Emily Dickinson wrote nearly 1,800 poems. Eleven of these (listed in Franklin, ed. (1998), pp. 1531-32) were printed during her lifetime, all anonymously. These anonymous published versions vary quite a bit from the surviving manuscripts; editors changed Dickinson's language extensively when printing the poems.

Dickinson died in May 1886. Her manuscripts were in several hands. A large collection of the manuscripts, including those bound together by the poet into the small manuscript books now called "fascicles," belonged to Lavinia Dickinson, the poet's sister and heir. A considerable collection belonged to Susan Gilbert Dickinson, the poet's sister-in-law. There were also letters and poems scattered among the poet's many correspondents.

Mabel Loomis Todd and T.W. Higginson prepared the first volume of Dickinson's poems for publication; it appeared in 1890 as Poems. Todd (the primary editor) freely altered Dickinson's spelling, punctuation, and wording to make her poems conform with 1890s poetic conventions. Further volumes of Dickinson's work, edited by Todd, appeared in 1891, 1894, and 1896.

After the death of Susan Dickinson in 1913, her daughter (the poet's niece), Martha Dickinson Bianchi, prepared a volume of Dickinson's poetry called The Single Hound, from manuscripts that had been in Sue's possession. Further volumes edited by Bianchi appeared in 1924, 1929, and 1935. After Bianchi's death in 1943, Millicent Todd Bingham (daughter of Mabel Loomis Todd) published most of the outstanding unpublished poems in a volume called Bolts of Melody.

Major projects uniting all the known manuscripts were undertaken by Thomas H. Johnson ( the poems), and by Johnson and Theodora Ward (the letters). These projects reached publication in 1955 as The Poems of Emily Dickinson and in 1958 as The Letters of Emily Dickinson. These editors restored the exact wording of the manuscripts and translated some of their distinctive punctuation and capitalization into print. A one-volume selection of a single version of each Dickinson poem was published in 1960 as The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson; it remains the most affordable and accessible version in print.

Still, many scholars felt that the 1955 Poems conveyed too little of the special qualities of the Dickinson manuscripts. A partial answer to this problem was provided in 1981 with the publication of The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, edited by R.W. Franklin. This volume provided facsimiles of the small books or "fascicles" that the poet herself had written and bound, mostly during the years 1858-1865.

Franklin continued his work on facsimile publication of important Dickinson manuscripts with The Master Letters of Emily Dickinson in 1986, a facsimile of several puzzling letter drafts found among the poet's papers. Marta Werner published a combination edition of and commentary on another set of manuscript drafts, in Emily Dickinson's Open Folios (1996). Throughout the mid-1990s, the Dickinson Editing Collective led by Werner, Martha Nell Smith, and Ellen Louise Hart made facsimiles of many Dickinson papers available on-line; in 1998 Smith and Hart published Open Me Carefully, a selection from the correspondence of Emily and Susan Dickinson. Also in 1998, Franklin published his complete revision of Johnson's variorum edition, The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition.