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25 I • Noticing Small Worlds In the 1840s Emily Dickinson began work on her first book, a collection of pressed plants preserved in a special herbarium. While keeping a herbarium was a common pastime for midnineteenth -century middle-class women, Dickinson’s collection differs from those of her contemporaries in quantity and quality. With its more than four hundred flowers, mosses, algae, and tree blossoms, it pays attention to nature’s minutiae more extensively than most of the era’s amateur herbaria, whose average number of specimens would be about one hundred. The largely accurate Latin names (see Angelo 170) are exceptional for an amateur herbarium, indicating a thorough knowledge of the Linnaean taxonomy. Yet her herbarium also omits information about when and where the plants were collected, leaves specimens unnamed toward the end, does not sort them according to the traditional Linnaean classes, and almost never presents the flowers’ roots, the most important parts of a plant in terms of identification . Her carefully crafted herbarium, then, surprises the reader with provocative arrangements that pay as much attention to the flowers’ unique morphology and botanical order as to their metaphorical suggestiveness and composition on the page, yet elides crucial gestures of controlling the material, linking the act of noticing nature’s details to questions of artistic representation and the limits of human knowledge. Only a few years later, in 1855, Walt Whitman published the first edition of Leaves of Grass, a slim volume whose cover suggested that whatever was inside the book was linked most vitally to nature, especially nature’s smallest incarnations. While similar designs were not uncommon at the time, as Jerome Loving and others have pointed out (Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself 179), Whitman’s cover superseded those of his contemporaries in crucial ways. Compared to Sara Willis Parton’s Fern Leaves from Fanny Fern’s Portfolio (1853), which features stylized golden floral ornaments and a title whose first words turn into vines, 2 6 • p a r t i while the center is claimed by what looks like paper and writing utensils,1 Whitman’s cover pushes an almost palpable referent into the foreground, drawing attention to a cluster of plant-letter morphs so laden with tiny leaves and roots they seem to literally grow out of the dark green base. They not only look weedy, almost moldy, in ways that Victorians would have found unsettling, and even unattractive; they also radically emphasize nature’s smallest, habitually overlooked elements. The phrasing, too, differs from popular book titles of the 1840s and 1850s, suggesting a more specific and smaller vegetation than Gathered Leaves, Fresh Leaves from Western Woods, Autumn Leaves, or Stray Leaves from the Book of Nature (see Loving 179). Also, the choice of “leaves” over “blades” of grass talks back to the era’s scientific discourses (see Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America 241), especially chemistry and botany. If the 1855 Leaves of Grass suggested the creation of poetic language as an organic process, it was also a “book of nature” probing the possibilities and limitations of imaginatively lifting the most humble, neglected natural phenomena onto the page without completely controlling their presence. Dickinson’s collection of plants and the cover of Whitman’s first volume of poetry already embody the passionate attention to nature’s minute details that both would sustain throughout their poetic projects . Clearly, nature’s smallest incarnations have a different presence and function in their poetry—Dickinson kept turning Victorian associations of white women with flowers and birds into ambivalent expressions of female autonomy, while Whitman embraced the grass as a multivalent symbol for American democracy and its new, uninhibited language. It is my argument here, however, that for all these differences, their poems also share a deep concern with paying attention to small nature, and that this shared interest expresses itself in related ways that attain fresh eco-ethical resonances when their works are read in the contexts of their time’s environmental discussions. Specifically, I hope to show that a key feature of this shared concern lies in what I call their frequent acts of noticing previously overlooked, supposedly minor flora and fauna, which echo but also revise the ways in which the proto-ecological sciences, in particular, were also turning toward nature’s minutiae. In Dickinson’s and Whitman ’s poetry, these acts of “noticing”—which the mid-nineteenth-century Webster’s defined as observing or seeing in the sense of “to regard, to treat with attention and...

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