My Life Had Stood a Loaded Gun

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. When volumes of her poems began to be published in the 1890s, she and her work became a sensation. Over four decades Dickinson carried on an erotically-charged intimate correspondence of poems, letters, and letter-poems with her beloved sister-in-law Susan Dickinson, sending her far more of her literary works than she sent to any other, and in this trove is the only instance we have of Dickinson rewriting a poem to suit her reader.