I have an assignment to analyse her poems. I need to know the significance of dashes and capitalization in her poems. I would appreciate your help if you would.

I believe that the dashes are ED's way of doing pauses. Since nothing was published until after her death, we don't really know what she wanted.

The capitals are partially an old stylistic convention, and partially used when referring to God.

pam

The dashes are not consistent and represent a variety of pauses: periods, commas, semi-colons, colons, caesuras and even, infrequently, line breaks.

The following site might be helpful.
[www.colorado.edu]