The saga of Emily Dickinson (1830–86), with the increasingly voluminous literature on the subject, has far exceeded that of her English contemporary Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89). Both were held to be eccentrically ahead of their time – they were barely published in their own lifetimes, and even then in edited versions for occasional appearances in periodicals. Robert Bridges sat on Hopkins's poems until 1918. Only ten of Emily Dickinson's poems had reached print by the time she died, but Poems, heavily edited and mostly given titles by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson came out in 1890, with another series in the following year. The first series went through eleven editions in two years; the second went through five in a similar period; and a third series came out in 1896. In spite of a so-called Complete Poems in 1924 and various supplementary volumes after that, the three-volume urtext edition prepared by Thomas H. Johnson came out as late as 1955, the three-volume edition of the letters following three years later. This was too late for Aaron Copland to use a correct text for his Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson, which is still the most convincing musical interpretation of one of the nineteenth century's greatest poets – and one of the finest song cycles to a text in English.

Emily Dickinson and Hopkins wrote without any contact with a normal public, but the New Englander's isolation seems the more acute. Both, however, had access to an intellectual community through family connections with higher education or the Church. In terms of sheer neglect, Emily Dickinson's predicament recalls that of Charles Ives – the few professionals who came across his work were baffled. Unlike Emily Dickinson, who wrote as a confessional diarist and sent poems to her friends, Ives was adversely affected by his neglect: he had stopped composing by the early 1920s. He lived just long enough to see his fortunes start to change after World War Il, but, like Hopkins, he was an original whose work was prevented from feeding into the mainstream until long after it had been created.