1In 2020, science had a magical moment. As the air became hostile and amateur epidemiology spiked, two science writers arrived to tell us that, no, science does not have all the answers, and that, no, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. For one of them, this was old news. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants was first published in 2013, but didn’t hit the New York Times Best Sellers list until February of 2020. It has stayed on the list for, at the time of writing, 226 weeks. Spun between Kimmerer’s essays in the volume is a story of dis- and re-enchantment. Her signal anecdote involves the complementary colours of purple aster and yellow goldenrod, which grow together in meadows. Why, she asked her undergraduate botany advisor, does nature care about such aesthetics? The advisor, as she recalls it, roundly told her off: “I must tell you that that is not science. That is not at all the sort of thing with which botanists concern themselves” (40). The irony the chapter reveals (although Kimmerer interestingly does not state it as such), is that there is a very good evolutionary-botanical explanation for the colour pairing. Bees, it turns out, see the colours of aster and goldenrod very similarly to humans. Purple and yellow, as complementary colours, make each other appear more vivid. So in a field of flowers, the mixed patch of aster and goldenrod would act as a “beacon” for pollinators (46). It is harder to accept Kimmerer’s claim that the flowers are therefore “beautiful” to bees, but this is exactly the point of her argument about what academic science misses (46). In its quest for systematic, empirical rigour, it might miss answers by scorning some kinds of question. In the case of the meadow flowers, it was wonder that began the work. In a world subject to multiple environmental collapse, this “cross-pollination” between science and ways-of-knowing less liable to reinforce the human/non-human divide is, Kimmerer argues, vital (47).
22020 also saw the publication of Carlo Rovelli’s Helgoland, a history of quantum physics culminating in a case for the “relational” interpretation. It is a cliché to say that quantum physics looks, to the layperson, like magic. Schrödinger’s classic thought experiment hardly helps things, with its rabbit-in-the-hat theatrics, and its whiff of necromancy. Rovelli, though, is happy to tell us that we shouldn’t worry, and that sometimes it looks like magic from the inside, as well. Having led us deftly to the problem at the heart of the science—that nothing has any properties until it is observed—he showcases a few of the “interpretations” of this magic. The “many worlds” theory, in which every observation splits the universe in two, is probably the most well-known. Opening the cat’s box, we find it alive because we are in the alive world, and the dead world has split off, unrecoverable, or vice versa. Rovelli doesn’t quite buy this, and offers instead his own “relational” interpretation. In this theory, the universe manages to get up and go in the morning because everything is observing everything else. I might feel, as a thinking, sensing human, that I am the one observing a rock. But at the quantum level, says Rovelli, where every particle exists in relation to another, the rock is looking back.
3What, though, is the value in calling either of these things—Rovelli’s relations and Kimmerer’s wisdom—“magic”? In 2021, a third book came along to make that case. Chris Gosden’s archaeological survey, The History of Magic, proposes that human culture has, since its first emergence, been made up of a “triple helix” of science, religion, and magic. Different periods and different places have seen one or two ascend over the others, but they have all always been there. Within this helix, magic is the admission of the indeterminate. Its precise, formal rituals are a response to a world in flux, in which the human is not a privileged category. This account of magic explodes that of gaming and popular fiction. The magic of Harry Potter and Dungeons & Dragons, with their distinct, codified spells, is based on action by the individual. Characters desire an effect in the world and make it happen. Magic as Gosden finds it, meanwhile, is a response to not knowing what will happen. The harvest might succeed or it might fail. My child may sicken or heal. Magic rites and shamanistic rituals, in his telling, work to remind us that humanity is not the axis on which the world spins. The rock looks back.
4Gosden is cited early on in Renée Bergland’s Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science. And like Gosden (and Kimmerer and Rovelli), Bergland offers her book as a case for re-enchantment. She finds this vocabulary in Max Weber’s 1917 lecture on the “disenchanting of the world” by science and mathematics, and her introduction seats this disenchantment, in turn, within Darwin and Dickinson’s nineteenth century (2). The current cultural reputation of science as “secular” and “systematic” was a reversal of science’s historic aura. Where the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had seen science, or what was then called “philosophy,” as a “dirty-handed” pursuit, opposed to the purity of literary and theological study, the nineteenth century saw it professionalised into a sober, empirical endeavour. Darwin was the emblem of this change, albeit, per Bergland, unwillingly. If even something as majestic as the diversity of the planet’s species could be explained by simple laws, every other mystery was surely on a short clock. The scientific community had proven that it had the answers. What got lost in this gentrification of science was “natural magic”: the emotional or spiritual response to the natural world even or especially under close observation. Science, by the end of the century, had “distanced itself from wonder” (2). Bergland sets out to reclaim that natural magic by reading Charles Darwin as a scientist reluctant to abandon wonder, and Emily Dickinson as a poet always ready to wonder at science. Her case for the paired study runs like this: if disenchantment was an inevitable result of cultural progress, then why did Dickinson, a poet famous for her mysticism, give so much space to evolutionary science in her poems, and why did Darwin, the vanguard of that progress, so rue his lost love for poetry?
5The ensuing account of their parallel but non-intersecting lives is generically hard to fix. It is tempting to call the book an intellectual history, because it does that tricky work of idea-chasing so well, but its manifest interest in the world beyond scientific societies and journal pieces makes the label a poor fit. Critical biography probably hits closest to the mark, albeit with a caveat. Bergland is sharp on the scholarship for both her subjects, and her twinned reading gives her a tool to scrape away at outdated portrayals, but the very nature of the book’s argument takes it towards a kind of productive sentimentalism. As a work of criticism, Natural Magic wants us to carefully rethink its subjects based on the literary-historical evidence. As a biography, it still very much wants us to like them. The book proceeds in alternating, chronological chapters. Darwin was twenty-one years older than Dickinson, so some time compression is required early on. After a prefatory chapter made up of excellent close-reads of her subjects’ childhood portraits (both of which prominently feature flowers), the first full Darwin chapter takes him somewhat breathlessly to twenty-two and the brink of his voyage on the Beagle. The first Dickinson chapter, meanwhile, sets up Amherst as a scientific and intellectual hub, with the infant poet only half-present in the background. Once Dickinson catches up to adulthood, though, the book’s back-and-forth structure starts to blossom. Bergland has given herself a hard task, because Dickinson only ever mentioned Darwin twice by name, and Darwin almost certainly never read a Dickinson poem. The pair’s mutual friendship with Thomas Wentworth Higginson is the closest thing Bergland finds to an encounter. Instead of an account of a personal or textual relationship, therefore, we get the story of Dickinson growing up within an intellectual culture textured by the transatlantic scientific exchange that accompanied natural selection’s gradual entry to mainstream thought. Bergland capitalises on the diffuseness of this relation, and makes great use of her subjects’ different scales of experience. While the Darwin of Natural Magic travels the nation and then the globe, Dickinson rarely gets out of Amherst. And yet, she never missed a beat of the century’s intellectual traffic, and, in Bergland’s reading, formulated her correspondence and poetry not as a private reflection on that traffic, but as an equal partner within it.
6The book’s major breakthrough (at least from my perspective as a Dickinson scholar) comes in the early chapters. Bergland spots that Dickinson grew up in a vanishingly small educational window, wherein science was judged a fine pursuit for young women, while young men received the more humanitarian instruction necessary for college entry and eventual practice in politics and law. We already had an image to hand of Dickinson the amateur botanist, picking flowers for her herbarium, and have long had a fine reflection on it in Judith Farr’s The Gardens of Emily Dickinson. But where Farr focusses on this activity as primarily aesthetic, Bergland situates Dickinson’s botanical activity within a very specific moment for science, gender, and education. Even one generation later, in 1866, when Dickinson’s niece Mattie was born, science had become “primarily reserved for boys” (78). Thus, when Dickinson writes in her botanical mode, she is doing so less in resistance to a spectre of hard, male science, and more so as a scientist. Chapter seven offers a parallel sketch of Dickinson arriving at Mount Holyoke Seminary, and Maria Mitchell, at twenty-nine, discovering the comet that would make her “the most celebrated American scientist of the decade” (154). This constellation of educational opportunity and example would not have been lost on Dickinson, who might well have understood even her private botanical writing as putting her on a continuum with Mitchell and other women scientists. I would not be surprised if, on the back of Bergland’s work, a scientific Dickinson becomes the next scholarly phase for the poet (as predicted by Robin Peel’s 2010 Emily Dickinson and the Hill of Science). There is a great deal to be said for combining, as Bergland does here, the presiding interest in Dickinson in her social-political context with a response to the renewed pressure on the humanities to justify itself in relation to STEM subjects. Bergland shows in her novel reading of Dickinson’s botany how this can be done without any kind of disciplinary self-deprecation.
7Natural Magic is, in sum, an undoubted success. Finding, in 2024, a new Dickinson and a new Darwin feels like a magic all of its own. It is, however, a book with a lot of ground to cover, and the work on what is shared between the scientific and the poetic puts something of a cramp on what is unique to each. Darwin’s experimental method, for instance, is only lightly touched upon. Bergland might be right to take the reader’s understanding of natural selection for granted. One of the symptoms of disenchantment, after all, is the tendency for mainstream scientific theories to sit blandly in education and culture, as received facts rather than emergent structures of thought. Which is to say, liberally educated readers probably think they know what evolution means, without another rundown of the finches. And yet, it might have been to the book’s benefit to stage Darwin’s discovery more dramatically. “Discovery” is, to be sure, another term under Bergland’s microscope. Natural selection, she shows us, emerged almost inevitably from a series of long shifts in geological and biological thought, not from one late night in the lab. But Darwin still had to do something before he was sure enough to publish. Bergland paints a very human picture of Darwin shut up in his office with “his barnacles” for months on end, in a kind of symbiotic immersion in the natural (195). What he actually did with them is less clear. What adaptations did he find? What evidence persuaded him he would be taken seriously? Perhaps not every reader will share my curiosity here, but, after Kimmerer, I believe these encounters matter, since so often they rest not on empiricism, but on imagination’s interaction with the real.
8Dickinson’s poems, meanwhile, are highly present in the book, but not fully activated. I came away from Natural Magic with no doubt in my mind that Dickinson was thinking through the logics and implications of natural selection in her verse. In “Flowers – Well – if anybody” (Fr95), she writes of the butterflies of “St Domingo” having “a system of aesthetics” superior to her own. Prior critics have made a case for St Domingo as a reference to the Haitian Revolution, and thus to the abolitionary crisis of Dickinson’s own decade. To this, Bergland adds a rejuvenatory Darwinism, concluding that “Dickinson’s poems offered readers a vision of an interconnected natural world where death was as closely related to new life as beauty to truth” (295). While this reading opens the poem up, it also closes it down. Flowers, earlier in the poem, stir an ecstasy which is “Half a transport – half a trouble.” The trouble slips out from Bergland’s paragraph, as do the troubling implications of compulsion in “transport.” As a pair of opposites, “transport” and “trouble” are a dramatic failure, and Natural Magic does not make room for that kind of malfunction. In one of her transition sentences, Bergland points out that, contra Darwin, “Dickinson’s experiments were primarily literary’” (265). This could probably have gone without saying, and yet on the other hand that word “experiment” serves Dickinson well. Her poems are so often reachings towards, or testings out, and, and sometimes the results don’t match the hypothesis. Bergland starts and ends Natural Magic with a focus on two lines squeezed onto the bottom of a page in Dickinson’s first fascicle: “To him who keeps an Orchis’ heart / The swamps are pink with June” (Fr31). Bergland treats this as a complete poem, despite it having only the first seven beats of Dickinson’s standard fourteen beat stanzas. It is only a half a thought, haunted by a missing preface or conclusion. What is the fate of those without “an Orchis’ heart”? Is it that she cannot imagine such a thing, or that the poem would be unable to reconcile two such opposites? These moments where Dickinson leaves poetry’s mechanics on show are vital to her project, in which poetic language might, but does not necessarily, cross the gap between writer and reader.
9Perhaps what I am circling here is not a criticism of Natural Magic at all, but an opportunity of which it has made me aware. It is much easier to make drama of science than of poetry. This is probably why popular science is a thriving genre, while popular poetics is not even remotely near to being a thing. The glassy laboratory, the night sky, the dense blackboard of sums resolving to some perfect answer—science has its signal scenes of mystery. The only recent media that comes to mind as having tried something similar for poetry is, tellingly, Alena Smith’s Dickinson. Each episode sees inspiration strike Dickinson as she goes about her life, and the words of what will become a poem appear as calligraphic hallucinations on the screen. It is as good a way as any of giving room to text in a textless medium, but it ends up reducing poetry to a form of diarising, a limited reflection on personal experience. The poem becomes the conclusion, the end result, and not an active site of questioning. We lose, in essence, the kind of magic which science is ironically allowed to keep, and which is so much of Dickinson’s method: the giving room to doubt.
10One of the most evocative images Bergland offers in Natural Magic is of Darwin preparing for what would be a five-year stint aboard the Beagle:
When Darwin packed his bags for the voyage, he took along a few scientific instruments (telescope, microscope, compass, clinometer), “a case of good strong pistols and an excellent rifle,” and a large number of books, including a Bible, Paradise Lost, William Paley’s Natural Theology, John Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse on Natural Philosophy, Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative, and dozens of blank notebooks. (71)
11In Bergland’s hands, this packing list becomes a showcase of different kinds of knowing, or, rather, of asking. Natural Magic is in good part a study of what something like Paradise Lost could do for Darwin, in complement to his microscope and his blank notebooks. Could Paradise Lost and its complex formal apparatus be an instrument of enquiry, or of production? To make a science of poetry in this way goes counter to Bergland’s argument, which is that both poetry and science should act, on their own terms, as access points to non-human otherness. She is entirely right, but her hope seems to me early. With very little going our way at present, the job of literary scholars might have to be, for now, simply to persuade outside observers that literature still has questions to ask; that a poem might look back.