In a letter to Dickinson from Helen Hunt Jackson, Helen writes asking why Dickinson won’t consider publishing any of her works. She says that when she is dead and is looking back on her life, Dickinson will be sorry that she was so stingy with her work. It made me wonder if Dickinson would be or is regretting her decisions. Based on her reclusive and solitary nature, I’m not sure if she is disappointed. Her work has gotten out without her having to deal with the publicity that comes with it. If anything, I think that this is exactly what she would have wanted, if she wanted her work to ever be published at all.
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I’m not sure Dickinson’s refusal to publish would necessarily lead to regret, because publishing doesn’t have to be the goal of writing in the first place. Someone can take a craft seriously and even become really good at it without wanting a broad public audience. Dickinson still shared her work with Higginson, which suggests she wasn’t uninterested in being read, just selective about who read her. Publishing would have meant opening her writing up to a much wider audience, along with the possibility of editors shaping her poems or expectations about how poetry should look and sound. We even see this happen later, when early editors revised Dickinson’s poems to match what they thought her writing should look like. Keeping her work mostly within letters let her write more freely, without needing to shape the poems for a general audience or a clear public message. In that sense, I agree that what ended up happening almost feels fitting.