Yes, it's true!
Because of the meter Dickinson used most frequently in her poems ("common meter" or "hymn meter"), one can sing much of her poetry to the tune of The Yellow Rose of Texas.
Try it now with the following poem:
"Could I but ride indefinite
As doth the Meadow Bee
And visit only where I liked
And No one visit me
And flirt all Day with Buttercups
And marry whom I may
And dwell a little everywhere
Or better, run away
With no Police to follow
Or chase Him if he do
Til He should jump Peninsulas
To get away from Me-
I said "But just to be a Bee"
Upon a raft of air
And row in Nowhere all Day long
And anchor "off the bar"
What Liberty! So Captives deem
Who tight in Dungeons are."
Ca.1862, in packet 88 of Dickinson's poems, as published in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Volume II, p. 509, T.H. Johnson, ed., Belknap Press, Cambridge, MA, 1955.
Dickinson's picture is reproduced from: Rutledge, L.C., 2003. Emily Dickinson's Arthropods, American Entomologist, 49(2): 70-74. Rutledge notes that 180 of Dickinson's 1,775 poems refer to one or more arthropods.
It's interesting to compare Dickinson's notions about the life of the Meadow Bee (I presume that she had in mind either a bumble bee or a honey bee) with biologists' current ideas, which document not only a different sex for Dickinson's Bee, but also a much more frantic pace of life for her (for example, Bumblebee Economics, Bernd Heinrich, Harvard Unv. Press, Cambridge, MA, 1979).
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