“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold
no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the
top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I
know it. Is there any other way?"—Poet Emily Dickinson quoted by her
editor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in “Emily Dickinson's Letters,” The Atlantic
Monthly, October 1891
