Emily Dickinson and the hill of science

"Emily Dickinson and the Hill of Science offers a new reading of Dickinson's 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 once have thought." "This fresh appraisal of Dickinson asks what happens when we shed all the assumptions we normally bring to the work of Emily Dickinson, and read her not as a poet, but as a concealed natural philosopher/ scientist, using parallel methodologies and inspired by the same questions as he