In the July 1893 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, an aspiring woman poet published one late contribution of many to the nineteenth-century American vogue for sonnets – the writer's first and, as it turned out, her last notice by Boston's aging grande dame of nineteenth-century high literary culture:

The author of this unimpeachably correct Petrarchan sonnet was Mary Potter Thacher Higginson, previously the author of Seashore and Prairie, Stories and Sketches (1877); an occasional contributor of poetry to Harper's Magazine, Harper's Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, and other periodicals; and the second wife of the reformer, author, and editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson. In the summer of 1893, she and her husband were in the thick of negotiating with Thomas Niles, of the Boston-based publishing firm Roberts Brothers, for the rights and illustrations for a joint collection of their poetry; the July printing of “Ghost-Flowers” in the Atlantic served as a small advance notice for Such as They Are: Poems by Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mary Thacher Higginson, which would be issued by Roberts Brothers in late 1893. The fate of the Higginsons’ joint volume, however, was predicted by its self-deprecatory title: Such as They Are sank into obscurity without drawing significant popular or critical notice.

The Atlantic's printing of “Ghost-Flowers,” followed in short order by the chastening of its author's hopes for her published volume of poetry, tells one typical story – reasonably typical at least with respect to her race and class stratum – of women's access to authorship in late nineteenth-century American poetry.

Anyone who knows any Dickinson poems probably knows “Because I could not stop for Death –.” “If the word great means anything in poetry, this poem is one of the greatest in the English language,” wrote the American poet and critic Allen Tate, one of Dickinson's most important early critical champions, in 1936; his judgment has since been ratified not only by innumerable anthology editors, but also by the several composers who have set the poem to music, from Aaron Copeland to Natalie Merchant.

The poem Tate knew as “one of the greatest in the English language” was not, however, exactly the poem as Dickinson wrote it. A single manuscript copy of the poem survives, transcribed into one of Dickinson's fascicles around 1862. The only version available to Tate in 1936 was that published by Higginson and Todd as “The Chariot” in their first edition of Dickinson's poems. Compare it to Franklin's version, a century later:

What part of Dickinson's value lies in her identity as an American writer? This question would not have seemed strange to Dickinson herself, nor to most of her English-speaking contemporaries on either side of the Atlantic. American literary culture in the years leading up to the Civil War was much preoccupied with asserting its independence of British models and British tutelage; the emergence of an original American literature, it was frequently argued, would ratify the political independence asserted by Great Britain's North American colonies in 1776, consolidated in the constitution of 1789, and defended in the war of 1812. The call for a new American literature was already old when Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his essay on “The Poet” (1844), lamented that

Around 1861, Dickinson copied out a poem that may be her most self-conscious contribution to the discourse of American literary nationalism – her most explicit attempt to assess the aesthetic value of her American materials. Contra Emerson, however, this poem starts from the premise that the distinctive value of those materials can only be known comparatively:

Dickinson's initial metaphor presents her as the simple originary product of New England nature, a lyric bird “growing” and singing in her native landscape as naturally as “Robins do.”

In his magisterial anthology The Experience of Literature, first issued in 1967 and intended for college-level literary courses, Columbia University's august literary critic Lionel Trilling included a poem by Emily Dickinson among the twenty-two works of poetry he selected for reprinting and explication. The Experience of Literature introduced Dickinson into very good company, alongside Milton's “Lycidas,” Arnold's “Dover Beach,” Keats's “Ode to a Nightingale,” Marvell's “To His Coy Mistress,” Shelley's “Ode to the West Wind,” and Eliot's “The Waste Land,” not to mention, elsewhere in the anthology, Sophocles's Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare's King Lear – a substantial vote of confidence in her value, especially for a poet whose works had only been available in something approaching a complete and reliable edition since 1955.

Trilling's principle of selection was anything but mysterious: allowing for the economies that dictated “Lycidas” over Paradise Lost, he represented major poets by one of their best-known works. Confronted with Dickinson's poetry, though, that principle appears to have broken down. Of the 1,775 poems before him in Thomas H. Johnson's 1955 variorum edition, Trilling lit upon an obscure short poem that had not drawn any previous editor's eye before Bolts of Melody (1945) gathered together the last bits of Dickinson's writing left unpublished in Mabel Loomis Todd's possession:

Perhaps the poem's direct reference to classical Greece amplified its value for Trilling, given the tacit theory of world literature behind his anthology's selections of drama and fiction (for what Trilling considered “obvious reasons,” the poems “are all English and American”). One matter, though, worried him. Acknowledging that “One of the tenets of modern literary criticism is that a poem is a self-contained entity” to which “knowledge of the personal life of the poet … is considered irrelevant,” he nevertheless conceded that for the purposes of this “striking little poem, there is at least one personal fact about the author which it is essential we bring to our reading – that the poet is a woman.”

In Todd and Higginson's 1890 volume of Dickinson's poems, Book II, “Love,” comprising eighteen poems, follows directly upon “Life.” Aside from a couple of pieces in Dickinson's early floral gift-idiom and one late poem probably sent to Mabel Loomis Todd, almost all of these poems were transcribed into Dickinson's manuscript books, her present-day editors believe, between 1861 and 1865, her most concentrated period of poetic production. A few were also shared in her letters, but for many of them the fascicle copy is unique; so far as the surviving record can tell us, Dickinson did not share many of these poems with other readers during her lifetime, and no one correspondent seems to have been singled out consistently to receive those she did share. For readers who believe that something uniquely valuable about Dickinson's writings inheres in their direct, concrete address to familiar individual correspondents, these poems considered as a group provide no such hook on which to hang an account of why they matter. Yet I would wager that these poems – among them “Mine by the Right of the White Election” (Fr 411), “I cannot live with you” (Fr 706), “There came a day at summer's full (Fr 325), “I'm ceded – I've stopped being theirs” (Fr 353), “T'was a long parting, but the time / for Interview had come” (Fr 691) and “I'm Wife – I've finished that –” (Fr 225) – remain some of Dickinson's most important, across many communities of readers. And for every poem Todd and Higginson included in “Love,” readers could supply examples of many more inhabiting the same structure of feeling.

It is hard to settle for calling this generative structure, which looms so large in Dickinson's oeuvre, simply “love.” Not that Dickinson herself didn't use the word, and frequently; but to compare one of her definitional or riddling poems about love, such as “While it is alive” (Fr 287) or “Struck was I nor yet by lightning” (Fr 841), with her contemporary Elizabeth Barrett Browning's celebration of “love, mere love” in Sonnets from the Portuguese is to see how far Dickinson will go not to wallow in tautology.

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.

Put it this way, as a thought experiment: If somehow all of Dickinson's manuscripts were lost along with all the copies of all the print editions and all the facsimiles, analogue and digital, of her writings – if Dickinson's poetry had to be reconstructed like Sappho's, from the memories of readers, from a smattering of fragments quoted by other writers, and from the assembled shards of Emily Dickinson coffee mugs occasionally unearthed from office middens – I suspect that an astonishing share of the corpus of her work could be accurately reassembled in stanza form, on its most basic metrical scaffolding of sound and sense.

Other aspects of Dickinson's writing that readers now value, however, including its embeddedness in personal correspondence and the visual appearance of her manuscripts, would be much harder to reconstruct. The affinity between particular poems and the wording of memorable letters; the poems that Dickinson chose to include in her first outreach to Thomas Wentworth Higginson; the high points of her long correspondence with Susan Gilbert Dickinson – readers would likely be able to converge on these. Reconstructing what was already a twentieth-century editorial reconstruction, experts might be able to reach a tolerable degree of consensus on the original relationship of the poems in at least some portions of some fascicles. In the effort to assemble and compare reliable texts of the poems, readers would contribute to recollecting Dickinson's most striking variant readings; it would be interesting to see how many such readings could be attested to by multiple readers. Readers who had spent time with Dickinson's manuscripts or their reproductions would retain, I think, at least general visual templates of early, middle, and late Dickinson: the careful cursive of the earliest fascicles, the wider spacing, cross-marked variants and unpredictable line breaks of the mid-1860s, the exploded fragments of the later years – and in the absence of the original manuscripts, memory would inevitably be biased toward the most extreme and distinctive characteristics of each phase of the life of Dickinson's writing. Memory of particular visual line breaks in particular poems in most cases would decay far more quickly.