Lavinia, soon after entrusting her collection to Susan for editing, abruptly reclaimed it, and delivered the work instead to Austin’s mistress (and Susan’s nemesis), Mabel Loomis Todd, who, with Thomas Higginson, a mentor of sorts to Dickinson, put out the first editions of Dickinson’s poems, in the eighteen-nineties. I came across this beautiful little edition of Emily Dickinson's Envelope Poems, which I couldn't leave behind.

An insightful new volume, The Gorgeous Nothings, edited by Jen Bervin and Marta Werner, also provides a fascinating glimpse of Dickinson by assembling images documenting the poetry she scrawled on repurposed envelopes — envelopes that have themselves been elevated to a new sort of art. In 2013, Harvard launched the Emily Dickinson Archive, with the coöperation, if not exactly the blessing, of Amherst, which insisted on open access to all manuscripts. It felt like a four star read to me simply because many of the ideas didn't feel finished or realized. A complete and mostly unaltered collection of her poetry became available for the first time in 1955 when The Poems of Emily Dickinson was published by scholar Thomas H.The first and immediate shocks are in the words, with other, lingering, aftershocks following in the visual details of their settings.

Her first collection of poetry was published in 1890 by personal acquaintances Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, both of whom heavily edited the content. It is a pleasant fancy to imagine that Dickinson, ever the tortoise in relation to rushing time, knew that, in the end, we would catch up to her.Her dashes stand for all the nonessential and time-taking aspects of syntax: she is a process poet even in her finished drafts, preserving the urgency of composition. Her own transformative power, often frightful even for her to contemplate, is their presiding subject: the “still—Volcano—Life” she describes as ever churning under her daily rounds. It has been argued that Dickinson refused publication exactly because it was synonymous with print, whose standardizing tendencies she knew would miscarry her precision effects.