Emily Dickinson's writing remains valuable to a wide range of readers today. This I know because my first-generation Kindle™ tells me so; when it goes to sleep, its electronic ink every so often morphs into her image, surfacing in the screensaver's rotation of canonical authors along with the likenesses of Charlotte Brontë, James Joyce, John Milton, Sir Thomas More, John Steinbeck, Shakespeare, Mark Twain, and Virginia Woolf.

If I query my reading machine about what Dickinson is being valued for, though, matters become more complicated. The Dickinson presented to readers through the Kindle's screen has been retouched on multiple dimensions. The image's hyperfeminine lace ruff, curly hair, and heavy eyeliner are crude twentieth-century fabrications drawn onto the single indisputably authenticated daguerreotype likeness that remains of Dickinson, taken in 1847 – she was then just over sixteen years of age – now preserved in the Jones Library of Amherst College. A reader disconcerted by Dickinson's extreme Kindle makeover could strike back with the “Emily Dickinson Historic Vinyl Wall Graphic Decal Sticker,” also available from Amazon.com – an imposing presence standing 60 inches tall, advertised as “Great for Parties.” Emily Dickinson as icebreaker? This unlikely version of Dickinson faithfully reproduces the flat hair and unadorned facial features of the famous daguerreotype, but alters Dickinson's dress to reveal her arms and neck: a wall sticker she may be but a wallflower she must not be, cost her image what it may in historical accuracy.

Less imposing but no less retouched are the Kindle store's most popular versions of Dickinson's writings: freely available digital transcriptions (made by volunteers in the Gutenberg Project) of the first, posthumously published volumes of Dickinson's poetry, edited by Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd and now in the public domain. Like the Kindle screensaver image, the writings in Poems of Emily Dickinson (edited by Higginson and Todd, 1890), Poems of Emily Dickinson, Second Series (Higginson and Todd, 1891), and Poems of Emily Dickinson, Third Series (edited by Todd on her own, 1896) were altered for public circulation, well ahead of their later migration into digital format: their spelling and punctuation altered to conform to late nineteenth-century norms, their stanza forms regularized, they appeared under titles (“The Secret,” “The Lonely House”) and in thematic groups (“Life,” “Love”) never assigned them by Dickinson herself.

In The Life of the Poet (1981), Lawrence Lipking proposes that “the image of a fulfilled poetic destiny – the life of the poet – continues to lure both poet and reader.” The value of individual poems to both poets and readers, he argues, stems in part from their relationship to “the cumulative purpose – the career or destiny – that unites them.” The high value that readers set on the life of the poet reflects our own human investments in “self-making,” as Edward Said calls it, which is not a prerogative reserved for poets alone; “all of us, by virtue of the simple fact of being conscious, are involved in constantly thinking about and making something of our lives.” The beginnings of poetic careers, according to Helen Vendler, echo and find artistic shape for the early stages of our common human self-making: “To the young writer, the search for a style is inexpressibly urgent; it parallels, on the aesthetic plane, the individual's psychological search for identity – that is, for an authentic self-hood and a fitting means for its unfolding.” Poets come into their own, as Lipking observes, in the process of learning to re-read and re-write their own earlier work, “in constant recoil from [their] earlier themes.” The “last great problematic” of artistic careers, Said proposes, is that of human life at large – “the last or late period of life, the decay of the body, the onset of ill health” – in response to which some artists take on, “near the end of their lives … a new idiom, what I shall be calling a late style”; great instances of late style may register “the artist's mature subjectivity, stripped of hubris and pomposity, unashamed either of its fallibility or of the modest assurance it has gained as a result of age and exile.”

For much of the twentieth century, and by many critical readers, Emily Dickinson's writing was thought not to have a life, in Lipking's strong sense of “a fulfilled poetic destiny” accomplished over time. What took its place were variations on “the Myth” of Amherst – in the phrase that village gossip began to use about Dickinson during her lifetime: the story of a woman who garbed herself in white, retreated to her father's house, and churned out hundreds of similar poems in the wake of a mysterious romantic rejection.