Emily Dickinson is a special case, I think, at least for me, since over the years I am often "discovering" poems of hers that I never really noticed before, poems that I had seen but hadn't opened up for me earlier. Many of her poems are closed little systems that seem puzzling until you somehow crack the code and step inside them. Also, while she clearly has some poems that are the stand-outs, the rest of her poems seem to be an important context to a full apprecition of the voice that speaks to us in the greater poems, and once you are tuned to the voice of her greater poems it is always nice to hear it speak once again in her "lesser" poems. So if only 100 of her poems are great, I will indeed choose to keep the other 1700 and value them.
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