Notes From Your BooksellerIt’s hard to believe that only 11 of Emily Dickinson’s poems were published in her lifetime. A shining star way ahead of her contemporaries. We know she would have gone viral if she had access to Twitter. Short, first-person point-of-view poems that were ripe for understanding the human condition. We are jealous of anyone getting to read Dickinson for the first time.
Although Dickinson was a prolific private poet, fewer than a dozen of her nearly eighteen hundred poems were published during her lifetime. The work that was published during her lifetime was usually altered significantly by the publishers to fit the conventional poetic rules of the time. Although most of her acquaintances were probably aware of Dickinson's writing, it was not until after her death in 1886-when Lavinia, Emily's younger sister, discovered her cache of poems-that the breadth of Dickinson's work became apparent.
