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They shut me up in Prose ��
As when a little Girl
They put me in the Closet ��
Because they liked me “still�� ��

Still! Could themself have peeped ��
And seen my Brain �� go round ��
They might as wise have lodged a Bird
For Treason �� in the Pound ��

Himself has but to will
And easy as a Star
Abolish his Captivity ��
And laugh �� No more have I ��

I recently ran across an argument against eBooks that went along the lines of suspicions of censorship, commenting on how easy it would be for publishers and the like to change the text at any point via the digital interface, obfuscating any spot of material at any point thought necessary and rendering the interaction between reader and reading as puppet and puppeteer. A plausible occurrence, but an old one. Technology does not birth new abuses of communication and truth; it merely expedites, and leaves a different trail.

A century and a quarter after Dickinson's death, almost sixty years after the last of her poems were finally published as they were meant to be, and still much too much is made of the means by which she composed. Never mind the seven years of higher learning, the keen network of letters enabling a vibrant circle of thought, the oeuvre itself in its wondrous breadth and brilliant insight that puts many a classical novel to shame. No, let us instead focus on how weird she was, how closeted her life, how quiet her compositions, how we rescued her work from the dire abyss and shaped it for the public whims and fancies as to how an American gentlewoman of that day and age should have written. How easy it is for us to focus on the cutesy trifles, the small morbidities, the things we call experimentation in men and "capriciousness" in women, that last word courtesy of Thomas H. Johnson, editor extraordinaire. So proud he was of his complete collection and yet still couldn't give his scholarly focus the benefit of the doubt.

Endow the Living �� with the Tears ��
You squander on the Dead,
And They were Men and Women �� now,
Around Your Fireside ��

Instead of Passive Creatures,
Denied the Cherishing
Till They �� the Cherishing deny ��
With Death's Ethereal Scorn ��

One favor Johnson did well enough when he wasn't patronizing his chosen poet was accompany every poem with two years: one of composition, the other of publication. The first of the review was written 1862, published 1935. The second also 1862, yet published 1945. Once the anger at such mincing censorship has cooled, the text becomes invaluable, for here is a shameless record of piece by piece persistence of a work through the consternation of the ages. Paranoia inspired by digital outposts has nothing on a history of flagrant editing, closeting, disbelief and pride, till the author finally gets her due in her own words if not those of others.

God is indeed a jealous God ��
He cannot bear to see
That we had rather not with Him
But with each other play.

Written unknown, published 1945. Multifaceted the academics say, as if this wasn't a lifetime contained in 1,775 proofs of existence whose range of thematic material could have easily come together into one of those weighty tomes popularized by those with sufficient freedom of time and respect of endeavor by both Self and Other. Thought, Truth, Ethics, Creation, Creed, Deserving Pride, Bound Despair, Fragility of Self, Violence of Intellectual Development, Inexorable Stretching of Time from Second to Eternity and All the Survival Between, to name just a few of the topics captured so surely in succinct measures in some of my favorites of hers, thirty-one in total and not a single one seen before in high school classrooms and other variations on the popularity context. If you want the scale of a legacy of ungrateful disrespect, try Moby-Dick; or, The Whale on for size. Now make Melville a woman.

His Mind like Fabrics of the East
Displayed to the despair
Of everyone but here and there
An humble Purchaser ��
For though his price was not of Gold ��
More arduous there is ��
That one should comprehend the worth
Was all the price there was ��

Written 1878, published 1945. Even her compositional submission to virulent androcentrism couldn't revive this particular piece till near seventy years went by. Her mind was a marvel and knew it, too, clear evidence in her just contempt, her needful compartmentalization, her courting with the furthest ends of triumph and sheer oblivion. She never needed to go to war to know the futility of achieving glory and fame by means of homicidal finality, nor venture far from her chosen methodology of creation to contemplate the rise and fall of Life and Ideal the world over. Milton was blind when he conjured up Paradise Lost through dictation to his daughters, and nary a murmur that mayhap some of the result was her or her own. Dickinson was a woman who found the means to contemplate; the rest is sordid history and ugly present.

Witchcraft was hung, in History,
But History and I
Find all the Witchcraft that we need
Around us, every Day ��

Written 1883, published 1945.

I think I was enchanted
When first a somber Girl ��
I read that Foreign Lady ��
The Dark �� felt beautiful ��

[...]

Written 1862, published 1935.

[...]

My Splendors, are Menagerie ��
But their Completeless Show
Will entertain the Centuries
When I, am long ago,
An Island in dishonored Grass ��
Whom none but Beetles �� know.

Written 1861, published 1896. Whitman's multitudes came first, but Dickinson knew the difference then as bitingly as she would now. She was dead when others came to rifle through her work, and still they insisted on putting it and her persona through the torturous paces of then till today. Her words excavated themselves long before technology came into play; how long till we stop pretending otherwise?

P.S. She talked about the Birds and the Bees a lot. Just saying.