Emily Dickinson and Fidelia Hayward Cooke’s Springfield Republican

This essay traces a critical development in Dickinson’s relation to her daily newspaper, the Springfield Republican , during the early 1860s, when two of Dickinson’s poems—“I taste a liquor never brewed - ” and “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers”—appeared among the paper’s literary selections. Printed in “Original Poetry” sections, as “The May-Wine” (May 4, 1861) and “The Sleeping” (March 1, 1862), these poems participated in what the essay identifies as the rhetorical project of the Republican ’s in-house literary editor Fidelia Hayward Cooke (1816–1897). During 1861–1863, especially, Cooke’s editing practice actively fostered a relationship between regional women’s poetry and Civil War news, such that regional women’s poetry became an active and indispensible source of affective renewal for war-weary Republican readers. Considering in detail how Cooke materially positioned Dickinson’s poems first to consummate and then to condition this affective renewal, the essay argues that Dickinson’s poems became so embroiled in the Republican ’s address to its readers that the epistolary aspect of the paper for Dickinson shifted irreversibly: what was once a letter from friends was now Dickinson’s own “letter to the World / That never wrote” to her.