Richard, your Dickinson example strikes a real chord. Just last weekend I was waxing tedious with a friend, explaining how I loved reading even her "bad" poems because her countless great poems had made me fall in love with her voice, and that often one encounters a few great lines within poems that don't succeed all that well overall, and always one gets to hear someone who can be no one other than Emily Dickinson. My friend, a composer, countered with a similar observation about Mahler.
I also find that knowing ED's great poems provides a gloss on her lesser poems, and vice versa. My "bias" for ED, which is rather pronounced, is thus not a true bias but a passion formed and deepened by familiarity.
I'd agree that in some ways she becomes more difficult the more you read her, but I do recall my first encounters with her (in high school, when I first started reading poetry) were scarcely different from encountering an entirely foreign language, or maybe pages of Chinese ideograms, and now I feel very much at home with her language and its difficulties are more philosophical, not the kind that exclude me from the poems but the kind that bring me deeper within them. She speaks a language that I now understand, though I don't understand everything she says in that language.
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