Emily Dickinson had the extraordinary ability to convey in her poetry her experience of reality. For her, there were both surfaces and evasive underlying meanings. Unlike her contemporaries, she refused to provide definite readings of life’s surfaces, and her ambivalent, contradictory, and at times baffling poems reveal this rebellion against doctrinaire certainty, this willingness to reside in indeterminacy.

Confused by such indeterminate verses and concerned about public reaction, Dickinson’s first editors conventionalized her poems. They smoothed her syntax, her rhythms, and her rhymes, they altered word choices they believed to be eccentric, and they arranged her challenging poems in categories with interpretive headings such as “Love,” “Death,” and “Nature.” Although done with the best of intentions, these editorial decisions “robbed” (a term Dickinson herself once used under similar circumstances) the poet’s lines of much of what makes them powerful and difficult.

In her elliptical, intensely compressed verses (usually four-line stanzas averaging twenty lines), Dickinson omitted conjunctions, used imperfect rhymes, tossed aside agreement between nouns and verbs, created her own adverbs when there were none that fit her needs, and incorporated the subjunctive tense seemingly at will. Especially upsetting to Higginson, Dickinson ignored rules governing article usage, as in her use of the indefinite article in the line “I wish I were a Hay.”

In setting her thoughts to rhythm, Dickinson did turn to the conventional meters of popular nineteenth century hymns (the hymn meter of alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter), but in order to achieve meaning she often incorporated this meter with a twist, such as the addition of an occasional one-or two-stress line. Her “Wild Nights—Wild Nights!” is metrically provocative and startling, terms a contemporary also used when describing Dickinson’s piano improvisations. In tone, Dickinson is at one moment intimate and the next stark, at one moment appropriating the voice of a child and the next that of a queen. Whatever voice she appropriates, though, the idiom, with its complexity of syntax and richness of music, is uniquely her own.

Todd and Higginson were too prescriptive in selecting headings for Dickinson’s poems. Though certain themes are indeed recurrent, Dickinson’s exploration defies the simplistic interpretations that these headings imply, and her overall canon defies compartmentalization. Dickinson followed no school of thought. She easily moved from the realism of “A narrow Fellow in the Grass” to the metaphysics of “I died for Beauty—but was scarce,” and poems such as “Sweet Mountains—Ye tell Me no lie—” are not just nature poems but transformations, the creating of a more woman-centered religion that incorporates a reverence for the things of the earth. Though she also created poems about love, Dickinson wrote not the sentimental love poems of her contemporaries but hauntingly erotic and complex explorations, incorporating imagery rich in male and female symbolism. Her religious poetry reveals her unwillingness to accept carte blanche either the patriarchal God of her Puritan forebears or the more maternal version contemporary poets depicted. With her usual mixture of tones, she demands that her Heavenly Father (“Papa above!”) “Regard a Mouse.” Equally complex, her plumbing of psychological states, physical pain, and death is both unnervingly honest and imagistically descriptive. Poems such as “Crisis is a Hair,” “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—,” and “I felt a Cleaving in my Mind” stay with a reader long after the poems are read.

Dickinson’s manuscripts, with their many variants, show how much she loved to play with the multiplicity of language. As feminist scholars have pointed out, Dickinson’s awareness of connotative meaning transforms “She rose to His Requirement—dropt” from a poem that seems to accept patriarchal conventions into...