‘I heard his silver Call’: Emily Dickinson and the Poetry of Telegraphic Acoustics

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.