Emily Dickinson’s Black Contexts

Abstract Scholars have noted that Emily Dickinson’s poetic composition increased during the Civil War, arguing rightly that this is evidence that she was not isolated and unaffected by national events, but responded to them. While her responses to the war do seem evident in these readings, Dickinson’s responses to slavery and emancipation are less clear, despite her friendship with the prominent abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson and others concerned with these issues. Nevertheless, Dickinson wrote poetry in a context in which Black lives were present, noted, and mattered, even if they did not explicitly matter to her. This essay reads Dickinson’s Civil War era poetry alongside the African American contexts that she either engaged with or ignored. Reading her work alongside local attention to Black people in Massachusetts and elsewhere and the poetry of her most prominent Black contemporary poet, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, we gain a new perspective on Black presence in and around her work. Opening up a discussion of Dickinson’s poetry to consider also the parallel world of African American presence, print, and literary creation helps us to see her racial ambivalence not as a neutrality but as a political stance of its own, and one likely to be embraced by the later publishers of Dickinson’s poetry.