Dickinson’s Aesthetics and Fascicle 21

Midway through a fascicle that is midway through her entire self-publishing project Emily Dickinson declared her aesthetic principles. In Fascicle 21 she copied, facing each other, two poems that, as far as we know, she had never sent to any correspondent and that were not published—and then separately—until more than thirty years after Dickinson’s death: “They shut me up in Prose—” (J613, Fr445) and “This was a Poet—” (J448, Fr446).¹ Fifty years and generations of commentaries on the poems in isolation from each other passed before Ralph W. Franklin’s Manuscript Books (1981) allowed us to see