Nights and Natural Lights in Nineteenth Century American Poetics

Cecily Parks, Texas State UniversityThe advent of electric lighting and rapid industrialization in the American nineteenth century marked the beginning of the end of the American non-urban night. This paper theorizes the... [ view full abstract ]

Cecily Parks, Texas State University

The advent of electric lighting and rapid industrialization in the American nineteenth century marked the beginning of the end of the American non-urban night. This paper theorizes the night as an environment, like a wetland or prairie, and uses the term night poetics to think about what happens in the night that cannot happen in the day, with a specific attention to those sensual relationships to the natural world that the night cultivates. In these relationships, small spots of organic light—will-o’-the-wisps, moonlight, fireflies—often act as metonyms for poetry, mediating the darkness they’re borne out of. Henry David Thoreau and Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s essays, Emily Dickinson’s poems, Washington Irving’s ghost story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” and spirituals: these texts and traces of texts represent remnants of an unrecoverable time and an unrecoverable place. For beneficial or destructive ends, our twenty-first century secrets are increasingly public, shared on the Internet that never sleeps, glowing on screens long into the yellow light-polluted night.