Emily Dickinson International Society Annual Meeting

Abstract
My paper situates Emily Dickinson within a transatlantic tradition of “aphoristic science” — a genealogy of compact, observational writing running from Francis Bacon through German writers like Lichtenberg and Goethe to American writers like Emerson and Thoreau. Focusing on Dickinson’s botanical correspondence, I argue that her letters functioned as a laboratory in which she practiced a participatory science, writing in an aphoristic mode that holds close attention to plant detail in tension with an openness to interpretation. Drawing on Coleridge’s astronomical analogy of centripetal and centrifugal forces (and his related pairing of Fancy and Imagination), I read Dickinson's theme of Circumference as a similar polarity: language that is condensed yet expansive, bounded yet suggestive. Through her early letters to Abiah Root — especially her use of the ambiguous genus term Leontodon for the dandelion — Dickinson emerges as an imaginative practitioner of both botanical science and a doubled sesnse of “correspondence”: exchanging letters with a friend while also establishing an Emersonian correspondence with the natural world.

This paper is based on my Critical Institute draft from the 2025 EDIS International Conference in Taipei.