.“As a teenage child-man in the 1960s new to what women might want, I saw in Dickinson a phenomenon I had no precedent for: a young woman who wanted a nest in which to create, not procreate.  Instead of focusing on what going out had been depriving her of, I obsessed over what she was depriving herself of by not going out. She, meanwhile, was clear: the nest she needed was the one she was already in. Her impulse to put herself away may have been sharpened by losses in love, but she turned her face from the world not in order to weaponize her despair, but as a valorous means to a single-minded end. Her asylum default had become solitude of a high order.   

There is a solitude of space
A solitude of sea
 A solitude of death, but these
Society shall be

Compared with that profounder site
That polar privacy
A soul admitted to itself—
Finite infinity.    

One whole poem of eight short lines sets up three vast solitudes – space, sea, and death to show them simply not stacking up beside the fourth, free will. . .