harles Wadsworth, a clergyman she met in 1855, and later with Judge Otis Lord, whom she met in 1878. Linscott suggests that her separation from Wadsworth in 1862--after he accepted a position in San Francisco--led to a number of major changes in her life and career. First, she "seems to have considered, for the first time, the possibility of publication." Second, the man she wrote and sent several poems to in her tenuous attempt to publish was Thomas Wentworth Higginson, upon whom the bulk of this study will focus in his relationship with Dickinson. With respect to Lord, Dickinson "conceived for him a passionate love, and even hoped for marriage." In her last years Dickinson narrowed her activities increasingly to the domestic front, including baking, gardening, and writing letters to others who had experienced the death of loved ones. Her sister discovered her poems after her death and began a deciphering, copying and selecting among them for publication: "With the help of Thomas Wentworth Higginson she finished the task and found a publisher who agreed to bring out the book" (Linscott ix-vi). Dickinson wrote over 1700 poems in her life (Shurr 1).
Dickinson's relationship with Higginson was crucial for her life and her poetry. The sources indicate that until 1862 Dickinson had a number of reasons to have shied away from publication and greater exposure to the public for her poems. However, in 1862, after the end of her relationship with Wadsworth, she tentatively began to reach out to test the waters of publication, or
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