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Originally Posted by st.cronin
Emily Dickinson's poetry was read by literary types during her lifetime, and was absolutely composed for an audience. That that audience didn't show up until later has nothing to do with that fact.
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Your depiction of her work being "read by literary types", while partially true in certain regards, is not supported by historical fact. The editor who she sent her poems to for advice, in fact, tried to change her work to fit the contemporary mold in order to reach a wider audience, and Dickinson didn't follow along. She published ten poems in her lifetime, and most of those in a single daily newspaper.
And she certainly wasn't writing to meet the expectations of her contemporary audience -- her voice was unprecedented. It wasn't until many, many decades after her death that her work came to be recognized as important. I'm not foolhardy enough to claim I know what her intentions were in regards to audience, but her behavior and career (or lack thereof) certainly doesn't support the argument that she was trying to connect on their terms. And I likewise don't believe she felt that her work was meaningless since she just made books out of her poems and stuck them in drawers.