On August 21, 1862, Emily Dickinson wrote a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, literary editor of The Atlantic Monthly, who had just published a piece of advice to young writers. She enclosed four poems and asked: "Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?"

Higginson wrote back. He told her the verse was alive but irregular. He suggested she regularize the meter. She thanked him and kept writing the way she had been writing.

Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, on December 10, 1830. She published ten poems during her lifetime — seven of them without her consent, submitted by others or extracted from correspondence. She wrote approximately 1,800. She kept them in hand-sewn fascicles, small booklets assembled with thread, stored in a locked chest.

The regularization problem Higginson identified is the one her editors spent forty years arguing over. When her poems were first published in 1890, four years after her death, her editor Mabel Loomis Todd and Higginson smoothed the dashes, regularized the meter, normalized the capitalization. The poems as edited were popular; the poems as written were not published until the 1950s, when Thomas H. Johnson produced the first scholarly edition restoring Dickinson's original punctuation and ordering.

What the sixty years of smoothing had done was make the poems comprehensible to a reading public trained on conventional Victorian verse forms. What it had also done was remove the structural features that gave the poems their power: the dashes that created rhythmic hesitation, the slant rhymes that produced unease rather than resolution, the capitalized nouns that gave objects weight they do not have in conventional grammar.

The question of why she didn't publish is the question her critics have been asking since 1890. The answer is almost certainly simpler than the explanations offered: she saw what happened to women who published, understood the trade she was being asked to make, and declined it.