rock’) and calling from beyond a solid barrier (‘Block’) separating the speaker from everyone else, there would be no epistemic problem: she would distinctly hear the universe call and answer by penetrating the barrier, just as railroad engineers ‘tunnel’ through mountains. But that is not the nature of the universe, now that telegraph networks have redefined ‘contact’. Telegraphy’s wire (‘a single Hair - | A filament’) has covered the globe in a ‘Cobweb - wove in Adamant’, a communication network at once permeable and impermeable.89 The network is a ‘limit like the Vail | Unto a Lady’s face -’ because it simultaneously connects you with other people, yet acts as a membrane reminding you of your separation from them.90 This ‘Mesh’, while an unbreakable ‘Citadel’ fortifying global connection, also constitutes a porosity that cannot keep dragons at bay, all-encompassing as the network increasingly grows. As Baudrillard puts it, ‘We are no longer a part of the drama of alienation; we live in the ecstasy of communication. And this ecstasy is obscene’.91 The poem asks whether we should indulge in that ecstasy fully; alienate ourselves by erecting walls between the network and us; or permit a ‘Mesh’, which is something in between. Unlike other poems, this one struggles to describe the network as network because it is a newly emergent property of telegraphy. Commentators began settling on ‘network’ to describe telecommunications only around the 1880s. ‘Hair’, ‘filament’, ‘Cobweb’, ‘Vail’, ‘Mesh’ are thus Dickinson’s attempts to contribute a term for this phenomenon. Such words were already within the feminine, domestic vocabulary she often used, but these metaphors also conversed with larger evolving discourses. For example, Charles Dickens invoked Wheatstone’s distinctive dial in an 1865 speech, describing newspapers as that ‘which gathers up the stitches of the electric needle, and scatters them over the land’.92 And in 1881, Maxwell described the wire as a ‘thread’ and the network as a ‘mesh’.93 Moreover, the copper wire that Alfred Vail used in his early experiments with telegraphy was ‘milliner’s wire, such as was used to give outline to the sky-scraper bonnets of the day’.94 Loeffelholz argues that Dickinson’s ‘The Spirit lasts - but in what mode -’ [F1627B], another ‘Adamant’ poem, proclaims that ‘poetry depends utterly on its material medium without being reducible to it’.95 Similarly, ‘I had not minded - Walls -’ proclaims the network is not reducible to its material medium, and the poem gropes for new vocabulary to capture that idea. Whatever the terms, intellectuals like Dickinson sensed that networks posed new synergies beyond the sums of their parts. The 1875 poem ‘How News must feel when travelling’ [F1379A] posits telegraphy’s potentially vast consequences by entertaining what it would feel like to be the news, part of the continuous global information flow, a fluidity highlighted by invoking locomotive ‘freight’ and reinforced by the absence of Dickinson’s idiosyncratic dashes. But the final stanza is most significant and perplexing, with its acoustic ‘tell[ing]’: What News will do when every Man Shall comprehend as one And not in all the Universe A thing to tell remain?        [F1379A] Telegraphic triumphalism would interpret this final stanza as presaging a utopian future. As Carey puts it, the Enlightenment insisted ‘[p]eople were people—everywhere the same. Communication was the engine that powered this ideal’. It would be easy, and coherent, to imagine Dickinson—an American bourgeois—endorsing this view, especially since the ‘rhetoric of the electrical sublime [was] a central tenet of middle-class ideology’.96 By extension, such an interpretation would neatly corroborate Dickinson’s image as lyric poet par excellence, a status debated by McCormack, Jackson, Jonathan Culler, and others.97 This is not, however, the only consequence of the final stanza. In addition to predicting utopia, this stanza also predicts informational apocalypse: if news diffuses telegraphically till the universe achieves total homogeneity, then quite literally nothing can be vocalized, nothing can be done. Like propagating sound waves, the transaction of news requires a differential: the sender must possess information the receiver lacks. Without this differential, all communication would be merely phatic since there would be not ‘A thing to tell’. This poem, then, already recognizes a basic paradigm behind what will eventually become one of the twentieth century’s most significant mathematical fields: information theory. In 1924, Bell Laboratories engineer Harry Nyquist published the seminal work, Certain Factors Affecting Telegraph Speed, which would inspire Claude Shannon and others to develop information theory. Among other achievements, information theory has impacted natural language processing, cryptography, cybernetics, and data compression, which has produced compact discs, mobile phones, and the internet. Central to information theory is the concept of entropy, which physicists such as Maxwell, Rudolph Clausius, Ludwig Boltzmann, and others were deriving from thermodynamics during Dickinson’s lifetime. Among them were Yale physicist Josiah Willard Gibbs, who published his first major work in 1873, two years before Dickinson’s poem, and who was descended from one Rev. Jonathan Dickinson, the co-founder and first president of Princeton University. My point in narrating entropy’s conceptual development and its offspring, information theory, is not to propose that Dickinson was aware of these contemporary scientific developments (though this is possible), nor that her poetry directly influenced these theories (this is impossible), but rather to show that her thinking was fully participating in much larger intellectual trends, which for her were made most obvious by telegraphic acoustics. VII. CODA: ‘CALLED BACK’ AND THE ‘SPEAKING TELEGRAPH’ Telephones—the progeny of telegraphic acoustics—were first installed in western Massachusetts as early as 1877, and by 1880 the Western Massachusetts Telephone Company had set up its first exchange in Northampton. Poles were erected and phone lines run into Amherst along Amity Street across the common’s north side. Amherst House, two stores, and the rail depot had telephones; the first call from Amherst was made in December 1882. By autumn 1885, however, Amherst disconnected its phones because of a rate increase, and telephony would not return until 1895, after Dickinson had been gone for nearly a decade.98 Though the telephone was disconnected before Dickinson’s death, its infrastructure remained a feature of the landscape.99 As with her telegraphy poems, a cluster of telephony poems emerges in 1884–1885 that reinvigorates the fluidity of sound, electricity, and water. One speaks of an ‘electric Oar’, another of ‘Declaiming Waters’, another of the ‘recallless sea’, and still another declares, ‘We send the wave to find the wave, | An errand so divine | The messenger enamored too | Forgetting to return’.100 Among these poems, the most significant came in 1884, which begins: The farthest Thunder that I heard Was nearer than the Sky And rumbles still, though torrid Noons Have lain their Missiles by - The Lightning that preceded it Struck no one but myself - But I would not exchange the Bolt For all the rest of Life -         [F1665B]101 Dickinson again identifies ‘Electricity’ with storminess, in this poem a metaphor for intellectual revelation, but the poem might also figure such revelation in telephonic terms. Calls could be made at least as far as Springfield, some 20 miles away, rendering the ‘farthest Thunder’ that could be heard ‘nearer than the Sky’, not least because Amherst’s weather reports came by telephone.102 In this context, the ‘Lightning that preceded it’ indicates telegraphy, telephony’s forerunner, especially since ‘Flash’ is a variant for ‘Bolt’. But the thunder’s ‘clamor’ here has evolved from telegraphy’s acoustics to the actual voice transmissions of the telephone, which was known as the ‘speaking telegraph’ and perceived as telegraphy’s consummation rather than a distinct technology. Indeed, in this late poem Dickinson seems to use telegraphy to finally sum up all thought as ‘A Crash without a Sound’. What could be a more supreme imbrication of intellectual revelation with telegraphic acoustics? The telegraphic/telephonic interpretation of this poem is reinforced by ‘The Jay his Castanet has struck’ [F1670A] and ‘“Red Sea,” indeed! Talk not to me’ [F1681A], which soon followed. The former poem, about autumn’s transition to winter, closes with, ‘The Cricket drops a sable line’. ‘Drop a line’ had connoted mailing a letter in America at least since 1769, and Dickinson nudges the colloquialism toward the contemporary valence of telephoning by alluding to the new phone lines overhead.103 The latter poem uses the Exodus saga ostensibly to describe her unspecified ‘Navy’, but ‘Talk’, ‘Line’, and ‘marine’ suggest telegraphy/telephony are at play, specifically a comparison between the transatlantic cable ‘in the West’ and a submarine cable system operational since 1870 in the Red Sea, which was defective throughout 1882 for various reasons.104 Whatever the case, whereas ‘The Eye inquires with a sigh | That Earth sh’d be so big -’, the ‘Line’ uses the ‘divine’ properties of acoustic technology to overcome distance. Dickinson seems never to have explicitly referred to the telephone in her extant writings, and it is unlikely she ever used one. Nevertheless, Amherst’s system was unavoidable because of its infrastructure and newspaper coverage. Near the end of her life a new telephonic phrase emerged that would have posthumous consequences for her poetry. In 1885, Dickinson (and much of Amherst) was reading Hugh Conway’s romance novel Called Back (1883). In one passage the protagonist speaks of the ‘newly-opened telegraph’ in Tobolsk, Russia, alluding to the telegraph lines that were ultimately to run through the Bering Strait, across Siberia, and on to Tobolsk and St Petersburg, to be completed in late 1867.105 At least one reporter declared that these lines would accomplish the ‘electric girdle […] spun round the earth’ had they not been abandoned that year, at last fulfilling the prophecy of Shakespeare’s Puck, often repeated among telegraphy enthusiasts.106 Scholars have noted that Called Back, perhaps the last novel Dickinson read, was important for several reasons. In what was probably her last letter, she wrote to the Norcrosses in 1886 only ‘Little Cousins, Called back. Emily’ (Letters, 1046). Some time after her death on 15 May and her burial in Amherst cemetery, Dickinson’s niece had her headstone inscribed with ‘CALLED BACK’.107 Most importantly from a literary perspective, Susan had Dickinson’s 1860 poem, ‘Just lost, when I was saved!’ [F132A], published in The Independent in 1891, with the title ‘Called Back’. The poem describes a near-death experience, wherein the speaker compares returning from the dead to being an adventurous sailor returning with exotic news. As I have shown, Dickinson wrote the poem when she was actively contemplating and participating in the telegraphic network. The first stanza’s ‘disappointed tide’ and unusual verb ‘girt’ use the girdle trope in comparing resurrection to the disappointment felt when the long-sought transatlantic cable promptly broke, setting up further telegraphic allusions in the second stanza:108 Therefore, as one returned, I feel, Odd secrets of “the Line” to tell! Some sailor skirting novel shores! Some pale “reporter” from the awful doors Before the Seal!             [F132]109 Dickinson imagines herself a ‘reporter’ of news from ‘novel shores’ telling ‘secrets of “the Line”’ (the same conflation of ship and telegraph terminology in the Red Sea poem), longing for things by ‘ear unheard’. Susan might have sensed telegraphic valences in this poem, since she had ‘Through the strait pass of suffering’ [F187A] of 1861 published beneath it, which concludes with the magnetic lines, ‘The needle to the North degree, | Wades so, through Polar air’.110 Giving ‘Just lost, when I was saved!’ the title ‘Called Back’ in 1891 updates Dickinson’s telegraphic acoustics for telephony: around the 1880s, ‘call’ and ‘call back’ became phrases to describe telephonic exchange.111 ‘Calling’ had long meant vocally hailing someone or visiting someone at home, which is how Dickinson used it, but the verb’s connotation was already changing. And the utility poles and wires associated with telephony, which had largely been absent along the length of Main Street, suddenly sprang up in a line opposite the Evergreens just before Dickinson's poem was given the title ‘Called Back’. Even if Susan did not interpret the poem telephonically, readers of The Independent could have—and the poem’s language would withstand this interpretation. Moreover, however much Conway’s novel and Dickinson’s final letter influenced Susan’s title, the telephonic valence of ‘called back’ ultimately overtook the meanings it had for the Dickinsons. The result is that if we see the phrase on Dickinson's headstone today, we might think of the telephone for an instant and smile at how incongruous it seems to associate her with such acoustic technology. In reality, it turns out we might not be too far off. Open in new tabDownload slide Top: ‘View east on Main Street in Amherst’ (c. 1889) by John L. Lovell. Bottom: ‘View east down Main Street in Amherst’ showing new utility poles (c. 1890) by John L. Lovell, published by E.R. Clark & Co., Amherst, MA. The Evergreens sits across the street from the First Congregational Church, whose steeple can be seen in the background of both photographs. Courtesy of The Jones Library, Inc., Amherst, MA. Open in new tabDownload slide Top: ‘View east on Main Street in Amherst’ (c. 1889) by John L. Lovell. Bottom: ‘View east down Main Street in Amherst’ showing new utility poles (c. 1890) by John L. Lovell, published by E.R. Clark & Co., Amherst, MA. The Evergreens sits across the street from the First Congregational Church, whose steeple can be seen in the background of both photographs. Courtesy of The Jones Library, Inc., Amherst, MA. Acknowledgement Special thanks to the National Museum of American History and Carlene Stephens for hosting my Smithsonian Predoctoral Fellowship; to the Emily Dickinson International Society for the Graduate Student Fellowship; to the curators at Amherst College Archives & Special Collections, Jones Library, Houghton Library, and Emily Dickinson Museum; and to Jerusha McCormack, Richard Menke, Phoebe Putnam, Roland Greene, Sianne Ngai, Claire Jarvis, Jean Ma, Thomas Keymer, Andrew Nash, and the anonymous RES readers. Footnotes 1 Emily Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition, ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge, MA, 1998). Unless otherwise indicated, all poems are transcribed from Franklin. Subsequent references appear in the text and are indicated by poem number. 2 See Eliza Richards and Alexandra Socarides, ‘Special Issue: Networking Dickinson’, The Emily Dickinson Journal, 23 (2014), vi–vii; Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton, NJ, 2015). 3 Jerusha Hull McCormack, ‘Domesticating Delphi: Emily Dickinson and the Electro-Magnetic Telegraph’, American Quarterly, 55 (2003), 569–601 (574). 4 David Hochfelder, The Telegraph in America, 1832–1920 (Baltimore, MD, 2012), 98. 5 Mary Loeffelholz, The Value of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge, 2016), 133. See Cristanne Miller, Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century (Amherst, MA, 2012); Virginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton, NJ, 2005); Emily Dickinson, The Gorgeous Nothings, eds. Marta Werner and Jen Bervin (New York, NY, 2013). 6 Roland Wenzlhuemer, Connecting the Nineteenth-Century World: The Telegraph and Globalization (Cambridge, 2012), 12. 7 ‘telegraph, n.’ OED Online, (pubd online December 2016) <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/198686> accessed 4 September 2018. 8 See Lily Gurton-Wachter, Watchwords: Romanticism and the Poetics of Attention (Stanford, CA, 2016), 116–19. 9 The earliest publication of ‘telephone’ in English was in 1832. ‘telephone, n.’ OED Online (pubd online December 2016) <www.oed.com/view/Entry/198718> accessed 4 September 2018. 10 David Trotter, Literature in the First Media Age: Britain Between the Wars (Cambridge, MA, 2013), 7. 11 Richard R. John, Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (Cambridge, MA, 2010), 6–7. 12 See 12 September 1851 in Henry D. Thoreau, The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, Journal, Volume 4: 1851–1852, eds. Leonard N. Neufeldt and Nancy Craig Simmons (Princeton, NJ, 1992), 75–6. 13 The Dickinsons possessed an æolian harp. See Dickinson’s 12 April 1853 letter to Austin in The Letters of Emily Dickinson, eds. Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward (Cambridge, MA, 1958), 115. Subsequent references appear in the text and are indicated by letter number. 14 This poem by Edward A. Rand was originally published in Telegraphica on 10 June 1873. See Donald McNicol, ‘Poetry of the Telegraph’, in Jeff W. Hayes, Autographs and Memoirs of the Telegraph (Adrian, MI, 1916), 9. 15 ‘Sounds of Telegraph Wires’, Journal of the Telegraph, 2 (1869), 97. 16 James D. Reid, The Telegraph in America, Its Founders, Promoters, and Noted Men (New York, NY, 1879), 191. 17 Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC, 2003), 23, 92. 18 Reid, The Telegraph, 647. 19 Sir David Brewster claimed he identified Morrison through a series of letters, the earliest of which was dated 1750. See Margaret Maria Gordon, The Home Life of Sir David Brewster (Edinburgh, 1869), 205–7. Others believed ‘C.M.’ to be ‘Charles Marshall of Paisley’. See Samuel Irenæus Prime, The Life of Samuel F. B. Morse, LL. D. (New York, NY, 1875), 259. 20 C. M., ‘An expeditious method of conveying intelligence’, Scots Magazine, 15 (1753), 73–4. 21 Richard Menke, Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems (Stanford, CA, 2008), 68–9. 22 Samuel F. B. Morse, ‘Improvement in the Mode of Communicating Information by Signals by the Application of Electro-Magnetism’, patent no. 1647 (20 June 1840), 1. 23 John Wilson Townsend, ‘The Life of James Francis Leonard: The First Practical Sound-Reader of the Morse Alphabet’, Filson Club Publications, 24 (Louisville, KY, 1909), 19. 24 Reid, The Telegraph, 647. 25 Qtd. in Townsend, ‘James Francis Leonard’, 20. 26 Robert Sabine, The History and Progress of the Electric Telegraph with Descriptions of Some of the Apparatus (London, 1869), 58. 27 Reid, The Telegraph, 659. Moses G. Farmer patented this silent relay in 1858 and 1859. 28 William Lynd, The Practical Telegraphist, and Guide to the Telegraph Service (London, 1884), 131. 29 ‘To Telegraph Learners’, Journal of the Telegraph, 3 (1870), 278. 30 ‘Learners’, 278. 31 McNicol, ‘Poetry of the Telegraph’, 1, 2. 32 The Fifth Reader contained poems by Bryant, Whittier, and Halleck. See William H. McGuffey, McGuffey’s Rhetorical Guide; or Fifth Reader of the Eclectic Series (Cincinnati, OH, 1844), 10–12. Townsend records that Leonard had to finish McGuffey’s and Kirkham’s readers to graduate (‘James Francis Leonard’, 6). 33 William H. McGuffey, The Eclectic Fourth Reader (Cincinnati, OH, 1841), xii. 34 ‘Freaks of the Telegraph’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 129 (1881), 469. 35 McGuffey, Eclectic Fourth Reader, 79. 36 ‘Freaks of the Telegraph’, 469, 476. 37 Samuel Kirkham, English Grammar (Rochester, NY, 1834), 219. 38 See Catherine Robson, Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem (Princeton, NJ, 2012). 39 [Edward Everett Hale], ‘The Dot and Line Alphabet’, Atlantic Monthly, 2 (1858), 633. 40 ‘The Dot and Line Alphabet’, 634. 41 ‘The Poetry of Discovery’, Scientific American, 5 (1849), 77. 42 Joseph Addison, ‘Letter’, Spectator, 3 (1711), 481–2. Addison reproduced his description of Strada’s explanation verbatim in paper no. 119 in The Guardian of 28 July 1713. 43 ‘Misographos’, ‘The Sympathetic Loadstones’, The Student, or, the Oxford and Cambridge Monthly Miscellany, 1 (1750), 354–6. 44 ‘The Poetry of Discovery’, 77. 45 ‘The Electric Telegraph’, Saturday Review, 6 (1858), 190. 46 ‘A School of Telegraphy’, Journal of the Telegraph, 1 (1868), 2. 47 ‘The Poetry of Telegraphy’, Journal of the Telegraph, 4 (1871), 204. 48 Reid, The Telegraph, 390. 49 ‘Telegraphic Meeting’, Hampshire and Franklin Express (25 October 1861), 2; ‘Telegraphic’, Hampshire and Franklin Express (1 November 1861), 2. 50 ‘Telegraphic’, Hampshire and Franklin Express (29 November 1861), 2. 51 ‘The Telegraph Completed’, Hampshire and Franklin Express (13 December 1861), 2. 52 ‘telegram, n.’, OED Online (pubd 1989) <http://www.oed.com/oed2/00248418> accessed 4 September 2018. 53 John Greenleaf Whittier, ‘The Telegraph’, Atlantic Monthly, 2 (1 October 1858), 591–2. 54 Oliver Wendell Holmes, ‘The Professor at the Breakfast-Table’, Atlantic Monthly, 3 (1 January 1859), 96. 55 Emphasis added. ‘The Telegraph’, Hampshire and Franklin Express (14 February 1862), 2. 56 George Wilson, The Progress of the Telegraph (Cambridge, 1859), 21–2, and George Wilson, Electricity and the Electric Telegraph together with the Chemistry of the Stars (London, 1859), 16. For more on controversies surrounding electricity's ‘fluid’ nature, see Menke, Telegraphic Realism, 75–6. 57 The verse originally appeared in the Boston Chronotype. See Charles Maybury Archer (ed.), Anecdotes of the Electric Telegraph (London, 1848), 99. 58 McNicol, ‘Poetry of the Telegraph’, 5–6. 59 See Hochfelder, The Telegraph in America, 100. 60 Christopher Hanlon conducts similar analysis of Walt Whitman’s transatlantic cable poem, ‘A Word Out of the Sea’. See Hanlon, ‘Whitman’s Atlantic Noise’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 70 (2015), 194–220. 61 Emphasis added. The letter also included ‘I cannot dance opon my Toes -’ [F381A], which contains the line, ‘Till I was out of sight in sound -’. 62 The poem was probably also inspired by Alfred Tennyson’s lines, ‘He put our lives so far apart | We cannot hear each other speak’, from lyric 82 of In Memoriam. The Homestead library edition is dated 1850. 63 McCormack, ‘Domesticating Delphi’, 573–4. 64 Henry Wells also identifies ‘What I see not, I better see -’ [F869A] with sonnet 43. See Jack L. Capps, Emily Dickinson’s Reading, 1836–1886 (Cambridge, MA, 1966), 65. 65 Many writers exploited telegraphy’s amorous potential. Perhaps the most famous example is Henry James’s In the Cage (1898). Mark Goble claims that ‘telegrams are at least a kind of love for Henry James’. Goble, Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life (New York, NY, 2010), 12. 66 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed. Margaret Smith (Oxford, 1975), 419–20. 67 ‘Jane Eyre’, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, 15 (1848), 346–8 (348). 68 McCormack, ‘Domesticating Delphi’, 576. 69 Marta L. Werner, ‘“For Flash and Click and Suddenness ‐”: Emily Dickinson and the Photography-Effect’, in Martha Nell Smith and Mary Loeffelholz (eds.), A Companion to Emily Dickinson (Oxford, 2008), 471–89 (476). 70 See Eliza Richards, ‘“Death’s Surprise, Stamped Visible”: Emily Dickinson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Civil War Photography’, American Studies, 54 (2009), 13–33. 71 Emphasis in the original. ‘Influence of the Telegraph upon Literature’, The United States Magazine, and Democratic Review, 22 (1848), 409–13 (413). 72 C. T. B., ‘Song of the Telegraph’, The Dollar Magazine, 7 (1851), 146. 73 Quoted in Benson J. Lossing, ‘Professor Morse and the Telegraph’, Scribner’s Monthly, 5 (1873), 579–89 (587). The first commercially sold book illustrated with photographs was The Pencil of Nature (1844–1846). It noted that the pictures within were ‘wholly executed by the new art of Photogenic Drawing, without any aid whatever from the artist’s pencil.’ H. Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (London, 1844), [1]. 74 Telegrams also brought news to the east coast of Helen Hunt Jackson’s death (Letters, 1009a). Jackson herself once intimated to Dickinson that telegrams caused disappointments: ‘[W]e […] took the 5 o clk train to Springfield’, she wrote, ‘but there, Mr. Jackson found a telegram from New York which compelled him to go on without stopping here – and so I came alone to Mr. Warners, which was a disappointment’ (Letters, 573b). 75 For the best explication of temporal succession in Dickinson, see Sharon Cameron, Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre (Baltimore, MD, 1979). 76 William Lynd, The Popular Guide to the Telegraph and Postal Service (London, 1884), 12–3. 77 The variant for line 3, ‘Report by Sign a Circumstance,’ makes similar allusions. In his reading edition, Franklin prints [F638B] but adopts line 3 from [F638A], as above. 78 Wenzlhuemer, Connecting the Nineteenth-Century World, 10–1. 79 Siegert is propounding ideas by Michel Serres. Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, tr. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (New York, NY, 2015), 32. 80 Line 20 reads, ‘no more he singeth mournful, her sadness she doth lose’. 81 Henry D. Thoreau, Walden, ed. Jeffrey S. Cramer (New Haven, CT, 2004), 50–1. 82 Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’, tr. John Johnston, in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (New York, NY, 1998), 130. 83 Hochfelder, The Telegraph in America, 98. 84 Menke, Telegraphic Realism, 76. See N. Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Chicago, 2012). 85 James W. Carey, Communication as Culture, Revised Edition: Essays on Media and Society (New York, NY, 2009), 157. 86 Wenzlhuemer, Connecting the Nineteenth-Century World, 11. 87 Dickinson couples telegraphy with the railroad from early on. On 9 June 1853, she writes to Austin that the people of New London, CT, are coming that day by special train to Amherst to celebrate the opening of the railroad. This is the same letter where she writes of a ‘telegraphic despatch’ (Letters, 126). 88 Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA, 1983), 11–3. 89 In ‘With Pinions of Disdain’ [F1448A] from 1877, Dickinson explores ‘filament’ as a figure for the wire, writing that ‘during it’s electric gale -’, the ‘Body’ loses its sensuality and ‘is - a soul -’; it is consequently ‘little work’ to ‘put off filaments like this | for immortality -’. For further discussion of this poem, see McCormack, ‘Domesticating Delphi’, 590. 90 While ‘vail’ is a variant spelling Dickinson uses for ‘veil’, she might also be alluding to Alfred Vail, Morse’s financier and co-experimenter. ‘Tunnel’ might allude to attempts to bury the original Washington-Baltimore wires in underground pipes before deciding to suspend them from poles. 91 Baudrillard, ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’, 130. 92 Charles Dickens, The Newsvendors’ Benevolent and Provident Institution: Speeches in behalf of the Institution, by the Late Mr. Charles Dickens, President (London, c. 1871), 10. 93 ‘mesh, n. (and adj.)’, OED Online (pubd online September 2001) <www.oed.com/view/Entry/116958> accessed 4 September 2018. 94 Franklin Leonard Pope, ‘The American Inventors of the Telegraph’, The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, 35 (April 1888), 930. 95 Loeffelholz, The Value of Emily Dickinson, 129. 96 Carey, Communication as Culture, 160. 97 Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA, 2015). 98 Daniel Lombardo, Tales of Amherst: A Look Back (Amherst, MA, 1986), 31–3. 99 There was at least one ‘very tall telephone pole’ near the First Congregational Church across Main Street from the Evergreens, for example, that might have lingered after disconnection. ‘The News About Town’, Amherst Record (3 June 1885), 4. 100 Respectively, the poems are ‘’Tis not the swaying frame we miss -’ [F1631A]; ‘Declaiming Waters none may dread -’ [F1638A and B]; ‘Still own thee - still thou art’ [F1654A]; and ‘We send the wave to find the wave’ [F1643B]. 101 ‘Noons’ in this poem might have particular telegraphic significance. Kern notes, ‘The day the railroads imposed a uniform time, November 18, 1883, was called “the day of two noons,” because at mid-day clocks had to be set back in the eastern part of each zone’ in America, a feat partly achieved through telegraphy (The Culture of Time and Space, 12). 102 Lombardo, Tales of Amherst, 32. The Amherst Record reported on 7 October 1885 that the last telephone had been removed, ‘and now the telegraph is the only communicating line we have with the outside world. This puts a vetoe [sic] on the weather signal service in Amherst’. 103 ‘drop, v.’, OED Online (pubd 1989) <www.oed.com/view/Entry/57882> accessed 4 September 2018. 104 Wenzlhuemer, Connecting the Nineteenth-Century World, 102–5, 124. 105 Hugh Conway, Called Back (Bristol, 1885), 188. 106 ‘The Asiatic Telegraphs’, New York Times, 16 (17 February 1867), 4. 107 Capps, Emily Dickinson’s Reading, 100. 108 Dickinson uses ‘girt’ only one other time, in 1860’s ‘A little over Jordan’ [F145A]. 109 I transcribe the poem as published under ‘Two Lyrics’ in The Independent—i.e. the way Susan understood it. This published version is based on [F132A], the manuscript Susan received directly from Emily, rather than [F132B]. The first version is arguably the more acoustic one since it uses ‘heard’ in line 3 (B uses ‘felt’) and highlights ‘the Line’ and ‘Reporter’ by enclosing the words in quotation marks (B omits them). ‘Two Lyrics’, Independent, 43 (12 March 1891), 1. 110 ‘Two Lyrics’, 1. This published version is based on [F187A]. 111 ‘call, v.’, OED Online (pubd online March 2016) <www.oed.com/view/Entry/26411> accessed 4 September 2018. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press 2019; all rights reserved This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - ‘I heard his silver Call’: Emily Dickinson and the Poetry of Telegraphic Acoustics
JF - The Review of English Studies
DO - 10.1093/res/hgz016
DA - 2020-04-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/i-heard-his-silver-call-emily-dickinson-and-the-poetry-of-telegraphic-tB0WR6L56B
SP - 1
VL - Advance Article
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
ER -