Act Natural: Emily Dickinson's Verse at Play in the Garden

In a new article at Slate, Ferris Jabr delves into Emily Dickinson's verse garden and its creatures, suggesting that "so much depends," in her writing, on botanical environment. More:

A few months ago, I began making my way through the complete set of Emily Dickinson's 1,789 poems. Right from the start, I was struck by how often commonplace plants and animals—robins, bumblebees, dandelions—featured in her poetry. She devoted entire poems to such ubiquitous backyard creatures, describing them in ecstatic, even spiritual language. Whenever she needed a metaphor or a simile, she turned to the garden. When she required a symbol for herself, she chose the wren, clover, or spider. And she seemed to be deeply familiar with the biology of such species. Dickinson has long been classified as one of the great nature poets, but as I explored her work I started to see her as every bit the naturalist.

As someone who has loved gardening and natural history since childhood—and who now makes a living writing about nature and science—I began to feel an almost embarrassing kinship with Dickinson. Here was a writer who unabashedly proclaimed her rapture for the mere “bumble of a bee” and scent of a new blossom, who described herself as a “debauchee” routinely getting drunk off nature—a poet who filled her verse with the Latin names of flowers and the habits of tiny, oft-overlooked creatures. I thought back to all the blissful hours I’d spent tending flowers and vegetables, or simply watching birds and bugs in the green spaces I had known. I remembered poring through encyclopedias of plants and animals just for the thrill of learning their names and appearances, filing away mnemonic snapshots in the menagerie of my brain.

Continue at Slate. For more about Dickinson's green thumb, turn here.