Dickinson published almost nothing in her lifetime and spent it largely in her room in Amherst, Massachusetts. From that room she sent out 1,800 poems that redefined what poetry could do. Her slant rhymes, dashes, capitalized nouns, and compression of cosmic subjects into domestic images ("Because I could not stop for Death / He kindly stopped for me") are entirely original. Harold Bloom placed her among the handful of greatest writers in the Western tradition.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.