Emily Dickinson
International Society

Abstract
In an 1877 letter to Sarah Tuckerman, Emily Dickinson shares her “timid happiness” that, as she describes, “adds to some bright total.” Included in this total are Dickinson’s botanical companions: “The immortality of Flowers must enrich our own, and we certainly should resent a Redemption that excluded them.” This line, which suggests that Dickinson includes the nonhuman in her sense of immortality, is also unusual: in the vegetal world, flowers are among the fastest perishing entity. We can easily read this metaphorically—flowers live on in our memory even after the plant itself dies—and much recent scholarship by Christine Gerhardt and Mary Kuhn has usefully revealed the layers of botanical thinking in Dickinson’s writing. However, I instead read this line in light of the morphology of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In The Metamorphosis of Plants (1790), Goethe finds the Urpflanze in the form of the leaf: every piece of a plant, including its flower, is merely a metamorphosed leaf. For Goethe, vegetal life thus reveals the immortality of leaves. While Dickinson instead prioritizes the flower, I argue that her vision of plant life similarly conceives of immortality in this way: botanical forms metamorphosing over time, suggesting in the plant a feature of immortality that she traces in human experience and especially poetry. Turning to recent work in literary and cultural plant studies, especially the idea of vegetal cognition and “plant-thinking,” I suggest that in her letters Dickinson thinks with plants, whom she imbues with agency like Goethe and the metamorphosing plant or Henry David Thoreau and his “acquaintance” trees. Ultimately, I argue that Dickinson’s use of plants throughout her correspondence models a vegetal-focused empiricism that blends poetic language with botanical description, enabling plants to express their own agency—and immortality—to the reader.