"Open the Door..." Emily Dickinson

When here nephew died, Emily Dickinson wrote,
" ' Open the Door, open the Door, they are waiting for me,' was Gilbert's sweet command in delirium. Who were waiting for him, all we possess we would give to know -- Anguish at last opened it, and he ran to the little Grave at his Grandparents' feet -- All this and more, though is there more? More than Love and Death? Then tell me is name!"

When Dickinson wrote poems, she wrote them on regular paper and collected stacks of these papers. She never published anything publicly but after a few years she would polish her poems for her self. She'd recopy them onto nice stationary, stack up a few sheets, punch holes in the edges and bind them together with string (these groupings are now called fascicles). She destroyed all the earlier drafts of the poems and put the fascicles on her shelf. Her handwriting wasn't very good; it was pretty but hard to read, a bit long and scrawly. It seems she really never intended anyone to read poems.

I don't think publication or popularity necessarily reflects the quality of a poem or poet, but I can't imagine what writing is if publication -- in the simple sense of making public -- is not the aim. What is this thing that Dickinson was doing if it was completely private? R Kearney always says that literature is someone says something to someone... and hermeneutics deals with each of those "some--"s. But to whom was Dickinson speaking except for a couple friends in letters? To herself? To God? When George Herbert writes confessional poems to God, he was so religious in a strict Christian sense that he actually believed he was speaking to an invisible being who could hear the words, whether or however this being responded.