Preface Although a very prolific poet—and arguably America’s greatest—Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) published fewer than a dozen of her eighteen hundred poems. She preferred not to, and instead created her own gatherings of poems into packets later known as fascicles. When, in her later years, she stopped producing these, she was still writing a great deal, and at her death she left behind many poems, drafts, and letters. And it is among the makeshift and fragile manuscripts of Dickinson’s later writings that we find the “envelope poems” gathered here. (Strictly speaking, some of the envelope writings collected here are messages or notes rather than poems.) The earliest envelope poem may have been composed around 1864, but the majority were probably created from 1870 to 1885, when she was no longer creating her fascicle books and when she was testing, differently, and for a final time, the relationship between message and medium. “What a | Hazard | a Letter | is – ” Dickinson scrawled in a late fragment composed in a handwriting so disordered it seems to have been formed in the dark. These manuscripts on envelopes (recycled by the poet with marked New England thrift) are sometimes still referred to as

Manuscript A842, “As there are | apartments in our | own minds”