"What News must think when pondering": Emily Dickinson, the Springfield Daily Republican , and the Poetics of Mass Communication

Abstract

This essay explores the ways in which Dickinson's local newspaper, the Springfield Daily Republican , informs the subject and form of her poetry. From her daily reading, Dickinson responded to a variety of unusual and seemingly uninteresting components of the newspaper: from a mundane medical advertisement to routine stock and weather reports, and from the Republican 's frequent mission statements to its commentary on the developing technology of the telegraph. By considering the ways Dickinson's poetry addresses the Republican , in content as well as form, we can observe the ways the newspaper gave Dickinson occasion to contemplate the larger issue of the nature of mass communication. This article argues that, in poems such as "Would you like Summer? Taste of our's - " (Fr272), "Myself can read the Telegrams" (Fr1049), and "How News must feel when travelling" (Fr1379), Dickinson envisions mass communication as diminishing the importance of the individual by treating readers as an undefined mass and thus forcing the reader into a single, predefined role. In response to this unnatural homogenization, Dickinson's poems model the ways in which the individual, specifically the artist, can prosper in the era of mass communication by taking what is produced for an undefined vast readership and crafting individualized works of art.