Indian Summer – A Brief History of a Poetic Season

My talk traces the cultural history of Indian summer, from its sudden appearance in late eighteenth-century weather discourse to contemporary marketing campaigns that advertise the season as the best time to come look at the leaves. It is my hope that the talk will provide professional meteorologists a brief survey of the cultural and historical significance of this unusually beautiful time of year. The talk will focus primarily, although not exclusively, on nineteenth-century New England. In the work of writers such as Emily Dickinson and Henry David Thoreau Indian summer played an important and overlooked role in the region's efforts to forge an identity specific and separate from the rest of the nation. I will begin with a brief discussion of the science behind Indian summer weather, which seems appropriate given the audience for this talk. My focus, however, will be on the cultural implications of unusual autumnal warmth. The season's history begins with an etymological oddity: While only a small handful of references to the season prior to 1800 survive, by 1820 the term was ubiquitous in the nation's meteorological talk. From there, I move to poetry with discussion of how the season contributed to the rise of American sentimental verse during the 1820s. Twenty years later, the same conditions encouraged Thoreau's transcendental muse. Nineteenth-century Indian summer also came to symbolize wizened understanding, a period of second (and smarter) youth that follows a hard-won maturity. Because plants and shrubs briefly rebound to life, it invites writers to fuse images of youthful exuberance with the seasoned understanding of the mature. No writer, however, thought more seriously about the implications of Indian summer than Emily Dickinson, and my talk will feature close readings of a few of her most powerful Indian summer poems. For all its poetic potential, Indian summer remains a difficult term to define. According to the American Meteorological Society's Glossary of Weather and Climate, Indian summer is “a time interval, in mid or late autumn, of unseasonably warm weather, generally clear skies, sunny but hazy days and cool nights.” In New England, the same publication continues, “at least one killing frost and preferably a substantial period of cooling weather must precede that warm spell in order for it to be a considered a true Indian summer,” a specific requirement not made for any other region of the country. Despite this contention, the definition of Indian summer has only recently received such an official imprimatur. For the most part, we have come to identify Indian summer with a few warm days in the fall, usually (though not always) enjoyed in early November. Because I am primarily interested in the ways the season has been imagined and described, I have adopted this somewhat loose definition. As Thoreau once remarked of the cause of autumn's colors “I am more interested in the rosy cheek than I am to know what particular diet the maiden fed on.” I, too, am intrigued less by precisely what Indian summer is than in the broad array of cultural practices that the season can help illuminate. The history of the term “Indian summer” is equally difficult to pin down. That etymology has been lost in the tangled and tortured history of white America's relationship with the indigenous peoples for whom the season is so enigmatically named. I recall as a child hearing many different explanations for why a warm spell in the fall bears the name Indian summer. I have also read dozens of conflicting theories in the course of my research. But precisely where, when, and how warm autumnal weather and Indians became etymologically linked will never be firmly established – a fact for which I am grateful. As I hope to make clear in this talk, the season's buried origins and loose definitions make it an ideal subject for anyone interested in the ways that poets, artists, cultural historians can make use of the weather.