Emily Dickinson Twitter Essay

Something striking about Emily Dickinson’s poetry is the makeshift way it all seems to come together. It’s written on any type of paper—whether envelope or wrinkled, torn corner—in an endless chain of thought, as if her entire body of work was sticky-noted. And so this allows for reproduction upon reproduction. Because of its jotted down nature, Dickinson’s collection of poetry lends itself to a continuous but broken style, which is built around her punctuation and self-revision. To bring this into a more modern sense, I’ve made Emily a twitter account that demonstrates her technique in the age of technology while at the same time accounting for her style of writing, complete with dashes, emphasis, and word-options. Twitter’s format grants Dickinson’s work a space …show more content…
In a tweet, there are several marks that can slow down a reader, or put emphasis on something. These punctuations are one of the first things that led me to choose Twitter as a mode of present day literature. And immediate example of this is the ever-present hashtag (#). Normally used to measure trending topics on the social media site, I find them useful in Dickinson’s work to emphasize certain words she feels weigh more in a poem, and specifically in the section of a poem that makes up a tweet. Hashtags in effect are a sort of summarizing tool; they also provide a way to recover certain poems, by searching for the key parts of them. Another feature of Twitter appropriate in this context is the “at sign” (@). Usually, it’s used in tweets to reference people, calling them out almost, and the literary equivalent of this symbol would be the allusion. So, in her poems Dickinson would be able to signify to the reader that she’s using an allusion, specifically when she alludes to people, all while keeping it in the spirit of