Copland's Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson bear testament to a trend in the composer's post-war music away from large-scale "public" works to those of a more private, introspective nature. The cycle's genesis can be traced to March 1949, when Copland started work on a setting of Dickinson's celebrated poem "The Chariot." As work progressed, he considered a sequence of three songs, then six. By March 1950 he had composed twelve, arriving at an order only after the completion of the entire set, a time-honored procedure dating back to the cycles of Schubert and Schumann. Copland began arranging some of the songs for chamber orchestra in 1958; by 1970 he had orchestrated eight, and published these as a freestanding set under the title Eight Poems of Emily Dickinson.

In contrast to Copland's earlier works, the Dickinson songs reflect a preoccupation with the issues of love, death, and self-realization. While Copland consulted at least two volumes of Dickinson's verse and set her poetry thus, the editions he used were corrupt to various degrees; in fact, no complete critical edition of Dickinson's work appeared until 1955. Much of the punctuation—including Dickinson's trademark dashes—was smoothed over, and occasional words or even stanzas were omitted altogether. Nevertheless, most of the texts as set by Copland are a fair approximation of the authentic versions.

The first two of the Eight Poems, "Nature, the Gentlest Mother" and "There came a Wind like a Bugle," address nature as an alternately benign and destructive force. The poet turns to matters of faith in "Why Do They Shut Me out of Heaven?," a song in which she imagines herself turned out of heaven for singing too loudly, a nod to her own nonconformity. "The World Feels Dusty" and "Heart, We Will Forget Him" address the matter of love and solace in the face of death, while "Dear March, Come In!" celebrates springtime, whimsically depicted as though a caller coming to the house for a visit. At the heart of the cycle is "Sleep Is Supposed to Be," an exalted, messianic vision of life and death. Matters of faith and doubt are expressed in "Going to Heaven!," wherein the poet pictures her ascent to heaven; in "The Chariot" she envisions her own funeral ride to the cemetery, observing the life cycle from childhood to death and beyond.

Copland's settings are enormously varied, alternately melancholic, sardonic, and wistful in tone. His distinctive and often demanding vocal writing contains numerous bold leaps, jagged melodic lines, declamatory rhythms, and extremes of range that require a singer with a particular ease and flexibility in both the soprano and mezzo-soprano ranges. Copland expressed a special liking for "Sleep Is Supposed to Be" and "The Chariot"—indeed, two of the cycle's most gripping songs. Still, the whole is larger than the sum of its parts, and presents a compelling, complementary, and multifaceted portrait of what Copland called Dickinson's "unique personality."

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