"Often seen - but seldom felt": Emily Dickinson's Reluctant Ecology of Place

This essay discusses Dickinson's poetry of place in conjunction with her culture's proto-ecological discourses. In subtle but important ways, Dickinson's visions of connectedness and interdependence test early ecological concerns as poetic perspective; her regionalism can be linked to living-in-place as a long standing environmental strategy; and her cosmic yearnings suggest a basic interrelatedness of small and large, past and present natural systems that is still at the heart of ecology today. What makes Dickinson's explorations of natural landscapes particularly environmentally resonant is her prevailing skepticism, which prevents her green sense of place from turning into a one-dimensional, restrictive localism.