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Emily Dickinson: Genius or Genius?

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Papersatan:
One of the problems with studying Dickinson is that she didn't publish. She didn't want to be published; poetry was not her profession, it was her hobby.  This makes her inherently more difficult to study than a Whitman, Faulkner or Frost.  Her poetry raises greater questions for me about the role of editing for the marketplace and of authorial identity.  Though I'm not sure the questions which her poetry and her new status raise are the lens through which she is taught in most classes. 

As far as her being agnostic/atheist: I am wary of citing from an author's work to provide proof of their personal feelings or beliefs because an author only has so much impact on their final published product and because even if their works were unedited, and you were reading them for the first time with nothing to color your interpretation you can never know what they author actually intended. That being said her works are highly edited to make them into more conventional "poems".  Many of them were also interestingly packaged by her.  I believe 'The Cricket Sang' was written on a piece of paper which was folded around a dead cricket.  That makes her work much more harder to analyse than your typical poem. 

That being said I love Emily Dickinson.   Her poetry looks nothing like it did when she wrote it, but few published works look like they did when their authors penned them.  Her works were found after her death and have been edited, by multiple people, to be easier to read.  The final product of all this is that we have reasonably standardized and readable poems which can resonate with us, and help us find a truth, which is the point of Literature in the first place. 

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