This brief piece echoes an argument poet Susan Howe makes in her My Emily Dickinson that I've found quite persuasive: that Dickinson tends to be pathologized to serve the ends of critics who need to make her accessible to her own narratives. One reason this theory appeals to me is that it seems also to fit the way Dickinson is often beaten, round peg into a square hole, into the role of a simple-minded inspirational poet.

Dickinson is, and I hope she will remain, as enigmatic as her verse. There is, to my mind, no reason to dispel the mystery around her, nor is there any need to mystify her. Instead we should appreciate the ambiguities and uncertainties of both her life and her poetry.

Certainly I think, given limited time, one would be best served reading her collected poems rather than reading even the best of biographies. Assuming more time, I recommend starting with the Sewall bio. I plan to to track down Taggard's book!

She's not the last American female poet to become a cottage industry..Sylvia Plath is dug up at least several times a decade.
As you said:
"Dickinson is, and I hope she will remain, as enigmatic as her verse. There is, to my mind, no reason to dispel the mystery around her, nor is there any need to mystify her. Instead we should appreciate the ambiguities and uncertainties of both her life and her poetry. "

Amen..
A

Does it ever bother you that you can sing a lot of her stuff to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas"?

And there you go: the one thing that non-readers of Dickinson "know" (and feel awfully clever for knowing).

Her songs often fall into that rhythm because it's a hymnal form. No one faults Shakespeare for writing in iambic pentameter most of the time.

Does it ever bother you that you can sing a lot of her stuff to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas"? Any poem that has four beats per line can be sung to the tune of "Yellow Rose of Texas," including most of Dickinson's' poems.