She was known to give poems to friends and neighbors, often as an accompaniment to the cakes and cookies she baked, sometimes lowering them from an upstairs window in a basket. Her habit of binding groups of poems together into little booklets called fascicles might indicate she felt her poems were presentable, but most of her poems never went farther than her desk drawer where they were discovered by her sister after Dickinson’s death in 1886 of kidney failure. In her lifetime, her poetry remained unknown, and although a few small editions of her poems were published in the 1890s, it was not until 1955 that a reliable scholarly edition appeared, transcribing the poems precisely from the original manuscripts and preserving all of Dickinson’s typographical eccentricities (see Note). Convincingly or not, she called publication “the auction of the mind” and compared the public figure to a frog croaking to the admiring audience of a bog.

It is fascinating to consider the case of a person who led such a private existence and whose poems remained unrecognized for so long after her death, as if she had lain asleep only to be awakened by the kiss of the twentieth century. The quirky circumstances of her life have received as much if not more commentary than the poems themselves. Some critics valorize her seclusion as a form of female self-sufficiency; others make her out to be a victim of her culture. Still others believe that her solitariness has been exaggerated. She did attend school, after all, and she maintained many intimate relationships by letter. Moreover, it was less eccentric in her day than in ours for one daughter—she had a brother who was a lawyer and a sister who married—to remain home to run the household and assist her parents. Further, all writers need privacy; all must close the door on the world to think and compose. But Dickinson’s separateness—which has caused her to be labeled a home-body, a spinster, and a feminist icon among other things—took extreme forms. She was so shy that her sister Lavinia would be fitted for her clothes; she wore only white for many years (“Wear nothing commoner than snow”); and she rarely would address an envelope, afraid that her handwriting would be seen by the eyes of strangers. When asked of her companions, she replied in a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Hills, sir, and the sundown, and a dog large as myself that my father bought me.”

However tempting it is to search through the biographical evidence for a solution to the enigma of Emily Dickinson’s life, we must remember that no such curiosity would exist were it not for the poems themselves. Her style is so distinctive that anyone even slightly acquainted with her poems would recognize a poem on the page as an Emily Dickinson poem, if only for its shape. Here is a typical example:

’T is little I could care for pearls

Who own the ample sea;

Or brooches when the Emperor

With rubies pelteth me;

Or gold, who am the Prince of Mines;

Or diamonds, when I see

A diadem to fit a dome

Continual crowning me.

Such a short form leads to concision and quick-wittedness, her poems standing as dramatic examples of poetry’s ability to compress wide meaning into small spaces. She was also fond of the riddle. The diadem that crowns her always is the sky. With the dome of earth overhead, the little poem wants to ask, who needs the grosser riches of pearls, rubies, gold, or diamonds? The modest size of her poems (most are shorter than a sonnet) matches the modest space of house and garden in which she chose to live. The poems are also short because she does not waste time introducing the poem. She neither provides the details of a physical setting, as a conventional nature poem might do, nor does she explain the poem’s occasion. The poems begin suddenly, often with a declaration (“Superiority to fate / Is difficult to learn”) or a definition (“Hope is a subtle glutton”). Dickinson does not knock before entering, so the reader may feel swept up into the center of the poet’s thought process without warning. To open a poem by saying “I felt a cleavage in my mind / As if my brain had split” is to thrust the reader into a psychic intimacy with the fractured speaker. Also, her poems tend to end abruptly and decisively, often with epigrammatic authority (“The only secret people keep / Is Immortality”).

Her tiny, untitled poems may fit her sensibility and provide the verbal equivalent of a home’s safe enclosure—a room within a room—but the shortness of her lines is due to something else: her preference for common meter, the meter of ballads and Protestant hymns, and even of nursery rhymes. In common meter, a line of four beats is followed by a line of three beats.

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound

That saved a wretch like me.

Or, more speedily,

Old King Cole was a merry old soul

And a merry old soul was he.

Or, with Dickinson,

A thought went up my Mind to-day

That I have had before,…

Rhythmically, the three-beat line sounds like an answer to the four-beat line, and it also provides a one-beat pause at the end, a space to breathe. Dickinson used other kinds of cadences, but common meter is the usual gait of her poetry. Almost every Dickinson poem can be sung—like it or not—to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” a song in common meter. But unlike that song, her poems also include a counter-rhythm she created by interrupting the regular beat with dashes—her obsessive type of punctuation—and by her sudden jumps of thought. Instead of a steady run of meaning, the Dickinson poem hops from one figure to another in a kind of zigzag logic that requires not just our concentration but our own agility in making imaginative and grammatical leaps. Even her obituary in the Springfield Republican noted that she was “quick as the electric spark in her intuitions.”

At the heart of Dickinson’s imaginative originality is her use of metaphor to guide the direction of a poem and to examine the mysteries of life and death.