Emily Dickinson, poet of the interior life, imagined words/swords, hurling barbed syllables/piercing. Nothing about her adult appearance or habitation revealed such a militant soul. Only poems, written quietly in a room of her own, often hand-stitched in small volumes. then hidden in a desk drawer, revealed her true self. She did not live in time, as did that other great poet of the day, Wait Whitman, but in universals. As she knowingly put it: "There is one thing to be grateful for -- that one is one's self and not somebody else".

Dickinson lived and died without fame: she saw only a few poems published. Her great legacy was later rescued from her desk drawer -- an astonishing body of work revealing her acute, sensitive nature reaching out boldly from self-referral to a wider, imagined world. Her family sought publication of Dickinson's poetry over the years, selecting verses, often altering her words or her punctuation, until, in 1955, the first important attempt was made to collect and publish Dickinson's work, edited by Thomas H. Johnson for the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.