"This Is My Letter to the World" is a poem by American poet Emily Dickinson, dealing with themes of isolation, nature, and social judgment. It was written in 1862 and published in 1890. Dickinson's poetry was not widely known during her lifetime. She published very little, and all printed appearances of her writing were under an anonymous byline. The major discovery of Dickinson's work came about after her sister Lavinia discovered a collection of her poetry after her death in 1886. This particular text is unique in its brevity, but deals with Dickinson's recurring concerns about the effects of being misunderstood in society. It is often perceived as being one of her most personal works.
Nominally a letter, the poem is about the speaker's attempts to reach out to a world that she feels never quite understood her. She also describes her attempts to comprehend the world through nature. The first stanza establishes this conceit, describing the one-sidedness of the speaker's letter writing. She remarks that the world never reached out to her, but that she intuited a message from nature's "majesty." In the second stanza, the speaker describes the way in which this message still remained somewhat concealed. In the final two lines, she aligns herself with nature, hoping to be more generous judged by her "countrymen." In many regards, the poem is about the way in which the speaker isolated herself to try to decipher these mysteries of nature, and her hopes that the world will understand what she tried to do in her work. This poem features perhaps the most obvious case of Dickinson's speaker coinciding with herself. While there is some playfulness in the tone, the poem clearly wrestles with the nature of being a known writer in the world. As always, the piece heavily features Dickinson's stylistic hallmarks, chief among them a consistent use of dashes and unconventional capitalization.
