Emily Dickinson and the Hill of Science

Emily Dickinson and the Hill of Science offers a new reading of Dickinsons poetry alongside the popular reporting of science in journals and newspapers available to Dickinson, and alongside the science textbooks in use in the schools Dickinson attended. The first half of the nineteenth century was an exciting period in the development of science and technology, and the revelations of science and the technology it used (from microscope to telescope) not only provided exciting, new ways of seeing the world, they did so in ways that were seized eagerly as evidence of revelation by New England Protestants. Science, no less than religion, inhabits the poems and is embedded in them, not only in the form of language and metaphor, but also in aspects of structure, and as strategies for addressing the subject of epistemology. Dickinson the scientist is not such a non sequitur as we might have thought.