It is rare that society and those who are in a position of power are ready to accept things that are new from people they see as odd, different or perhaps just less well-endowed. A publishing history of her work tells and interesting story of how Emily Dickinson’s poems often succumbed to the whim of big publishers who wanted to impose their own views, perhaps because they saw her unusual work as “sophmoric” and unpolished:

Mabel Loomis Todd and T.W. Higginson prepared the first volume of Dickinson’s poems for publication; it appeared in 1890 as Poems. Todd (the primary editor) freely altered Dickinson’s spelling, punctuation, and wording to make her poems conform with 1890s poetic conventions.

It took almost a hundred years before her work was widely accessible in an unadulterated form, free from spoil and intervention by those who claimed to have the public’s best intentions in mind.