"Emily was my patron saint," said William Carlos Williams in a 1962 interview. More recently, another prominent American poet, Adrienne Rich, described Dickinson as "the genius of the 19th-century female mind in America." Rich went on to praise Dickinson for inventing "a language more varied, more com- pressed, more dense with implications, more complex of syntax, than any American poetic language to date."
Despite the accolades of the poets and the probing of biogra-...