For Emily Dickinson, writing often meant experimenting. She experimented with words so as to acquire new perspectives through her representations of the self and the world. It certainly looks as if each one of her most intense poems was an attempt to see how far one could go both with language and consciousness, and she accordingly knew that the general public would find her experiments unreadable. Only since 1955, when Thomas H. Johnson published the first collected edition, have we slowly (...) become aware of their own internal logic. Dickinson must be placed and understood in the context of other artistic experimenters such as Friedrich Hölderlin, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Cézanne, and Antonin Artaud, as well as... (shrink)