When annotating Dickenson’s poetry, it is easy to highlight her philosophies about loneliness. She seems averse to notoriety of any kind, and seems to find enlightenment with solitude that others might find suffocating. Her poems read like midnight confessions written from herself as “letters to the world” as she puts it, which creates her uniquely intimate poetry.
It is with this context that we examined the chronology of Dickenson’s writing career, if it can so be called. The very small fraction of her poems which were published during her lifetime were done so anonymously in small papers and magazines, always heavily edited from their original state which can be found in her original manuscripts, all the rest were kept only for herself or closer personal friends and family and only published after her death. These facts seem to indicate that Dickenson didn’t have much interest in being known for her writing by the public at large, reflective of her reclusive lifestyle and philosophy of her poetry.
This is a map of relevant places associated with the life of Emily Dickinson.