If members of the mid nineteenth-century American reading public were alive today, they would most likely be shocked to discover that by twentieth-century standards one of the greatest American poets of their time, is someone they never heard of: Emily Dickinson (1830-1886). It is also likely that most of Dickinson's contemporaries would have hated her poems if they had read them. The few people who did see them considered them incompetent and amateurish. Yet today most scholars consider only Walt Whitman to be Dickinson's equal and relegate nineteenthcentury favorites such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Sidney Lanier to the second rank.

Dickinson's life is wrapped in a mystery that may never be solved. Some time between 1858 and 1862 she had a traumatic experience. No one knows what happened, but many believe that she was in love with a married man...