Playful Ecopoetics: Pressed Flowers as Lyric Subject

Abstract:This essay examines Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium and correspondence with Thomas Wentworth Higginson to reveal how pressed flowers function as indexical signs in her poetics. Drawing on Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotics, I argue that Dickinson created playful games binding words to material objects, establishing indexical relationships between poems, letters, and enclosed flowers. Through these games, she performed a disappearance of the human lyric subject, allowing nonhuman presences, particularly flowers, to emerge as speaking subjects. This substitution reveals Dickinson’s ecopoetic sensibility for it decenters human figures while foregrounding environmental attention.