"Dickinson, on the other hand, seems never to have seriously considered courting a large audience"

http://www.neh.gov/humanities/2012/novemberdecember/feature/the-image-writer

The Image of a Writer

By Randall Fuller | HUMANITIES, November/December 2012 | Volume 33, Number 6

Dickinson, on the other hand, seems never to have seriously considered courting a large audience. While it is often difficult to locate her meaning behind the verbal acrobatics and the smoke screens of her various personae, she made good on her claim to Higginson early in their correspondence. “I smile,” she wrote him, “when you suggest that I delay ‘to publish’—that being foreign to my thought, as Firmament to Fin.”

Except for a few poems published either without her permission or in order to benefit the Union army, Dickinson never published in the sense we understand it. Instead, she eschewed book and magazine publication and distributed an utterly original poetry that dealt obliquely with her era’s religious beliefs and sexual relations through letters and manuscripts to friends, family, and a wide range of correspondents. According to Kearns, this decision should not be regarded as a failure of nerve, an example of the gendered tyranny of the domestic realm, or a clue to pathology. Rather it was a shrewd move by an artist intent on exerting “the greatest power within a field of extremely limited production, . . . a practice that conduces to the greatest possible autonomy.”