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From the earliest days of Dickinson scholarship critics have rightly regarded religion as one of the great shaping influences on Emily Dickinson’s poetry.Its presence in her verse is undeniable,but this emphasis overlooks one important issue. During the antebellum period it was not religion, but the sciences that supplied the new generation with stimulating ideas, energy, and excitement, both because of what they were revealing and what they promised to reveal. Science provided topics of peculiar interest to general readers from Amherst to Amsterdam.The popular discussion of the sciences in the widely circulated belles-lettres journals was a transatlantic phenomenon untrammeled by copyright restrictions. Such a circumstance gives rise to a question. What happens when we read Dickinson as a poet/scientist,a writer/observer using methodologies parallel to her contemporary scientists and inspired by the same questions as they were? In answer,and drawing here on transatlantic conversations about geology, I would like to show that it is indeed possible to sustain a reading that sees Dickinson’s poems as having scientific intentions and making scientific claims. At first sight it seems perverse to pursue such a thesis. “It is futile to treat Dickinson as other than a religious poet,”says one well-respected critic (Eberwein 40). Unimpressed by the subject matter of science, in a letter of 1850 she clearly states that she is not interested in the body, but the soul.1 Nevertheless, if we shed some of the assumptions often brought to the work of Dickinson, the proposal is not as absurd as it might seem. In 1846 Dickinson wrote that “I have perfect confidence in God and his promises,and yet I know not why,I feel chapter thirteen Emily Dickinson and Transatlantic Geology Robin Peel Dickinson and Transatlantic Geology 233 that the world holds a predominant place in my affection.”2 The visible world was her starting point, and she tried many strategies and adopted many roles in her quest to understand it. There are, moreover, particularly good reasons for seeing Dickinson partake in a culture of science, just as much as we have seen her as part of a culture of religion.Though from early childhood she was steeped in the language of the Bible and immersed in the language of religion through sermons and hymns,she was equally steeped in transatlantic scientific discourse. New England had a strong oral tradition, and education practices of her time demanded that she memorize and recite great sections of scientific texts,at her first school,at Amherst Academy,and at Mount Holyoke Seminary. And she seemed to derive pleasure from doing so.In December 1847,when she was seventeen, she wrote to her brother Austin: “I finished my examination in Euclid last eve & without a failure at any time. . . . I had almost forgotten to tell you what my studies are now. . . . They are, chemistry, Physiology & quarter course in Algebra. I have completed four studies already & am getting along well.”3 In committing to memory and being able to repeat without error long passages of text it is necessary to read them again and again.The language and the concepts become part of the reciter’s intellectual furniture.These were substantial textbooks that were used equally by girls and boys.In fact,the older students became, the more emphasis was placed on science study in the curriculum for girls.“Your welcome letter found me all engrossed in the history of Sulphuric Acid !!!!!,” she writes to her brother from Mount Holyoke in 1848.4 How,though,can or should we regard Dickinson as a natural philosopher/scientist ? It is a question that can only be answered plausibly if we step back from the art-science divide that has characterized our own more recent culture. In her methodology,in her search for knowledge,and in her willingness to collect and collate her observations she was doing exactly what the amateur scientists of her day were doing (and the vast majority of those who engaged in science were amateurs, a term lacking in pejorative associations at that time). Charles Darwin, her most famous scientific contemporary, collected evidence that he recorded and stored over a period of twenty or so years. It is often forgotten that though some of this evidence was collected during the voyage of the HMS Beagle, much was gathered in his own study and from his own garden, where he observed the effect of earthworms on the ground in which they lived and considered variations...

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