The Sound of Shifting Paradigms, or Hearing Dickinson in the Twenty-First Century

In 1862, Emily Dickinson wrote a poem about the “Melody” the wind-a melody so powerful it hides within us “inner than the Bone” for “the Whole of Days.” The poem begins: The wind’s melody is like a poem: “Inheritance … to us/Beyond [our] Art to Earn.” The “sounds” of Dickinson’s poems that we hear at the turn of the twenty-first century, however, are different from those she heard when she wrote them, because in the twenty-first century, in the United States, very different “sounds” are “despatched abroad” from those dispatched.