NATURAL MAGIC

How a legendary poet and an iconic scientist shared a vision of enchanted life.

In this adventurous study, literature professor Bergland pairs Dickinson and Darwin to chart a profound transitional stage in Western intellectual history: a shift toward the separation of scientific and artistic perspectives. The author demonstrates how both figures rejected this shift, and their scrupulously attentive considerations of the natural world affirmed the presence of mysterious, awe-inspiring energies and interconnections. Bergland skillfully outlines the intellectual contexts in which both produced their masterworks and draws out affinities among their core assumptions. The author’s close reading of a number of Dickinson’s poems places them in relation to her advanced scientific knowledge and awareness of Darwinian theory, and the author argues convincingly that a good deal of Dickinson’s writing can profitably be interpreted “as part of a conversation with Darwin and his interlocutors.” This approach results in an often engaging decoding of the poet’s more obscure allusions and helps us understand the significance to her writing of a sense of the final unity of all life. Also rewarding is Bergland’s commentary on the resistance to Darwin’s ideas among scientists, theologians, and laypeople and on his passionate response to observing natural wonders. Some of the author’s attempts to draw out intriguing parallels between the two figures are strained—as in her commentary on some of their personal habits and the trajectory of their creative output—but she makes a strong case for the intellectual commonalities between them. Bergland is compelling in her suggestion that “Darwin’s and Dickinson’s voices can help us recover our sense of ecological meaning,” for “their lives and works whisper to each other and to us, telling us of the natural magic at the roots of our green world.”

An illuminating juxtaposition of two 19th-century trailblazers and their relevance to scientific history.