Drohan is a professional editor and writer who specializes in classic and contemporary literature. In the following essay, she explores Emily Dickinson's love of nature and her expression of its inherent contradictions and mysteries in "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass."

Dickinson composed over five hundred poems that examined the relationship between man and nature, a select few of which are categorized as anti-transcendentalist. This means a selection of her nature poems deals with ideas that are in direct opposition of transcendentalist poets, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and David Thoreau, who believed one could achieve a spiritual connection with nature. Dickinson departed from what she thought to be a simplistic view of nature to show that nature will remain forever elusive from any real under- standing or interpretation. Her unique ideas are represented most succinctly with "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass."

When the poem was...