How do the works of Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwin continue to influence our understanding of nature, ecological interdependence, and the human experience? How does understanding history help us address current social and environmental issues. How can dialogues between the arts and sciences foster holistic, sustainable solutions to global crises?
Renée Bergland is a literary critic, historian of science, and educator. As a storyteller, Bergland connects the lives of historical figures to the problems of the present day. As an educator, she emphasizes the interdisciplinary connections between the sciences and humanities. A longtime professor at Simmons University, where she is the Program director of Literature and writing, Bergland has also researched and taught at institutions such as Dartmouth College, Harvard University, and MIT. Bergland’s past published titles include Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science: An Astronomer Among the American Romantics and The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects. Her most recent book, Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science, was published in April of 2024. It explores Dickinson and Darwin’s shared enchanted view of the natural world in a time when poetry and natural philosophy, once freely intertwined, began to grow apart.
Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in December 1859. In the years that followed, he would often be at the center of public debate, subjected to bitter denunciations and passionate advocacy. At times, his allies' misguided defenses of his ideas would be as excruciating as the condemnations. Darwin would try again and again to explain that the adaptation and change at the heart of natural selection could offer consolation and inspire hope. Darwin had hoped his ideas would be important in scientific circles, but he had never dreamed that they would have such a widespread impact. Indeed, he was startled by his sudden scientific fame. As it turned out, Few aspects of life or death remain untouched by Darwin's thought. His ideas were quickly woven into the fabric of the modern world. Across the Atlantic, Emily Dickinson's response to Darwin helped her to write the poetry that speaks to us today. Emily Dickinson loved a wild experiment just as much as Darwin, who was one generation ahead of her. Darwin's remarkable ideas about the natural world would influence her thought profoundly. She did not have the same impact on Darwin as he had on her. In fact, since she published almost nothing during her lifetime, her circle of influence was very small until after her death. But being in the next generation also conferred some benefits. Able to read Darwin, consider his ideas at leisure, and record her responses for posterity, Dickinson usually got the last word. In this account, I have taken the liberty of giving her the first word, too. For me, this book started with the puzzling realization that many of Dickinson's poems seemed profoundly Darwinian. Although she never mentioned Darwin by name in her poems. She rarely mentioned anyone by name in her poetry, so this absence did not rule him out of her important influences. She did name Darwin in two letters, which confirmed that she knew about his work. Still, there was not much to go on. She returned again and again to the topics that fascinated Darwin, but was that enough to demonstrate that she was responding to his thoughts? Did Dickinson write about Darwinian ideas simply because she was his contemporary? Did her writing seem to apply to Darwin merely because she was a great poet whose writings were almost universally applicable? Both explanations are valid as far as they go, but neither goes far enough. There is a stronger connection between Dickinson and Darwin than the proximity of history. Or the universality of literature. They both understood natural science and the natural world in ways that seem strange and somewhat surprising in the 21st century. Their 19th century attitudes to nature and the study of it are so different from ours that when we trace their stories, a vanished world begins to emerge. The more I consider these figures together, the more I feel their world and my world. come alive. Darwin and Dickinson illuminate each other. By reading them together, we can start to understand the interconnected relationships that animated 19th century poetry and science.
– Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science
by Renée Bergland, Preface, pp. xiv–xvi.
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Many of us only think of Darwin’s work as being about survival of the fittest, and nature competing for limited resources, but you open this view up. You write about how Dickinson and Darwin refused to accept the separation of art and science. As you go through their writings, they're both talking about the awesome possibilities of the new sciences and at the same time striving to preserve the magic of nature. And today more than ever, we too need to reclaim these two discipline’s connections, and our shared sense of ecological wonder, especially as we're on the crest of the Anthropocene.
RENÉE BERGLAND
Yes, absolutely. Probably many geologists and stratigraphers would say that even Darwin and Dickinson both lived during the Anthropocene, that they lived during a time when human activity had really started to change the planet. But I don't know that they lived during the self-conscious Anthropocene as we do now, where we're suddenly aware of it and we're like, “Oh, no, what have we done?” But they were fascinated, both of them, by human beings in the whole biosphere.
The reason that people responded to Darwin as if he were theologically radical was because his vision of the great tree of life was not a ladder. It was not hierarchical at all. His metaphor of the tree has lots of intertwined branches and roots. There's not a single apex to a tree, and the way that Darwin described humans, they were not the top of the whole chain, the whole ladder. That was an insight that was upsetting to many people. It seemed humiliating for humans not to be the very best living creature. And that was one of the reasons that many people reacted negatively to Darwin. But for Dickinson, that idea was just liberating and exciting and fascinating, such that in many of her poems about the natural world, she blurs the human and the animal and the plant. One of the poems of Dickinson's that I think explains Darwin the best starts out, “There is a flower that bees prefer / and butterflies desire.” She's talking about the clover, and in that poem she describes the clover and the grass as kinsmen. They're related to each other, but they're contending, she says, for sod and sun. They are competing to see who can get the most soil, the most nutrients, but she calls them “sweet litigants for life.” And that interpretation of Darwinism, where they're sweet and they're struggling, but they're both actually litigants for life, they're both arguing for the biosphere and advocates—that takes us back to the first lines of the poem. “There's a flower that bees prefer / and butterflies desire.” The way that the clover and the grass compete is by trying to see who can be more beautiful, who can be more brightly colored, who can smell better, who can lure more pollinators, more insects and birds and collaborate better with them, and have a better chance of surviving. That is certainly a version of survival of the fittest, but it's not a dog eat dog violent version. It's a version where the way you get a generational advantage, and perhaps have more little clovers following in your footsteps, is by collaborating better, by making yourself more beautiful, more alluring, and more inviting, inviting pollinators to work with you. That's straight from Darwin. Darwin's very clear in On the Origin of Species that when he talks about the struggle for life, he's primarily talking about co-adaptation and collaboration between species that can learn to work together. He's the one who actually, as he explains the struggle for life, says it's nothing like two dogs fighting over a bone. That's not what it is. But unfortunately, a lot of that co-adaptation language got lost in the popular imagination. And that's one of the reasons that turning to Dickinson can help us understand—because she so beautifully depicts a Darwinian world where, yes, there's death, but there's more than anything, there's life.
