The first of these in particular reveals the extent to which the poet regarded Sue as her primary source of inspiration. Dickinson employs metaphors of wealth to depict Sue ("the Pearl -- / That slipped my fingers through -- / While just a Girl at school"); her love for Sue ("feelings so like gems, that I was sure I gathered them in whole baskets of pearls"); the poetic gifts she offers Sue ("I could bring You Jewels..."); the poetic trophies with which she hopes to triumph over Sue ("No matter -- now -- Sweet -- / But when I'm Earl / Won't you wish you'd spoken / To that dull Girl?..."); and, ultimately, her writing ("I'll clutch -- and clutch -- / Next -- One -- Might be the golden touch...").

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The link suggested by Dickinson's use of the same imagery to portray her love for Sue and her writing is made explicit in "It would never be Common...." This poem recounts how, when the poet had her "drop -- of India" (Sue is identified with India in two other poems) to write with and for, she "dealt of word of Gold / To every Creature" she met. But then,

...suddenly -- my Riches shrank --
A Goblin -- drank my Dew --
My Palaces -- dropped tenantless --
Myself -- was beggared -- too ....
I felt the Wilderness roll back
Along my Golden lines....

Once Sue became engaged to Austin and saw less of his sister, Dickinson felt as if she had been expelled from an Eden where poetic inspiration was "common." Nonetheless the poet remained devoted to Sue.

We might distinguish Dickinson's early and later views of Sue as naive versus informed idolatry. Conceding that she would never possess Sue completely, the poet compared her to Cleopatra, stressing her capacity to whet one's appetite for her without ever satisfying it.

She conflates Cleopatra, Sue, and nature in her writing by using similar imagery to describe them: In "The tint I cannot take -- / is best..." a sunset "swaggers on the eye / Like Cleopatra's Company," whereas in "Were nature mortal lady..." and "Like Some Old fashioned Miracle...," nature is depicted as feminine and beguiling.

But "What mystery pervades a well!..." most clearly associates nature's wiles with Sue's: One draft of the poem replaces "nature" with "Susan" in the line, "But nature is a Stranger yet." Like the well of the nature draft, Sue was unfathomable yet contained, domesticated, and familiar; and she was "a neighbor from another world / Residing in a jar," because Dickinson continually observed her comings and goings, from her bedroom facing Sue's house.

Dickinson apparently never tired of watching her; a few years before her own death, she wrote Sue,

To be Susan
is Imagination,
To have been
Susan, a Dream --
What depths
of Domingo
in that torrid
Spirit!

Sue's role in the development of Dickinson's writing cannot be overemphasized: As a source of love and frustration, of literary camaraderie and competition, she provided the poet with both a source of material and an ideal reader. Sue's early friendship inspired her to express her love candidly in poems and letters, but her perceived defection forced Dickinson to resort to poetic language to communicate with her.

No matter how strained their relationship, however, the poet continued writing to and for Sue, determined to keep her as an audience at any cost. As she wrote Sue in 1873, "We remind her we love her -- Unimportant fact, though Dante didn't think so, nor Swift, nor Mirabeau." Functioning as the poet's love object, wellspring of pain, ideal reader, and literary rival, Sue was Dickinson's muse. She elicited from the poet a body of homoerotic love letters and poems as passionate and elusive as any in western literature.

Although sometimes coded as romantic friendship, both gay male and lesbian attractions are reflected in nineteenth-century American poetry and fiction, including works by such major figures as Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson.

Although Western culture's reliance upon binary systems of classification and identification has meant the practical erasure of bisexuality, as such, from literary and cultural analysis, bisexual experiences appear in many literary works from ancient times to the present.

Since the 1960s, the general trend in lesbian poetry has been collective and political rather than purely aesthetic.

Until the beginning of the twentieth century, intimate, exclusive, and often erotic romantic friendships between women were largely perceived as normal and socially acceptable.

The frequently outrageous cultural commentary and caustic criticism of Camille Paglia have made her both famous and controversial.