This portrait was in the Benét book, but radically touched up. Dickinson now wore a white dress with a frothy neck-covering lace collar. She had been given a fluffed-out girlish hairdo and her facial features had been softened. This altered image dated back to 1890. It was prepared as the author portrait for the first, posthumous volume of Dickinson’s verse. And it was of a piece with changes made to the poetry by its editors, who normalized her expressive punctuation, smoothed her rhythms and held back certain types of poems, notably those angry or erotic in content.

Prettification was a marketing strategy, and 60 years later Benét perpetuated it. Her life of Dickinson was the story of a well-bred young woman who, after a single disappointment in love, took the genteel option of retiring to her home, where she wrote, raised flowers, addressed a Calvinist deity and died content with her lot.

Image The manuscript of a poem written in Dickinson’s hand with a dried rose attached. Credit... Houghton Library, Harvard University. Gift of Gilbert Montague

That Dickinson was a useful figure to two American eras with much in common. In the 1890s a rich nation unnerved by urbanism, immigration and racial violence was looking back with nostalgia for a simpler, whiter, rural version of itself. Dickinson, sold as a kind of village folk figure whose withdrawal was a rejection of the modern world, became a spokeswoman for that past.

She played a related role in the cold war years. As paranoia about Communism and nuclear destruction grew in lockstep with expanding American might, the country again dreamed up a yesterday, this one peopled by God-fearing pioneers. Dickinson, the nunlike individualist, again filled the bill.

That was the Dickinson image I was encountering, but even back then I could see that it didn’t jibe with the poetry. A three-volume edition of the complete poems, cleaned of Victorian “improvements,” finally arrived in 1955. My town library acquired a copy, and I pored over it. I found Benét’s wistful poetess there, but I also found another writer, a terse, intense, startlingly imprudent one, who wrote about holding a bomb in her bosom, being afraid to own a body, and feeling a cleaving in her mind. At her most extreme, she was a terrorist:

Had I a mighty gun

I think I’d shoot the human race

My hero had appeared.

Then I came across a second Dickinson biography, this one tucked away in the library stacks, Rebecca Patterson’s 1951 “Riddle of Emily Dickinson.” The old gussied-up portrait was on the cover, but set on a black ground and surround by pattern of luridly colored leaves, a noirish design of a kind I associated with murder mysteries. I took the book home and was stunned by what I read.