Passionate, astute, concentrated. The poems of Emily Dickinson (1830–86) have marked her out as one of the great American poets and she has been placed by the critic Harold Bloom as a key figure ...

sweet loaves and would even lower a basket containing the gingerbread from a window to neighborhood children waiting below.

By comparison, Emily Dickinson’s known epistolary output (1,304), written for a tighter circle of correspondents, seems measly. Yet she, too, appreciated the value of speedy delivery.