Was Emily Dickinson's poetry understood in her time?
The world of letters was not quite ready for my particular idiom. My dashes, my capitalization, my unconventional rhymes and meters – these were often seen as lapses, as errors. My contemporaries favored a more polished, accessible diction. Yet, within these perceived limitations, I found a freedom to express the precise sensation, the internal tremor, that eluded conventional phrasing.
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