I believe that the poet is responsible for a poem’s power. As an extension to this, I believe writers are responsible for a written work’s power. Recently, S.E. Hinton received backlash after stating that two of the characters in her famous work, The Outsiders, were not homosexual. People accused her of not being considerate of young people in the LGBTQ+ community who identify with these characters they assumed to be gay, to which her response was “Young gay kids can identify with the book without me saying the characters are gay…I said I did not write the characters that way. I apologize for nothing.”

In the case of Emily Dickinson, who hid her poems and never published any of her work with her name on them while she was alive, I don’t think she would appreciate other people trying to dictate what she meant in her writing. Dickinson was known for using a writing style (and life style) that would set her apart from other writers, and, according to Howe’s commentary, she was “emanicpated from all representations of human order” when she locked herself in her childhood home for the majority of her life. The outside world is not equipped to analyze her poetry and accurately depict what it means which causes the poem to lose some of its power.

Howe goes on to say that “My voice formed from my life belongs to nobody else.” According to this, the reader of poetry actually strips the poet of power once the poem is read.

-Sabrina Rodriguez