“To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee”: Dickinson’s Manufacturing of the Wild West

Abstract:This essay examines a number of western landscapes in Dickinson’s works in relation to the westward expansionism and settler colonialism of her time. It rethinks how Dickinson’s poems of the western sublime speak to a consistent geo-poetic imagination about moving westward as a national cultural thought experiment and a social-economic necessity, vacillating between industrial advancement and pastoral idealism, between utilitarianism and symbolism. The intricate connection between these enmeshed perceptions of the American West is manifested in a number of western scenarios, such as the sunset, the gold rush, and the prairies. The various western (or westward-moving) topographies gesture towards an expansionist enthusiasm for the pragmatic (as well as symbolic) value of the American West, yet not without acknowledging predicament, tension, and fracture. In particular, by comparing one prairie poem by Dickinson with William Cullen Bryant’s 1833 poem “The Prairies,” a poem informed by colonialistexpansionist ideology, the essay reveals how Dickinson’s westward-looking poetic production speaks to the concerted and yet conflicted cultural efforts of her time to both represent and to reimagine, to utilize and to aestheticize, to preserve and yet also to sanitize American place identity by manufacturing her own poetic wilderness.