Only ten of her poems were published in her lifetime, all anonymously… Not that she intended her poems to go unread—she often sent them in letters to friends, sometimes with other enclosures: dried flowers, a three-cent stamp, a dead cricket.
After a gregarious girlhood, it was said, Dickinson had gradually become a near-total recluse, known around Amherst as “the myth.”
Higginson famously compared Dickinson’s hand to “fossil bird-tracks,” an insight about the shape and the saturation of her letters, and also about their flickering gait as they cross the white of the page.
Limited run Artist Books. Mass manufacture as something that stamps out idiosyncrasies and uniqueness:
It has been argued that Dickinson refused publication exactly because it was synonymous with print, whose standardizing tendencies she knew would miscarry her precision effects.
Time, on these little scraps, is a function of space: both run out at the same instant.