The Poetic Science of the Ghost Pipe: Emily Dickinson and the Secret of Earth’s Most Supernatural Flower

“That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.”

In the late autumn of 1890, four years after Emily Dickinson’s death, her poems met the world for the first time in a handsome volume bound in white. Beneath the gilded title was a flower painting by Mabel Loomis Todd — the complicated woman chiefly responsible for editing and publishing Dickinson’s poems and letters.

Any flower would have been a fitting emblem for the poet who spent her life believing that “to be a Flower is profo...