"If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way"" A rhetorical question, for Emily Dickinson, the lyric poet sometimes known as the New England mystic, knew there was no other way. She spent her life creating an opus of 1,775 poems, only ten of which were published in her lifetime. She knew what made poetry, otherwise she could never have kept writing in the face of such public indifference. Yet this question was still posed in an 1870 letter to the literary editor of the Atlantic Monthly, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a man with whom Dickinson corresponded for many years about her poetry. Higginson, who professed to know exactly what made a good poem, managed to pass over 102 of Dickinson's which she sent to him over the course of their correspondence.
