
Punctuate

That’s the title of my new (and free) Issuu photobook about (1) photoshopping the only known photograph of Dickinson to bring out detail, and then (2) thinking about what then makes itself seen. Click here:
Antithesis: wings having opened in the azure, it is no longer barren.
The thesis, below, is from the Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (1821-1873). This meditation on the meaning of nature was first published in 1860 — that is, in the era of In Memoriam and a year after The Origin of Species — but in its time it went almost unread. Tuckerman’s brother Edward (1817-1886) taught botany at Amherst College and his wife was one of Emily Dickinson’s correspondents, but there is no evidence that Dickinson knew of Frederick or his work.
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Twenty-two words say: “His mere presence in the pulpit was majestic and fascinating, in the weird abstraction, concentration, solemnity of face, voice, mien, and manner.”
Wordlessly, this says:
Sources:
“Tribute by Dr. Richard Salter Storrs.” Memorial Collection of Sermons by Edwards A. Park, D.D., LL.D, Professor in Andover Theological Seminary for Sixty-Four Years, ed. Agnes Park (Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1902), p. 12. https://archive.org/details/memorialcollecti00park/mode/2up
Daguerreotype by Mathew B. Brady, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2004664036/. Cropped and post-processed.
Letter 142, The Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward. Harvard University Press, 1958.
Alfred Habegger, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson (Random House, 2001), pp. 310-313, “A Theology of the Feelings.”