For one of the most noted poets in the American canon, Emily Dickinson had a rocky road to publication. In reading about her poems' journey to readers, one is struck by how easily they were almost lost to history.
In her lifetime, Dickinson published about ten poems, all anonymously. With significant alterations to style and syntax, several of her poems were included in the Springfield Republican in the period between 1858 and 1868, under the editor-in-chief Samuel Bowles. Dickinson's poems also appeared in Drum Beat, a newspaper dedicated to raising money for Union soldiers' medical services, and Brooklyn Daily Union. T.W. Higginson, one of Dickinson's literary confidantes, introduced her work to contemporary author Helen Hunt Jackson. Jackson was able to persuade Dickinson to publish a poem as part of a collection titled A Masque of Poets.
In 1886, after Dickinson's death, her sister Lavinia burned much of her correspondence in accordance with her last wishes. However, Lavinia received no guidance regarding the massive cache of poems Dickinson left behind. Seeing their literary value, Lavinia pursued their publication and sought the assistance of her brother's wife, Susan Gilbert, and later, his mistress, Mabel Loomis Todd. Todd's assistance, unfortunately, did not prove to be as harmonious as Lavinia had hoped. Things quickly deteriorated into infighting, resulting in the lack of a comprehensive edition of her work. A first edition of her poetry was released jointly by Todd and Higginson in 1890 followed by a second (of which "Wild Nights - Wild Nights!" was a part) and third series in 1891 and 1896, respectively. While these collections were instrumental in introducing Dickinson's work to the wider world, they also made significant (and overreaching) corrections to the poems, changing lines to fit contemporary sensibility. These edits erased many of the stylistic quirks for which Dickinson would come to be known: slant rhyme, capitalization, dashes, and more. Todd also notably removed all of Dickinson's dedications to Gilbert from the poems, likely seeking to downplay the intimacy of their relationship.
A complete, unedited, collection of her work would not be published until 1955, with Thomas H. Johnson's three-volume critical edition of her poems. While many scholars consider this the definitive source text for Dickinson's writing, others have argued that her poems are meant to be read in the order that they were bound by Dickinson herself. In any case, what Dickinson's complex relationship to publishing points to is the mystery and elusiveness that is inseparable from even her best-known works.
