A narrow Fellow in the Grass (1096)

Dickinson was a famous recluse, whose ill health and lifestyle preferences eventually led to her living in seclusion and receiving visitors through a closed door. Her poetry reflects this anti-social behavior in its isolation from the world. However, it demonstrates Dickinson’s profound kinship with nature. Dickinson’s drive to read and learn about the great outdoors is led to a concerted awareness of her role within a larger ecology on a biodiverse planet.

Dickinson wrote poetry at a time in which ideas about nature in literature were changing. Early 19th century Romantics saw nature as psychologically reflective—a place for men to roam to undergo experiences of the sublime they could use for poetry. The transcendentalists of the 1830s associated nature with divinity and dreams. For example, according to the Ralph Waldo Emerson, nature is a lot like a “remoter and inferior incarnation of God,” as well as a “projection of God in the unconscious” (Nature. Shambhala Press. 2003). As Dickinson was writing in the middle of the 19th century, the advent of Darwinism sent nature into the realm of science, which saddled it with a notion of intrinsic violence (“survival of the fittest”).

Dickinson’s poetry makes space for all of these perspectives. Rather than exploiting nature as a resource for defining herself, she establishes a reciprocal relationship with nature through vivid descriptions, coupled with immense imaginative power. Dickinson’s poems include sublimity, theology, natural science, aestheticism, philosophy, and biodiversity. Her writing combines the Romanticism of the decades that preceded her and the Realism taking over as the dominant literary genre of the mid-and late-19th century.