Notes from the Editors:

This special issue of ESQ dedicated to Dickinson's Environments got its start in the summer of 2015 when ESQ Editor Karen Kilcup asked me if I would consider guest-editing an issue on Dickinson. I was deeply flattered and immediately captivated by the opportunity. When Karen told me that I would be free to decide on the topic, I knew right away that I wanted the issue to concentrate on Dickinson's writing about the environment. Scholarship on Dickinson's relationship to the natural world has of course been part of Dickinson studies from the beginning, but what initially emerged as scholarly investigations into Dickinson's status as a nature writer has in recent decades expanded to include a much broader understanding of the environment that extends beyond nature to include the material universe as a whole. As a Dickinson scholar, I have been impressed and at times befuddled by the increasing volume of published work situating Dickinson in the context of a rapidly advancing environmental turn that has understandably registered across the humanities at a time when higher education as a whole seeks responsible ways to address the threat posed by global anthropogenic climate change.

As critics and scholars, we have begun the difficult task of asking ourselves how we can escape the all-too-frequent unforeseen and destructive consequences of even our best-intentioned aspirations, and in doing so we have reconsidered what it means to be human. In what now feels like the beginnings of a Copernican Revolution of sorts, whereby the aim is to reconstruct the ontological foundations for human endeavor, the philosophers among us have proposed that we situate our own species within rather than apart from the nonhuman universe, in effect viewing ourselves from the perspective of the nonhuman. Our current geological age is thus reconfigured as the "anthropocene," and we address our imaginations to the realities of life in a "posthuman" world.

It is for precisely this reason that we find ourselves drawing on the wisdom of our best poets; we simply have no resource better suited to the business of imagining new ways of being human. As the contributors to this issue demonstrate, Dickinson's writing has much to tell us about how to think and feel when the universe acts on its own and we forego mastery for mystery, opening our minds once more to the depths of our own otherness. More importantly, Dickinson can help us begin seeing how the world we inhabit was never really governed by human prerogatives. This knowledge is particularly useful at a time when we are moving away from anthropocentrism but as yet lack a clear alternative point of view. As we once more look to Dickinson for guidance, we yet again discover the Dickinson we need in our present moment.

One of the primary joys of editing this issue has been discovering how many Dickinson environments scholars are now exploring. The decision to make the topic "Dickinson's Environments" and not "Dickinson and Ecocriticism" or "Dickinson's Ecological Imagination" was a deliberate effort to keep the topic broad and by doing so invite new and emerging encounters with the entire panoply of environments Dickinson addresses. That is how we discovered that "cuteness" could function as an environment that engages many of the same challenges evoked by the anthropocene, a liberated version of regionalism, and the agency of vibrant matter. I am for this reason grateful to Angela Sorby, Cody Marrs, John Funchion, and Michelle Kohler for opening my eyes to these provocative new ways of seeing how Dickinson's environments both thrive and interact. I am also much indebted to Christine Gerhardt for placing the essays by these four scholars in the context of current environmental discourse and directing our attention to the future scholarship they individually and collectively stimulate.

The aspect of being guest-editor that I regret most is not being able to include more of the submissions our topic attracted. My hope is that, as thinking people everywhere discuss the kind of humanity best suited to our many environments, this issue will prove to be part of...