In 1862, Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (1830-1886) of Amherst, Mass., well-established today as one of the most important poets of the American Victorian era, published these enigmatic lines in an untitled poem: “They put me in the Closet — Because they liked me ‘still’ — Still! Could themself have peeped — And seen my Brain go round — They might as wise have lodged a Bird. For Treason — in the Pound.” Her literary forms, first printed without attribution in Springfield’s Republican newspaper starting in the 1850s, tell the story of a unique perceptive mind. In the vast and multidimensional exhibition “Steampunk Springfield,” Dickinson’s persona is re-examined through the lens of science-fiction reality. Let’s reconsider her modernist, deeply introspective sentence fragments, not as written by a woman struggling with identity and freedom during the great transitions of the 19th … [Read more...] about Steampunk Springfield: Re-imagining and Industrial City