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Since her death, Emily Dickinson has stunned the world with her abstruse poetry, sharp intellect, brazen stubbornness, and unconventional yet simple life. One hundred thirty years after the discovery of her private corpus, scholars still struggle to understand her choices—debating about critical approaches to a body of work that disorients and overwhelms. And yet, Dickinson's words are profoundly accessible in that they continue to reach and stir us to this day, despite their mystery. A quality worth addressing in Dickinson's poems has allowed for them to remain cryptic and still hold our interest—existing as continuous fodder for highly polemical debates.
Part of what makes Dickinson's corpus so complex are the myriad forms and configurations her poems take. First, Dickinson vehemently defied conventional stylistic methods,1 often leaving confusing, contradictory marks on the page: dashes that could be periods, slashes and spaces, crossed out lines of verse, and notes and variants in the margins. Dickinson also wrote prolifically, sometimes at a rate of 300 poems a year, which makes her collection even more staggering to her critics. Many of these poems she bound with string into bundles that were later called fascicles, in addition to writing poems in letters and on envelopes. She also left fragments of thought and poetry on paper bags and scraps, with no discernable organizational system. One could imagine that traditional convention would
have stifled the rich, expansive multiplicity of the mind that was embodied in this assemblage of work.
The material plane of her poetry, like its forms, also illuminates the relation of her poetics to psychic experience. Werner (1999) notes:
The manuscripts have iconic value, serving as metaphorical as well as actual containers for thoughts: an envelope shaped like a bird carries a text about flight, a seal becomes a space for Dickinson to meditate on the power of secrecy, a torn edge corresponds to a textual verg