Imagine this: A dark and desolate December night. Outside, an icy storm is raging. The fading embers of a long burnt down fire provide no comfort and instead only project distorted and wreathing shadows onto the cold floor. A tired man is sitting at his desk, pouring over old, moth-eaten volumes of long forgotten wisdoms. His only company is the yawning darkness beyond the windows and the person-shaped void next to him. It is quiet except for the disconcerting rustling of the curtains and the frozen rain beating against the windowpanes. Then, suddenly, he sits up straight: someone is tapping against his door.
Now, imagine this: a woman is sitting alone at her desk with only a book of poetry to keep her company. Through the open window, a golden sunbeam warms her left knee. No sounds disturb her peaceful perusing of the lines, only the wind murmurs quietly as he passes through the grass in her colourful garden. The birds are chirping merrily, a bright melody accompanying the wind’s calming chant. The bumblebees’ content humming completes the little concert. The woman turns a page; her mind filled with beautiful words about beautiful things. When it knocks politely at her door, she smiles.
Though structurally similar – a person sitting alone at their desk hearing a knock – these two scenes could not appear more different. It takes just a few tweaks and one scenario suddenly feels dark, cold and lonely, whereas the other feels peaceful and quiet. Tweaks to what is usually referred to as a text’s atmosphere; a term that appears to be very straightforward on first glance. But of course, for a literary scholar like me, the easier the answer, the more questions I have. For example: Which narrative and/or poetic factors constitute and contribute to the atmosphere of a literary text? Is it a subjective phenomenon or can there be a poetics of atmospheres? Is the literary atmosphere in any way related to the physical atmosphere? How can we, within the context of literature studies, talk about it in a productive way? And, most importantly, what does “atmosphere” even mean?
Atmospheric Relations
Depending on whom you ask, the term can imply a wide range of different things: a climate scientist may tell you that it refers to the accumulation of gases surrounding our planet, whereas a psychologist might say that it refers to a certain type of mood that is prevalent in a room. Natalie Dederichs, in an attempt to combine these different concepts, defines the atmospheric in her book Atmosfears. The Uncanny Climate of Contemporary Ecofiction (2023) as “the ways in which we are embedded in and affected by spheres of interaction with our environments” (13). Atmospheres, therefore, are not only invisible, indescribable phenomena of the “in between” of individuals and their environment (cf. Gernot Böhme), but rely on and are constructed by the interaction and the distribution of agency between them. Anthropocentric, narrow conceptions of the term are thus no longer productive. When it comes to defining what it means to be an “affective and relational being in the world” (22), Dederichs further suggests that literary analysis can lend a hand to ecocriticism. After all, what better way to look at the immersive dynamic resulting from the friction between material reality and the individual than “where the interrelatedness of matter and text, reader and world(s) plays such an important role in the aesthetic experience?” (15) She further points out that, especially within the context of ecocriticism, literary atmospheres are uniquely equipped to enable “an embodied understanding of climate change because it is through atmospheric encounters that we are drawn into an affective engagement with the surrounding world” (20).

“The Raven,” by E. H. Wehnert, illustrating the poem by Poe (1856) via WikiCommons
But what, we may ask now, even are “atmospheric encounters”? After all, human beings always exist within and are dependent on (physical) atmospheres. Can we even distinguish between commonplace breathing and an “atmospheric encounter”? And which criteria can we employ to determine the difference? These questions lead us right back to the scenes with which I began this essay. The first “atmospheric encounter” occurs in Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven”(1844) where, as the title suggests, a raven (a representative of the ‘outside environment’) plays a key role. Because the bird can speak, it allows us to explore the (uncanny) dynamics between human and non-human agencies. The second example, Emily Dickinson’s poem “The Wind’s Visit” (approx. 1863), introduces similar dynamics, although the visitor (a gust of wind) is neither really tangible nor visible and thus more of an “imaginary presence” (Dederichs, 14).
Conditions of an “Atmospheric Encounter”
The scenic openings above reflect the outsets of “The Raven ” and “The Wind’s Visit ” (in that order). Both start with the poem’s speaker sitting alone in their house, when they suddenly hear a knocking. Both assume that it must either be “a visiter [sic]” (l. 16, Poe) or “a guest” (l. 5, Dickinson). The different connotations of each term (a “guest” is usually someone familiar who is encouraged to linger, whereas mention of a “visitor” implies formality and passing) foreshadow the later events of each poem. The tapping which disturbs the speaker of “The Raven” in his exhaustion-induced sleep is at first hesitant. The speaker describes: “I was napping, and so gently you came rapping, // And so faintly you came tapping, … // That I scarce was sure I heard you” (l. 21ff, Poe). Eventually, it grows more insistent and the “visiter [sic]” knocks several more times and “somewhat louder than before” (l. 23, Poe), until the speaker finally opens the correct window. Through a number of different stylistic devices in the first few stanzas (e. g. repetition, gemination, epiphora, internal rhyme), the plea for entry receives a sense of urgency on a textual level as well. In “The Wind’s Visit”, the visitor knocks politely on the speaker’s door. Again, the (lack of) insistency for requesting admission is reflected on the narrative level, as the onomatopoetic alliteration of the “t”-sound in the opening line (“The Wind – tapped like a tired Man –“ (l. 1, Dickinson)) imitates the slow, rhythmic knock of the visitor asking for entrance.
Both speakers eventually bid their unexpected visitors entrance. The speaker in “The Wind’s Visit” quickly musters up the courage to answer the knocking and “like a Host – ‘Come in’ // I boldly answered” (l. 2f, Dickinson). The speaker in “The Raven” is more hesitant, already unsettled by the raging storm outside. He has to reassure himself several times that “’Tis the wind and nothing more” (l. 36, Poe) making the noise. After the knocking continues, he eventually resolves that, in fact, there must be a physical being outside asking for entrance. The way in which the visitors knock and the speaker’s reactions to it each complement each other: a polite, slow knocking in “The Wind’s Visit” results in a calm, friendly bid for entrance, whereas the increasingly insistent, repeated knocking in “The Raven” causes uneasiness and heightened discomfort in the speaker. Here, the overall mood of the poems not only aids the readers imagination but, again, foreshadows the later events. The speakers’ reactions mirror the fact that an unexpected visitor is much more likely to turn into a guest invited to stay if they turn up at a pleasant hour of the day, instead of in the middle of the night.
The manner of first encountering the visitors, how it relates to their tapping, and the resulting dynamics of agency also differ quite significantly between the poems. The anthropomorphised gust of wind in Dickinson’s poem, for instance, does not require a door to be opened. Still, he waits for the verbal affirmation and invitation of the speaker before he enters. The theme of politeness and restraint is therefore continued, and the speaker controls the situation thus far. The raven, on the other hand, struts in as soon as the speaker opens the window: “Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he” (l. 38f, Poe). Although he does not fly in in a frenzy, he still wastes no time with waiting for an affirmation or welcome. The speaker thus loses his agency over the situation as soon as the window is opened. This comparison shows how the contrast between a welcome guest in “The Wind’s Visit” and an unexpected visitor in “The Raven” is intensified.
Atmospheric Agency – Anxiety or Assuagement?
However, neither poem lets this be the last word in terms of agency. In Dickinson’s poem, the wind’s calm manner of knocking and respectful entrance differ quite strongly from his conduct within the room. Whereas before entering, he is anthropomorphised through comparisons and personifications and has a corporeal presence (he can knock), these features all disappear as soon as he enters: he is a “footless guest” (l. 5, Dickinson) with “No Bone … to bind Him” (l. 9). He returns to being a meteorological phenomenon that cannot be controlled; his movements are described as “[r]apid” (l. 5), “flitting” (l. 17), and “flurriedly” (l. 19). This is also reflected on the textual level: the poem contains a large number of enjambments, and the sentences exclusively end with dashes or no punctuation at all. This creates the reading experience of rushing through the poem. In “The Raven”, the bird also does not behave how one would assume based on its bid for entrance. Although the raven enters “with many a flirt and flutter” (l. 37, Poe), he refrains from rushing about the room like the wind and instead “[p]erched, and sat, and nothing more” (l. 42, Poe) on a marble bust of Pallas Athena. The manner of asking for admission and the visitor’s behaviour within the room thus do not differ only between the poems but also on the intradiegetic level of each individual poem.
Neither the raven nor the wind remain quiet for long. Although the wind cannot articulate actual words, the speaker still refers to his utterances as a form of speaking: “His Speech was like the Push // Of numerous Humming Birds at once” (l. 10f, Dickinson). More than that, “His Fingers, as He passed // Let go a music – as of tunes // Blown tremulous in Glass” (l. 14ff). This passage pertains to the Aeolian wind harp, a popular poetic symbol during the Romanticism period. Named after the Greek wind god Aeolus, it refers to an instrument whose strings are set in motion via directing a gust of air or wind into a resonance space. According to the Cambridge University Dictionary of Literary Symbols, it is also commonly used as a “metaphor of the internal breeze or breath responding to the inspiration of a natural wind” (8) which increasingly “came to represent the experience of creative resonance between mind and environmental forces in the Romantic imagination” (Dederichs, 49). This is also the case in “The Wind’s Visit”: the speaker describes that the wind not only enters their residence but their “Residence within” (l. 4, Dickinson, emphasis added) and leaves its “music” there. The gust of wind consequently does not create music on an actual aeolian harp; it is the speaker who becomes the resonance space for the wind’s natural inspiration.

In order to look at the wind not only as a metaphor for inspiration (also note the German term “Inspirationshauch”, which literally translates to a “whiff” or “breath” of inspiration) but as an atmospheric phenomenon, let us return to Dederichs, who states that the atmospheric functions as “a particularly fruitful category to theorise the tensions and fuzzy borders between perceiver and perceived, subject and object” (14). Considering the fact that the wind enters the speaker’s “Residence within”, the environmental phenomenon in this poem serves as a good example for the ways in which an atmospheric encounter “shakes concepts of physical presence and destabilises anthropocentric notions of agency” (12). The immersive and, crucially, reciprocal dynamic of encounters with the atmospheric becomes evident through the speaker having to allow the wind inside and the wind in turn evaporating the borders between inside and outside, between individual and environment, and forcing the speaker to surrender control over the interaction. Especially the wind’s invisibility and lack of tangibility thus reflects the misassumption of anthropocentric control over encounters with non-human agents and atmospheric phenomena. Notably, the concession of control over the interaction is not negatively connotated in “The Wind’s Visit” (more on that later).

In “The Raven”, the opposite is the case: the tensions resulting from encounters with the atmospheric and loss of agency to a non-human party are decidedly uncanny. Just as the wind, the raven is not a silent visitor. In fact, Poe states in “The Philosophy of Composition” that he chose the raven as a visitor precisely because he is “a non-reasoning creature capable of speech” (Poe, “TPoC”, 679). Thus, the tension between human and non-human agency (i.e., between a reasoning and a non-reasoning creature) has been consciously considered and employed by Poe in his poem. It immediately arises as soon as the raven invades the speaker’s space without waiting for him to welcome him inside and thereby assuming agency of the situation. The speaker, still very much preoccupied with grief for his deceased love Lenore, starts a conversation with the raven who, much to his amusement, can only speak one word (“Nevermore”). This allows the speaker to guide the conversation and to reassume control over the interaction. Unfortunately, he quickly begins to ask himself “what this ominous bird of yore … // Meant in croaking ‘Nevermore’” (l. 69ff) and grows more and more perturbed by the bird’s answers to his increasingly distressed questions. For example, the speaker asks whether he will be reunited with his beloved in heaven, whilst being fully aware of the negating answer the raven will give him. Poe states in “The Philosophy of Composition” that the speaker “experiences a phrenzied pleasure in so modeling his questions as to receive from the expected ‘Nevermore’ the most delicious because the most intolerable of sorrow” (680). This means that although it is the speaker who leads the conversation, he allows the influence of the raven’s answers on his mental state to grow because he wants to feel sad. Once more, the non-human agent from the outside invades not only the speaker’s personal space but also their (state of) mind.
Moreover, the raven is not only “the bird of ill-omen” (Poe, “TPoC”, 679) and a “renowned harbinger of … despair” (Farrant/Urakova, 161), but also a familiar representative of everyday encounters with nature. This makes him a very suitable “baseline from which the uncanny will emerge, the necessary starting point for de-naturing to take place” (Farrant/Urakova, 160) and thus a good vehicle to create “an immersive and yet disruptive experience of otherness” (Dederichs, 20). The atmospheric encounter is not a positively connotated affective-immersive experience like in Dickinson’s poem, but rather an uncanny affective-invasive circumstance.
Remains of an “Atmospheric Encounter”
The theme of dwindling human agency in atmospheric encounters culminates in the poems’ endings. The wind in Dickinson’s poem leaves the speaker as unceremoniously as he came: “He passed … // He visited – still flitting – // … ‘twas flurriedly” (l. 17ff, Dickinson). This is reflected in the poem’s sudden ending as well (“Again, He tapped – … // And I became alone –“ (l. 19f)). As previously established, the gust of wind/inspiration, “[t]o offer whom a Chair // Were as impossible as hand // A Sofa to the Air” (l. 5-8), cannot be controlled or detained and leaves the speaker much as they were in the beginning; almost as if the visit had never occurred. However, the dash at the end of the last line (instead of the grammatically more conventional dot), suggests a certain openness to the encounter that is transferred to the reader:
Readers remain in very much the same situation as that in which Dickinson’s speakers often find themselves: we have received a miraculous visitor … who just as miraculously abandons us in a state of acute susceptibility. None of these poems can be said precisely to end, since they perpetually maintain themselves at the instant and in the condition in which they stopped. (Anderson, 218)
The result of this atmospheric encounter’s dynamic therefore is an open one. The speaker opened themselves up to the visitor’s influence and is rewarded by an immersive-affective, inspirational experience. Although they surrender control over the situation, they do it willingly (“boldly”) and the loss of agency is not marked as uncanny – rather it becomes something at once inspirational and aspirational. Anderson, too, resolves that Dickinson uses the encounter with the atmospheric phenomenon wind as a “synecdoche for transcendent experience” (213) and as allegory for the overlapping of “transcendent life and circumstantial, daily existence” (205).
The speaker in “The Raven” has no such luck. In fact, he experiences the opposite of Dickinson’s speaker’s calm inspiration, as he is increasingly negatively affected by the raven’s answers. As previously mentioned, he initially finds himself amused by his unusual, feathered visitor (cf. l. 43), a fact that is also evident in his use of archaic pronouns to address the raven. However, with his “ease reclining” (l. 75) progressively during their conversation, he eventually grows more and more frenzied and almost hysterical in his desire to get rid of the ebony bird: “Get thee back into the tempest and … // Leave my loneliness unbroken! – quit the bust above my door! // Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!” (l. 98ff) Unfortunately for him, the raven, who understandably has no desire to return to the storm (and also cannot understand him), will not leave. This presents a problem to the speaker, who has come to regard his visitor as a “demon” (l. 105) and “thing of evil! – prophet still, if bird or devil” (l. 85). The raven has become “emblematical … of Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance” (Poe, “TPoC”, 684), not only to the poem’s readers but also to the speaker himself. The speaker is torn between the desire to “forget this lost Lenore” (l. 82f) and the pain her memory brings, and to remember her forever (cf. Stanzas 13 & 14). Using Farrant and Urakova’s words to return to the atmospheric dynamic of this encounter: “the raven is an intruder; he comes from outside and eventually ‘masters’ the narrator in his own chamber. Instead of being caged … he entraps the narrator” (162). Although the raven has no harmful intentions, he still possesses all the agency in the situation, simply because the speaker attributes it to him. He is the one who continues to ask questions and the one who decides to feel distressed by the answers. It is the encounter with the atmospheric that leads the speaker down a spiral of grief and hopelessness, until he ultimately resolves that “my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor // Shall be lifted – nevermore!” (l. 107f) Again, the atmospheric agent invading the individual’s space holds agency not because they simply took it but because the subject encountering the atmospheric awarded it to them (although this time, not consciously). Again, the encounter is dynamic and reciprocal instead of one-sided.
The “Atmospheric Encounter”: Brushing or Bruising Experience?
According to Dederichs, the atmospheric “points to the ways in which we are embedded in and affected by spheres of interaction with our environments” (13) and that which draws us “into an affective engagement with the surrounding world” (20). This is, as the comparison of Poe’s and Dickinson’s poems has shown, not only a feature of contemporary prose, but also present in lyrical encounters. The dissolution of human agency, which Dederichs emphasizes several times, also seems to be a defining feature not only of physical and (literary) atmospheric encounters, but for the writing of poetry itself as well: To be an individual that enters into a dynamic and/or creative relationship with its surroundings means to surrender at least a certain degree of control over the situation. This can either be a daunting dynamic (cf. “The Raven”) or a calming and rewarding experience (cf. “The Wind’s Visit”), depending on the willingness of the individual to let go of their own preoccupations and the openness they bring to the encounter. Dickinson’s speaker voluntarily surrenders control to the atmospheric phenomenon and is left inspired and with the invisible remnants of a pleasant, ephemeral visit. Poe’s speaker, however, is too preoccupied with his emotions to productively engage with his visitor. The atmospheric encounter is not only a metaphor for his mental state (the knocking and raven are a metaphor for grief as something invasive that cannot be ignored) but also a catalyst for the speaker’s inner turmoil and as a mirror for his feelings. Whereas Dickinson’s speaker remains alone but not lonely, Poe’s speaker is not alone anymore, but lonelier than ever. In one case, the encounter is the beginning of the end, in the other, the end is just the beginning.
Ultimately, both atmospheric encounters model physical experiences as much as they (re)imagine the effect of writing and composing poetry. To read this not as a mere metaphor but as (metonymical) consequence of dynamic relations with our surroundings reminds us to contemplate our reciprocal affiliations with the atmospheric. It allows us to reflect both on our status as readers, writers, and beings in the world, and to recontextualize ourselves within the complex dynamics of our environment and learn to engage with them in a productive way.
Aive Jürgens is a graduate student at Ruhr-University Bochum (MA Comparative Literature and Anglistik/Amerikanistik). She is particularly interested in questions of narrative unreliability, mythology, and gothic fiction, but always happy to explore new topics.
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