Product Description
Poems by Emily Dickinson, Three Series, Complete is presented here in a high quality paperback edition. This popular classic work by Emily Dickinson is in the English language. If you enjoy the works of Emily Dickinson then we highly recommend this publication for your book collection. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Poor Choice
I'm not sure why anyone would want to publish or buy this book.It is like a Xerox copy of her poems in fine print without a table of contents or an index.The far superior Franklin edition is available for only a few dollars more.I suggest interested readers look there.

Creative Genius
Emily Dickinson is very creative with her concise, rhyming poetry. She speaks about nature, love, death and God. Could you believe that a woman has that much creative talent? She is a female writer who breaks the barriers of gender. She challenges men and the world with her short but powerful words. A must read! ... Read more

Product Description
The only authoritative paperback collection of all of Emily Dickinson's poetry. The editor has assembled a reading text of the preferred forms of all 1,775 poems, and has included in his introduction an explanation of his selection of texts, plus a helpful outline of Emily Dickinson's career.Amazon.com Review
Emily Dickinson proved that brevity can be beautiful. Only nowis her complete oeuvre--all 1,775 poems--available in itsoriginal form, uncorrupted by editorial revision, in onevolume. Thomas H. Johnson, a longtime Dickinson scholar, arranged thepoems in chronological order as far as could be ascertained (the datesfor more than 100 are unknown). This organization allows a wide-angleview of Dickinson's poetic development, from the sometimes-clunkyrhyme schemes of her juvenilia, including valentines she wrote in theearly 1850s, to the gloomy, hell-obsessed writings from her lastyears. Quite a difference from requisite Dickinson entries in literaryanthologies: "There's a certain Slant of light," "WildNights--Wild Nights!" and "I taste a liquor neverbrewed."

The book was compiled from Thomas H. Johnson'shard-to-find variorum from 1955. While some explanatory notes wouldhave been helpful, it's a prodigious collection, showcasingDickinson's intractable obsession with nature, including death. Poem1732, which alludes to the deaths of her father and a onetime suitor,illustrates her talent:

My life closed twice before its close;
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event tome,

So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twicebefell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need ofhell.

The musicality of her punctuation and the outright eleganceof her style--akin to Christina Rossetti's hymns,although not nearly so religious--rescue the poems from theiroccasional abstruseness. The Complete Poems is especiallyrefreshing because Dickinson didn't write for publication; only 11 ofher verses appeared in magazines during her lifetime, and she hadlong-resigned herself to anonymity, or a "Barefoot-Rank," asshe phrased it. This is the perfect volume for readers wishing toexplore the works of one of America's first poets. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (57)

Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
A fine scholarly edition of the poems of Emily Dickinson.This collection gives the reader Dickinson's poems as she actually wrote them.I've seen versions of her poems on the internet with incorrect capitalization and incorrect punctuation and misplaced lines.On a college web site I read "After great pain, a formal feeling comes" with an interpretation, apparently by the instructor, that I found in part ridiculous--and unthinkable if the poem had been reproduced accurately.When in doubt, get a book!!!

A Different Poet
One either hates or loves Emily Dickinson. I'm one of those who love her. She is able to capture tremendous thoughts in such a few words - and being a "woman of few words" myself, I enjoy that. I would like to know, as I suppose many would, why she became such a recluse. That's probably a mystery we will never understand completely. I do wish this paperback version was a little larger and hence a little thinner. I'm afraid its very thickness may cause it to not wear well.

Essential Dickinson
This book arrived on time andin perfect condition. This book is just what anyone who loves Dickinson's poetry should own.

A Marvelous Edtiton of Emily Dickinson's Poetry.
I spent 20+ years immersing myself in the poetry of William Blake. I never thought I'd be able to move on from his work. I've always loved poetry and wished I'd been born a Poet.

I taught elementary school for 30 years and attempted to help the children I learned from and spent my days with, aware of poetry. I was lucky to discovered the PBS series "Voices and Visions" (viewable at [...]) which introduced me to other poets. Some of these included William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, and happily and fortuitously Emily Dickinson. I fell in love with her poetry. But teaching did not allow me the time to dive headlong into the 1775 poems contained in this Wonderful edition. I had purchased a couple of used "selected works" editions but little did I know that when I purchase this editon at Amazon.com, what was about to happen to me. Once I retired I was able to give myself over to her canon and my life changed (seriously).

Retired- I had the time. I started reading the poems. Not an easy task. I read a biography. Then I moved on to critiques and analyses of her work, more biographies,and of course, there was always the poetry. But how do you read 1775 poems?? The biographies I read presented a fascinating and a remarkable Woman. Was I capable of understanding what she and her writings were about?? Having read Blake for so long developed, in me, a patience to continue.

I've read well over 30 books about Ms. Emily and her work. I've continued to read, from this paperback edition, over these many, many years. I carried it everywhere. Because it was a paperback I thought it would fall apart. (I am not kind to the books with which I live.) But that edition I bought years ago is still, amazingly enough, in great shape with highlights on each and every poem. I cannot believe it is still functional, but it is and it is the most valuable book I have ever owned. (Sorry William.) This is a book of Great Value. I recently came across a hardbound copy of this edition at used bookstore. But nothing will ever replace my original copy.

I have read all 1775+ poems "in context." That was important to me. I did not just want to be able to say, "I've read all of ED's poems." I wanted to read them with a sense of what Emily was saying. That's not an easy task. I do not want to deluded myself into thinking I have an understanding about Emily Dickinson. After reading the other 30 or so books, I've been helped to understand some of her work. But her work IS inexhaustible.

I have fallen in Love with Emily Dickinson, as have many. (See Billy Collins' "Undressing Emily Dickinson."). I want to say that the time I've spent reading her work has been worth every second. This, (this paperback edition), has seen me through this journey and for that I am most grateful!!!.

I Love with Emily Dickinson.

Be aware! Once you've read her poems you'll HAVE to read her letters!

Really terrible as Kindle book
I bought this book because it says 'optimized for Kindle Dx' or whatever, but it certainly doesn't work on my original Kindle.This is one of those books where you get a huge clot of text, no table of contents, and the poems break in mid-page.No way of accessing individual poems at all. Useless. Why does Amazon charge a premium for a book that could not possibly be more unattractive and unusable on the Kindle? ... Read more

Product Description
Publisher: Roberts BrothersPublication date: 1892Subjects: Juvenile Nonfiction / Poetry / GeneralLiterary Criticism / PoetryPoetry / GeneralPoetry / American / GeneralPoetry / English, Irish, Scottish, WelshNotes: This is an OCR reprint. There may be typos or missing text. There are no illustrations or indexes.When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. You can also preview the book there. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (19)

piece of junk
This book is the poorest quality publishing I've ever seen. There are at least a dozen typos/type-setting mistakes in the first two pages. It is not paginated properly nor is there any space between the poems. It is a messy piece of junk. I will never purchase another book from General Books. After looking at the fine print carefully I now see it has a disclaimer which states that the publisher used OCR software in the publishing. Buyer Beware. I wish I had known.

A Reading of Poem 431 - "If I may have it, when it's dead,"
Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/RLX6JH20XNH25 Since the majority of these reviews focus on the edition, I'll just add my tuppence here, having covered the poetry in the video.Please, please, please DO NOT buy the Kindle edition or any other edition, or you will be bemoaning your outcast state as so many of the reviewers do here.The only way to be assured of getting the real "impeccable" thing is to order this edition directly from Amazon.It truly is a treasure and worth every penny.

Anent the video: Please forgive the orthodontics.The braces make my mouth look bloated on the video.

Kindle edition way overpriced at $1.99
Amazon: Do you really want a Kindle reader's first experience to be a bait-and-switch? I purchased the 3-vol hardback and thought it'd be nice to have a copy on my laptop for travel. I downloaded the Kindle software and purchased the book to immediately find it is an entirely different, nearly useless, edition. It's not worth further hassle to get my $1.99 back. I guess that's a fair price for the lesson, if not for the book.

Buy another version!
So, I think I'm turning into a chick. I got on an email list of Great Poems. Saw a few by Ms. Emily and figured, "Wow... great stuff!I'll go to Amazon and get a book of her poetry." It's cool, guys can do it online so no one knows you're reading chick lit, and might be turning into a chick.

When I got this in it says up front in the copyright stuff "Yeah, we just OCRd some book off a shelf someplace, didn't take any time to fix the typos. Sorry for your luck" Well maybe not those exact words, but that's what they meant.They weren't lying. It's crap, filled with typos, and no clear differentiation between one poem and the next. You're better off to read them online or something. Now I just have to throw it away. It's not worth the $6 to take it to the post office!

Emiily Dickinson for Real!
Emily Dickinson for real! This is the only way to read her, and not the paperback, or scaled down hardcover version.Get this one, the three-volume, Poems of Emily Dickinson (Variorum Edition) edited by R. W. Franklin.

Very few of Emily Dickinson's poems have been printed in the original version, partly because there is no original, there is a collection of variations, sometimes up to 5 or 6 or more, which themselves have asterisks pointing to Emily's own suggested editorial alternatives for various words and phrases. Another factor denying an "original" is the way in which Dickinson used far more line breaks than the syllable count would indicate, with sometimes only one or two words per line running the poem down the page like a waterfall. Footnotes by Franklin let you know where the original line breaks were, but very few collections actually print the poems in that manner.One exception would be OPEN ME CAREFULLY, by Martha Nell Smith and Ellen Louise Hart.

Scholars who use this Variorum Edition are acquainted with ED in an entirely different manner than the average student or reader, and they become enchanted with her poetry, on account of the exquisite beauty of its unbounded multivalence. Dickinson seems purposely to have refused to cut anything in stone. So the reader becomes a collaborator with the poet, working out how the poem should assemble itself, and therefore also its ultimate meaning. ... Read more

Product Description
“There's nothing quite like a Charyn novel. . . . His sentences make a mournful and sensational clatter, like a bundle of butcher knives dropped on a cathedral floor.” —Jonathan Yardley, Washington PostJerome Charyn has been writing some of the most bold and adventurous American fiction for over forty years. His ten-book cycle of novels about madcap New York mayor and police commissioner Isaac Sidel inspired a new generation of younger writers in America and France, where he is a national literary icon. Now, adding to his already distinguished career, Charyn gives us The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, an audacious novel about the inner imaginative world of America’s greatest poet. Channeling the devilish rhythms and ghosts of a seemingly buried literary past, Charyn has removed the mysterious veils that have long enshrouded Dickinson, revealing her passions, inner turmoil, and powerful sexuality.

The story begins in the snow. It’s 1848, and Emily is a student at Mount Holyoke, with its mournful headmistress and strict, strict rules. She sees the seminary’s blond handyman rescue a baby deer from a mountain of snow, in a lyrical act of liberation that will remain with her for the rest of her life. The novel revivifies such historical figures as Emily’s brother, Austin, with his crown of red hair; her sister-in-law, Sue; a rival and very best friend, Emily’s little sister, Lavinia, with her vicious army of cats; and especially her father, Edward Dickinson, a controlling congressman. Charyn effortlessly blends these very factual characters with a few fictional ones, creating a dramatis personae of dynamic breadth.

Inspired by her letters and poetry, Charyn has captured the occasionally comic, always fevered, ultimately tragic story of Dickinson’s journey from Holyoke seminarian to dying recluse, compulsively scribbling lines of genius in her Amherst bedroom. Rarely before has the nineteenth-century world of New England—its religious stranglehold, its barbaric insane asylums, its circus carnivals—been captured in such spectacular depth. Through its lyrical inflections and poetic rhythms, its invention of a distinct, twenty-first-century “Charynesque” language that pays remarkable homage to America’s sovereign literary past, The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson provides a resonance of such power as to make this an indelible work of literature in its own right. 9 illustrations ... Read more

Customer Reviews (24)

Emily's "secret life" exists in the creative realm of Charyn's imagination
There exists a fascination with Emily Dickinson. A genius in a tiny bedroom scribbling poems that would become legendary. A mythological recluse writing about life, but not participating in it. Is it possible to tell a compelling story about an eccentric living in the recesses of her mind? Jerome Charyn draws out different aspects of her personality by peopling her life with his created characters. THE SECRET LIFE OF EMILY DICKINSON reads more like fiction than biography. While dutifully researched, the known facts about the "Belle of Amherst" are intermingled with the author's interpretation regarding her poetic inspiration.

Charyn introduces Zilpah Marsh as Emily's doppelganger. Zilpah is a scholarship student/maid at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary while Emily is the well-to-do daughter of the "Earl of Amherst." Zilpah has an affair with the school's handyman while Emily is left pining for his love. Zilpah is the favored pupil of their literary schoolmistress, but it is Emily who achieves poetic greatness. When Zilpah is hired as the Dickinson's maid, she quickly forges a lasting bond with Emily's father - something Emily struggles throughout her life to obtain. Yet it is Zilpah's highly educated mind that prevents her from accepting her low station in life. Her inability to cope lands her in an insane asylum. Emily feels Zilpah's mental breakdown, under similar circumstances, could have been her own.

Despite the heated passion of her verse, Emily Dickinson is generally thought of as an old maid. Shattering this stereotype, Charyn fleshes out her relationships with the opposite sex. She receives Valentines and marriage proposals. She suffers a lifelong infatuation for Zilpah's Holyoke handyman. She wants to run away with an alcoholic card shark. She sits on a judge's lap. She seeks love in an underground rum establishment. She treasures a flea-infested blanket from a wanted criminal. She is able to write about romance not as a passive spectator but as an active participant. However, despite her adventures of the heart, she remains an unmarried virgin.

Charyn portrays Emily's father as keeping her in a state of perpetual adolescence. He wants her to remain dependent on him, and he remains the most important man in Emily's life. While in a dream-like state, she even imagines her father as the perfect suitor. It is unclear if their relationship revolves around an Electra complex or if Emily simply regards her self-worth by how she appears in his eyes. After placing samples of her work under his bedroom door, it takes years for him to respond. While constantly seeking his approval, she views him as a type of savior. When wandering the streets of Boston, she stumbles across armed vigilantes pursuing Union deserters. In this chaos-induced scene, it is her father who magically comes to her rescue.

Emily suffers throughout her life with low self-esteem. Pale, freckled and red-haired, her timid voice is barely audible. When her eyesight starts to fail, she wears dark-colored spectacles to shield her eyes from light. These glasses add to the oddity of her appearance, but stimulate her creative impulses. While wearing them she is instructed to refrain from writing, but that prohibition is quickly ignored.

Charyn shines when verbalizing Emily's talent. She is a "kicking kangaroo" as the words come tumbling out. Her verses are "feathers" that require careful pruning. Inspiration is the "lightning" that illuminates her mind. While no doubt enhanced by her formal education, her poetry springs from a natural talent. To this day, it remains a stunning achievement in American literature.

Overall, Emily's "secret life" exists in the creative realm of Charyn's imagination.

Emily's voice
I loved the book and am sharing it now with friends. All agree it is like a powerful dream that is hard to emerge from...

At Home with Emily
Reading this novel, whose protagonist is Emily Dickinson, one can easily forget that it is fictional. Jerome Charyn's imagining of the "secret" life of Emily Dickinson is credible; the freshness of his language makes the (fictional) narrator's voice unique and resonant.

Charyn charts the entirety of Emily's life from her girlhood to her death. The book begins with Emily attending Mount Holyoke, a seminary, whose strict rules she frequently breaks. She lets her feelings be known. She talks openly about her infatuation with the only male at the institution, Tom the handyman, whose rescue of a baby deer from the snow she witnesses. The grace with which he resuscitates it gives it freedom, the kind of freedom that Emily seeks.

The novel's dramatis personae include Emily's brother Austin, her father Edward, her sister, and her mother. Charyn allows himself room for creativity, adding details that make this work fictional and not biographical. This book is an excellent companion to Dickinson's poetry and biographies. The language is entertaining and convincing; the story, full of humor and wit.

Reviewed by: Emmanuel Sigauke

A letter to Mr. Charyn on his latest work:
Dear Mr. Charyn,

I have recently had the opportunity to complete your novel "The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson." I was so intrigued by the book that I eagerly licked each word with ravenous eyes. I must say that I feel as though you have done the job of channeling our Emily rather well. As someone who has picked through her actual letters and pored over most of her works, I was amazed at how near your lexicon came to her poetic verse. You practiced her well. There were times when my mind slipped right out of my head and I forgot that I was reading fiction. Sometimes it was as if I were going through Miss Dickinson's own diary that had, perhaps, once been tucked away under a loose floorboard in the Homestead and I reveled in that delusion.

I enjoyed your vision also. Upon reading, one can be kidnapped by you, Sir, to a parallel universe in which our Emily had some heartpounding adventures. I thoroughly liked hearing your spin on Holyoke with the fictitious Zilpah Marsh and her tattooed Tom. I was fond of how you took such tedious measures to delve into the relationship between Emily and her father. It was splendid to see what life could have actually been like for those two outside of what history books have written. Your tale held my interest and made me wonder just how many exploits Emily had that no one, save God Himself, was able to be privy. You also remained true to her personality and did not fancy her into someone she could not have been. The cocktail you have invented has intoxicated my imagination to the fullest, but still resembles the Emily I have come to know over the past eleven years.

Perhaps my favorite aspect of your novel was how I found the events, that perfect blend of fact and fantasy, pointing to certain poems she penned during her lifetime. Several of her poems ran through my brain as I devoured your prose. "It's all I have to bring today" was what rang out when I read the part where she was in the orchard with her "Philadelphia." And I pretended that "I never lost as much but twice" was a combination poem in homage to both Tom and her father. It was a pleasure to feign that those poems were now inspired by your characters, both false and true.

I intend to let others know that you have found your mark with this book. Emily's fans, as well as Daisy herself, should be very proud and honored by what you've accomplished. Thank you.

The voice of Emily Dickinson comes alive
If you are looking for a book to read this summer, I would suggest The Secret Lift of Emily Dickinson by Jerome Charyn, for three reasons.The voice of the poet comes alive in the pages of this novel.The unanswered mysteries provoked especially by her early poems are answered with intelligence, thought and passion.

This is a novel of passion, but not a romance in the sense of bodice-rippers, and women too weak to see through mind games of stilted male characters.The passion evoked by this Emily Dickinson is all encompassing, combining her thoughts and spirit, both floating up to explode like lightning from her being, spreading throughout the beloved orchard behind her Homestead.

There has been some discussion that to enjoy the book, the reader should be familiar with Emily Dickinson's letters and poetry. I believe anyone can love this book, if they have read Dickinson or never heard of her.

Emily Dickinson loved summer, a time when she was free to roam through her garden and orchard. What better time to read this brilliantly insightful novel. ... Read more

Product Description

Seamus Heaney, Denis Donoghue, William Pritchard, Marilyn Butler, Harold Bloom, and many others have praised Helen Vendler as one of the most attentive readers of poetry. Here, Vendler turns her illuminating skills as a critic to 150 selected poems of Emily Dickinson. As she did in The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, she serves as an incomparable guide, considering both stylistic and imaginative features of the poems.

In selecting these poems for commentary Vendler chooses to exhibit many aspects of Dickinson’s work as a poet, “from her first-person poems to the poems of grand abstraction, from her ecstatic verses to her unparalleled depictions of emotional numbness, from her comic anecdotes to her painful poems of aftermath.” Included here are many expected favorites as well as more complex and less often anthologized poems. Taken together, Vendler’s selection reveals Emily Dickinson’s development as a poet, her astonishing range, and her revelation of what Wordsworth called “the history and science of feeling.”

In accompanying commentaries Vendler offers a deeper acquaintance with Dickinson the writer, “the inventive conceiver and linguistic shaper of her perennial themes.” All of Dickinson’s preoccupations—death, religion, love, the natural world, the nature of thought—are explored here in detail, but Vendler always takes care to emphasize the poet’s startling imagination and the ingenuity of her linguistic invention. Whether exploring less familiar poems or favorites we thought we knew, Vendler reveals Dickinson as “a master” of a revolutionary verse-language of immediacy and power. Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries will be an indispensable reference work for students of Dickinson and readers of lyric poetry.

Customer Reviews (3)

A Stunning Classic of Scholarship
No one offers insight into poetry as detailed and yet helpful as that of Helen Vendler. She has written of the great poets and their poetry, and I have gained something from each of her books.

This new volume, "Dickinson" takes on the enigma of Emily Dickinson. Like the others, this one is a browser's book. . .find a poem you want to understand better, wrestle with the poem a while by yourself, and then go over what Vendler has to say. Go over what Vendler has to say VERY SLOWLY and CAREFULLY.You will be enriched.

While she sometimes makes outlandish claims about the impact of a particular word or meter, she is nevertheless helpful in giving the reader new ideas to consider.

I love Emily Dickinson's work. I cannot say that I truly understand Dickinson's work. With Helen Vendler's help, I can speak somewhat more intelligently about the possibility of meaning in Dickinson's poems that appear so simple.There is much more going on between the lines, as Vendler points out.

Better than Churchill
Went into Border's w/coupn for some Autumn weekend reading, Hasting's bio of Churchill. What's this? Dickinson? Vendler?Back goes Churchill and out goes Vendler.

Dickinson's been a favorite since I discovered her in Mom's Oxford Am Poetry as a child in the fifties. . When my oldest friend died, himself as a young man, I recited"Because I could not stop for death" at the graveside. One of my favorites, but I gotta say I didn't get it all till reading Vendler's gloss, she touches exactly where that minor chord comes in, some thing I had missed for about half a century. I might have rethought the tribute had I had Vendler's take. I've got a couple other of her poetry criticisms in the library, Poetry prof at home, and they are always a treat to browse in, Shakespeare, Eliot, whatever.If you like browsing in Dickinson you're going to like browsing in Vendler. One poem, then commentary, follows another with a good short general introduction. (There's a lot that's that provoking, too, I think...I'm not saying Vendler's alawys on my page, for instance.)

Exceedingly Brilliant
This is the book on Dickinson I have always been waiting for, and wished I could write. Though I have loved Dickinson since I first started reading poetry and have brooded on a number of her poems and have even visited her residence in Amherst, Vendler's endless array of superb insights prove my previous interpretive sallies splendidly inadequate. Like Vendler's previous work on Keats, Hopkins, Yeats and Stevens, Vendler's lucid commentaries on Dickinson open up the poems to the reader's own imagination. This is to say that, though Vendler writes confidently and persuasively, even less than in her books on Keats and Stevens, she is not beholden to any overarching `argument' she must continue to address. (Some have criticized Vendler for her argument that Keats's Odes constitute a `sequence'; even if you disagree, you could very well ignore that thesis and instead concentrate on the local insights that constitute so much of the book's pleasure.) Without having to worry about promoting a ground-breaking thesis (other than a general one about Dickinson's originality of poetic argument, language, form and metaphor), we can simply enjoy Vendler thinking through each poem, providing us with intellectual and `algebraic,' to use her metaphor, schemas upon which to apply our own emotional responses.
Unlike some other great poetry critics (such as Harold Bloom), Vendler is intuitive and imaginative without being so idiosyncratic or doctrinaire as to promote her reading as THE reading or at least the definitive "Vendler" reading. We feel, rather, that we are being taught, instructed, provoked without being asked to incorporate ourselves into an unfamiliar theoretical interpretive system that would leave any vigorous response under the spell of that system rather than under the spell of the poem. You can just jump right in to Vendler; you don't need to learn how to read her.
Samuel Johnson (whom she, surprisingly, invokes in the course of her book) and William Hazlitt and Kenneth Burke and Paul de Man and Harold Bloom were/are all among the greatest readers of literature of all time, but their responses to works of art can be intransigent (Johnson disparaged Milton's `Lycidas'; Harold Bloom in his many great commentaries on Victorian Poetry, unnecessarily downgrades certain key works of Tennyson and Gerard Manley Hopkins), extraordinary but philosophically and linguistically dense (see de Man's commentaries on Mallarmé, Rilke, Shelley or Yeats), or, perhaps, ingenious but highly dependent on overarching aesthetic or rhetorical systems (Hazlitt's romantic `gusto,' Burke's `symbolic action,' Bloom's `anxiety of influence'). When I read `Lycidas' now, I may have Johnson's thoughts on the inadequacy of the pastoral mode for elegy or Bloom's mapping of his six revisionary ratios in the back of my mind, but these insights do not necessarily clarify local problems of poetic argument, formal innovation or visual logic.
Vendler, to be sure, is a formalist, but she is not dead-set on making us formalists too; she lets her readings speak for themselves. This lack of doctrine is a great stress reliever for the reader who simply wishes to get to the bottom of a Dickinson poem. As such, the book can be useful for advanced students (scholars, graduate students, undergraduates), high school teachers, high school students, casual readers, even your occasional exceptionally talented middle or elementary school student. In her introduction, Vendler characterizes the book as one to be "browsed in," much as we tend to find ourselves browsing in the collection of Dickinson's 1,800 or so poems. She resorts infrequently to the (admittedly very interesting, but already well-treated) subject of Dickinson's biography in interpreting the poems, and, only when appropriate for interpretation does she uncover the textual history of a poem (its many editorial iterations). Instead, Vendler gracefully uses the strategy of close reading; to justify this, she appropriately quotes in her introduction from possibly my favorite short poem in all of English literature, Dickinson's "There's a certain Slant of light," a poem which, I think, effectively encapsulates the Dickinsonian aesthetic of "internal difference,/ Where the meanings, are."
Have you ever had a teacher who said just the right thing to you to open you up to a work of art? Perhaps a music teacher taught you to appreciate proper instrumentation, an art teacher the virtues of abstract impressionism, or a physics teacher the secret of an elegantly constructed experiment. I consider this book loaded with those moments of saying "just the right thing" to help us find, to quote another Dickinson poem, "another way - to see." For the first time you may take pleasure in a poem you previously thought obscure, or wish to memorize a phrase the evokes an image or an emotion that only Dickinson could present. To sample just one of those moments, take Vendler's interesting comment on the final two lines of "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers -": "Soundless as dots,/On a disc of Snow." Vendler writes: "Her field of snow is, as a disk, circular in shape and perhaps alludes here to "The (apparently flat) surface or `face' of the sun, the moon, or a planet, as it appears to the eye" (OED, s.v., "disk, 4a)." Our planet, seen from afar, in the Arctic light of death, is rather like our full moon - a white disk frozen into snow...In the cosmic distance, human deaths, even the fall of crowns, cannot be heard. The world altering effects of a change of earthly government are insignificant to a cosmic observer-from-afar." Even if you disagree with Vendler on some local points, her visionary reading here of the single word `disc' is breathtaking and exciting to the imagination.
Having pre-ordered this book a while ago, I was admittedly pre-disposed to like it, especially since I am an unapologetic Dickinson freak. Maybe I'm a little strange for how excited I was, more excited than for any other work of criticism published in some time. I have very few complaints. Otherwise attractively produced, my main criticism is that the font, Adobe Garamond Pro, while great for prose, is somewhat ill-suited to Dickinson's poems; the font allows for somewhat unimpressive dashes (they look more like hyphens). If you've seen any of Dickinson's fascicles, her dashes are long, striking and manic. Some readers may object to Vendler's endless references to Keats, especially to "Autumn," but these references are never inapt and she even dedicates the book, lovingly, to Keats, who presumably, along with Stevens, taught her how to read nature lyrics, especially those of the emotions and the seasons. If I had any other complaints, it would be that she does not read more poems! With her selection capped at 150, while generous and inclusive of most of Dickinson's greatest pieces, Vendler manages to enlighten us on less than 10% of the Dickinson canon. The rest of the work, I suppose, is up to the industrious reader whose mind has been opened by this lovely, loving and thoughtful book. ... Read more

Product Description

Customer Reviews (3)

Edited, but good for the price
This is good for someone who just wants to read some good poetry. However, to truly get the experience of Dickinson's intention, one should buy an unaltered version. This is one with edited versions of her poems.

A Travesty
NOTE:This is basically a cut & paste of my review of the hardcover edition of this collection.This one suffers the same problem, and I hope that anyone who has any interest in Dickinson will please look elsewhere.

This Barnes & Noble released collection of the poems of Emily Dickinson is fine except for one very, very important fact: Whoever put it together took the liberty of "correcting" Ms. Dickinson's punctuation.

For anyone who has read and is familiar with Dickinson, you are well aware that she seemingly capitalized at random, often doing it to words in the middle of sentences,etc. that on the surface level have no meaning to the poem itself. But they off some insight into her mind and without them, these are not the poems that Dickinson created.

Imagine "correcting" poems by e.e. cummings, you just don't "fix" the work of poets. Often times, central themes and ideas are expressed not only through the words themselves, but through means and devices in which the poet has utilized those words, such as capitalization. This collection takes this very important element away from Dickinson's work.

For example, one of her more famous poems SHOULD look like this:

There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry --
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll --
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human soul.

However, this collection reduces it to this:

There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry--
This traverse may poorest take
Without oppress of toll
How frugal is the chariot
That bears the human soul


I admit that I have not bought this book, but I have looked through it at Barnes & Noble. I didn't buy it for this very reason, don't be fooled by the price tag this is NOT the poems that Dickinson intended, skip over it for another collection, please. If only to convince editors to stop "correcting" peoples' writings.

EDIT: As one comment stated on another review, it appears that this sad state of Ms. Dickinson's poetry is the victim of copyright laws, etc.And that this phenomenon of altering her works is not limited to this book.Very sad.But if that is the case, then I still recommend going out there and finding works that include her original poems in their unaltered states.

A Great poet and a great intellectual: Beautiful words from a beautiful woman:
Emily Dickinson's expressional language of yesteryear is still the je ne sais quoi of today. The genius that comes forth from her consciousness seems rather simplistic at first, but when you truly contemplate her writing style true enlightenment develops in what I'd refer to as the dimensions of humanity. These dimensions consist of the soul (psyche,) the spirit (nous,) and the body (soma).
I don't think there is anyone who could read Dickinson's poems and not have these dimensions of the self-affected.
A case in point: one of her poems goes like this.

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And Sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

This is one of her most recited poems to date. I sometimes wonder how most people would interpret it?
How I ascertain it is in this contexts. I believe it's about a bird that with a little help will be able to withstand the evening chill.
On it's own, it wants to persevere no matter what the odds, but the pangs of the world rest upon its shoulders.
The bottom line is that the bird needs support.
This bird is the mother of baby chicks who are in disparate need of nurturing, and protection simply because the dead of night is creating trepidations in their souls.
For you see, without trust there is no hope. That is why hope is a thing with feathers because the bird represents a better tomorrow. A tomorrow that will come someday. It will be a day when we can all freely trust one another. And that my friends is the definition of true freedom.
The bird also is the representation of man's struggle with pride. When we (in unison) humble ourselves in all aspects of life then and only then will we be successful.
GIVE A HELPING HAND to whoever needs it, and don't be arrogant, or too proud to receive help either. Those are words to live by.

Here is another good poem I cited.

I Gave myself to him,
And took himself for pay.
The solemn contract of a life
Was ratified this way.

The wealth might disappoint,
Myself a poorer prove
Than this great purchaser suspect,
The daily own of Love

Depreciate the vision;
But, till the merchant buy,
Still fable, in the isles of spice,
The subtle cargoes lie.

At least, `t is mutual risk,--
Some found it mutual gain;
Sweet debt of life,-- each night to owe,
Insolvent, every noon.

"A poem of unrequited love/faulty buisness transaction!" You truly can't help but love this stuff. Emily's poems will grab any reader's heart. If you are a lover of poetry then this is required reading. If these two samples of her work don't convince you to read her collection of poetry then nothing will.


... Read more

Product Description
A startling portrayal of one of America's most significant literary figures that will change the way we view her life and legacy

In 1882, Emily Dickinson's brother Austin began a passionate love affair with Mabel Todd, a young Amherst faculty wife, setting in motion a series of events that would forever change the lives of the Dickinson family. The feud that erupted as a result has continued for over a century. Lyndall Gordon, an award-winning biographer, tells the riveting story of the Dickinsons, and reveals Emily as a very different woman from the pale, lovelorn recluse that exists in the popular imagination. Thanks to unprecedented use of letters, diaries, and legal documents, Gordon digs deep into the life and work of Emily Dickinson, to reveal the secret behind the poet's insistent seclusion, and presents a woman beyond her time who found love, spiritual sustenance, and immortality all on her own terms. An enthralling story of creative genius, filled with illicit passion and betrayal, Lives Like Loaded Guns is sure to cause a stir among Dickinson's many devoted readers and scholars. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

Extravagant to Extravagant
By which I mean to say, the extravagantly-gifted Gordon does justice to the extravagantly-gifted poet.I was worried, too.I loved Gordon's "Vindication" passionately, but Dickinson is a Sphinx. I love Gordon's championing of "domestic values," her intuitive and empathetic approach, which allows her to possess knowledge of her subjects that seems magical; she always confirms in me the role of empathy in the highest forms of intelligence.

I am grateful to Gordon for redeeming "Sue" and for redeeming ED from the horrible speculative stuff on agoraphobia and avoidant personality disorder and blah-blah, none of which ever made sense to me in the context of ED's poetry; epilepsy, however, enhances and fits with ED's work.

Then, there is the pleasure of reading a biographer who inserts her own arresting thoughts and opinions, sometimes so arrestingly, they swerve one from the subject.Mabel is like a "furry little dog with doggy brown eyes" in her engagement photo, and then there's her home with its "ostrich plumes, ragged with age...tucked behind a nondescript painting of a seashore." No one could make adultery as nauseatingly gritty--almost in a Chekhovian way--and I love the description of Caro, "her rump encased in a striped black taffeta skirt.It rustled as she walked." Do you ever find that ED's poetry is so powerful, reading it stilts your own speech and writing--you start using too many dashes?Sometimes I wonder if the ED-effect got to Gordon:"He was long and lean...a full jaw like a whale.He had the communicative skills of whales, and sang his whale song to Millicent about caring for his kind.It reverberated benignly through her solitary sea."I don't even know what that means, but I still like it.

"Surgeons must be very careful/When they take the knife!"
Gordon implies that epilepsy was "a lifelong condition" for Dickinson.But questions abound. If epilepsy is the reason for Dickinson's seclusion ("A seizure can happen with little warning: about a minute.Too short a time to take cover. That is why those who keep the condition secret would fear to go out, even to join callers in the parlour," Gordon writes) then how does Gordon account for Emily's stay away from home at Mount Holyoke in 1847-48?Or her five weeks away from home in 1855, in Washington D.C. (where Emily records that "many sweet ladies and noble gentlemen have taken us by the hand and smiled on us pleasantly") and Philadelphia? If, as Gordon notes, a stigma attaches to epilepsy, then why would Edward Dickinson, winding up two years in Congress, expose an epileptic daughter to Washington's social swirl?

Emily and her sister Lavinia Dickinson visited Dr. James Jackson in Boston in 1851, when Emily was 20.Gordon assumes that the doctor diagnosed epilepsy, and that his prescription, glycerine, was "a crucial clue." Why does Gordon tell us that Dr. Jackson "has a chapter on epilepsy" in Letters to a Young Physician (1855), but not of Jackson's stated belief in that chapter that "relief" from epilepsy "is not to be attained by any medicine to which I am acquainted, but by diet. The diet, which I have directed with success, has been almost purely vegetable. I have directed an entire abstinence from flesh and fish, but have allowed the use of milk and butter, and occasionally of eggs . . . I have seen many recoveries." Note: In his 1855 Letters and in his 1861 sequel, Another Letter to a Young Physician, Dr. Jackson never once uses the word "glycerine." (The earliest Gordon could find glycerine listed as an ingredient in a remedy aimed at epilepsy was the year 1874, a quarter century after Emily's visit to Dr. Jackson).


Early in her book, Gordon, quite rightfully, congratulates Dickinson's most recent biographer, Alfred Habegger, for his "factual portrait," his "enormous detective flair," his "ability to track down verifiable facts." Why does Gordon then proceed to run roughshod over Habegger's findings and judgments on matters of health?Habegger was certain Dickinson "had several pulmonary episodes as a girl," and that her 1851 visit to Jackson was due to her "pulmonary tuberculosis, two of her symptoms being weight loss and a cough," a repeat of the health crisis she had experienced at Mt. Holyoke on 1848.Without mentioning Habegger, Gordon supplies this breezy analysis: "What made Emily ill? Why did the physicians come back so frequently? . . .In the spring of 1848, when she was seventeen, she joked about a fading cough . . . yet a cough sounds too slight to warrant her father's alarm. Critical opinion that she had `pulmonary episodes' stretches thin facts; most inhabitants of Amherst would have had the odd cough without interrupting their lives." Here, Gordon is flat wrong. The 1850 U. S. Census reveals that in the five counties of western Massachusetts 1 out of every 4 deaths was due to consumption (TB).Death from TB jumped to 50% for those dying between the ages of 20 and 49.Dickinson biographers report that in the early 1850s thirty-three young adults in the village of Amherst succumbed to disease, almost all of them from pulmonary tuberculosis.

Gordon asserts, repeatedly, that Dickinson was deceitful and manipulative in her letters: "The poet, as an adult, was not tubercular, on any evidence we have . . . To go on what her letters give out, as though an answer were at hand, is to block off the mystery." Habegger assigns more integrity to Dickinson's letters, and suspects the presence of TB even as late as her so-called Master Letter #2, written in 1861 when the poet was 30 years old. Habegger: "As Dickinson drifted out to sea in winter of 1860-61, she suffered her usual (consumptive?) symptoms - a `cough as big as a thimble,' `a Tomahawk in my side'." [That passage in full reads: "I've got a cough as big as a thimble - but I dont care for that - I've got a Tomahawk in my side but that dont hurt me much."] Gordon's analysis of Dickinson's Master Letter #2 omits any reference to "I've got a cough as big as a thimble," and instead invents a cruel encounter between Emily and Master: "`Master' appears responsible for a `gash' and drops of blood from Daisy's body . . . Daisy is not really cowed . . . the moment arrives for a dramatic gesture: she uncovers a weapon. `I've got a Tomahawk in my side.' It now comes out that so long as she's been brave enough to conceal the tomahawk, Master has been taking advantage; `Her master stabs her more.' The tomahawk and blood suggest a virgin's defloration."

Gordon acknowledges Habegger for his "feats of corrective research," but in placing epilepsy at the center of Dickinson's life, Gordon trades in Habegger and 70 years of Dickinson scholarship for an approach that is not nearly as rigorous or as reliable. There is a sad irony in the first pages of Lives Like Loaded Guns, where Gordon airily dismisses the "early biographers" of Emily Dickinson who, she writes, "got lost in the byways of fancy."

A Great Tell All Bio - Best Since Louisa May Alcott
"We will never look at a poetry book by Emily Dickenson the same again!We loved this tell all biography. Lives Like Loaded Guns is the best literary biography we have read since Louisa May Alcott - The Woman Behind Little Women. "

A satisfying pageturner about Emily Dickinson
As a former English grad student, I closed this book (after going through the Sources, Notes, and Indices) with a "Wow!"
Lyndall Gordon has written a very compelling account of feuds within the Dickinson family and how those were carried forward and intensified after Emily's death by Susan Dickinson's and Mabel Loomis Todd's daughters.The book presents clear and convincing evidence for the conclusions drawn, citing Dickinson and Todd papers, medical records, trial proceedings, editions of Dickinson's poetry and publications.It provides a rich social history background of New England individualism, vivid details on the Dickinson's Homestead and The Evergreens, and a vivid portrait of a real Emily Dickinson with unique creative genius.And it's a good read, no matter how you feel about academics.

A Cautionary Tale
It's unfortunate that so much attention has been given to the epilepsy controversy in the lead reviews here. It takes up such a minor percentage of this book and should not dissuade future readers. The author examines and successfully reconstructs so many stray facts about the Dickinson family's life...almost to the point of minutiae so that it took 150 pages for me as a reader to become engaged. I see her research and conclusions as a real cautionary tale about how the self-indulgence, vanity and selfishness of a pair of lovers went on to co-opt the future happiness/health of their offspring well into the 2nd generation of this family. Austin Dickinson, a renowned leading citizen of Amherst, conducted his affair with Mabel Loomis Todd within clear view of his family and well within the family compound of two adjoining homes. There was no pretense to hide anything or even consider the feelings of family or servants.

The vain coquette Mabel never grew tired of vilifying Sue Dickinson, Austin's long-suffering wife, perhaps as a lame justification for exerting her wiles over Austin year after year. When public opinion came into question-about the only thing she feared-she'd high tail it out of town for a while. Meanwhile, her own husband was complicit and encouraged the affair. And yet Todd performed an important task as Emily's editor successfully bringing her poetry into the public domain. Yet the shadow of the scandal lingered over everything for many decades after Mabel's death. It's not even very well understood today as Todd's propaganda about Sue continues to linger. Emily continues to come across as a true eccentric-epilepsy or no epilepsy. And while I know that attitudes towards animals were different in the 19th century, I was shocked to read that Emily deliberately drowned 4 kittens in a barrel of pickle brine in the cellar of her home and then left them to rot there(332).Great poet perhaps but not a real sensitive or kind human being. Worth the read. ... Read more

Product Description
This Companion consists of 14 essays by leading international scholars. They provide a series of new perspectives on one of the most enigmatic and widely read American writers. These essays, specially tailored to the needs of undergraduates, examine all of Dickinson's writings, letters and criticism, and place her work in a variety of literary, cultural and political contexts. The volume will be of interest to scholars and students. It features a detailed chronology and a comprehensive guide to further reading. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Celebrate 177 years of Emily Dickinson
It's hard to exaggerate the importance of Emily Dickinson's poetry, as we mark her 177th birthday (born December 10, 1830, Amherst, Massachusetts).But is this poet well understood, and are her birthdays and other important dates even recognized other than by those already devoted to her? One editorial reviewer for Amazon of the Cambridge Companion makes a key mistake-stating that she is one of our most important "19th Century poets."No--Dickinson is one of the two most important American poets in all our literature-of whatever century, and most likely including this new one- the other candidate for top honors being Walt Whitman. Arguably, Dickinson is the more important of the two given the resonance in our later poetry with the depth of her interior, private vision. Whitman aspired to be America's great public bard-a project Robert Pinsky and others have pointed out that did not succeed (see my Amazon review of Pinsky's Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry). But Dickinson's intense private vision is more responsible than Whitman's public one for generating followers and inspiring others. Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane are two examples. With rare exceptions, American poetry has developed more along the lines suggested by her more private vision and voice than it has to the broad, public sweep of Whitman's long-windedness.

Everyone more or less knows who Dickinson is, and most educated persons have probably read at least one of her poems. But, do we grasp what a deep treasure trove Dickinson has left us? Do we get beyond the superficial portrait most have of her? And most importantly, how do we access the wealth of creativity and insight that lies beyond the few dozen or so most popular Dickinson poems most of us are familiar with?

Wendy Martin's Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson is a great place to start broadening our view of her. The war over Dickinson's manuscripts (today part still belong to Harvard and part to Amherst College) and for defining her as a person is something that happened shortly after she died and was caused by a schism of sorts in her family when her brother, Austin Dickinson, took a lover, Mabel Loomis Todd, outside of his marriage to Emily's beloved friend, companion and lifelong correspondent, Susan Dickinson. This is a really racy story! It is ably narrated in Betsy Erkkila's essay "The Emily Dickinson Wars."

Christopher Benfey's essay "Emily Dickinson and the American South," is also remarkable. How do you explain the fact that Dickinson wrote throughout the Civil War, Emancipation, etc. and has almost nothing to say about these huge events? While not a Southern sympathizer, there is much in her work that accords with the agrarian, aristocratic elements in American life that was also represented in the South and its literature, and she fit the sensibility of those who yearned for a pre-Industrial America in the 20th Century quite well-although it doesn't really fully define her to see it in this way.

Wendy Martin's own essay on Dickinson's poetic strategies is a strong overview of how some of the larger elements in Dickinson's life worked themselves out in her verse, including her deeply meaningful relationship with her sister-in-law.Martin is very strong on her analysis of the poetic use of words like "sun" which appears so often in the poems, and she sees Dickinson as one who revels with her volcanic creativity in night and darkness. It's a luxurious image and picture of her.

I have to confess that, though our last names are the same, I am no relation to Emily Dickinson. Starting when I was a very young child, my mother (who grew up not far from Amherst in a similar setting) read her to me frequently, and I was somewhat confused about the name.For quite some time I thought when my mother said we were "not related" that we really were related. I felt the poems were something that had been written to us, like letters from a relative, which were also sometimes read aloud to the family. I was disappointed to learn that "no relation" actually meant we weren't related-and somehow before figuring it out got some of the deeper messages even as a very young child -it was as though they had been meant especially for me and sent from a kindred soul.

One suggestion for how to celebrate Emily Dickinson's birthday each December 10th is to read this book and others like it-and to re-encounter Dickinson's poems over and over.They richly repay our efforts to understand and enjoy them. ... Read more

Product Description
This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Essential Piece of the Dickinson Puzzle
An appraisal of this great figure's work is incomplete without a good look at these selected letters. As fascinating to the Dickinson scholar as they are to the casual enthusiast, Dickinson's letters -- along with those of Keats or Hopkins -- prove that this is every bit as legitimate a genre as fiction or poetry. Some of Dickinson's most gorgeous and enduring statements are here, and to read these in chronological order is to map the gradual development of America's premier woman poet. Even in a letter she wrote at 12-years-old, the idiosyncratic dashes with which she distinguished her poetic voice are abundant, and already have that effect of forcing the reader to savor clusters of words as they unravel down the page. Similarly, Dickinson's mind-blowing instinct for the staggering metaphor is in full gear throughout ("Vinnie came soft as a moccasin") and, for all her great death poetry, it is in a letter regarding the death of her father where we find perhaps her most vulnerable and moving confrontation with mortality:

"Father does not live with us now -- he lives in a new house. Though it was built in an hour it is better than this. He hasn't any garden because he moved after gardens were made, so we take him the best flowers, and if we only knew he knew, perhaps we could stop crying."

Perhaps most fascinating of all, though, is the mixture of extremes Dickinson's personality manifests throughout these letters, a crude bluntness that mingles with the most tender innocence. She at once condemns a cousin's valentine as "A little condescending, & sarcastic, your Valentine to me, I thought" and begins another missive with the exuberant mysticism of a child speaking as if out of some fairytale: "I wanted to write, and just tell you that me, and my spirit were fighting this morning. It isn't known generally, and you musn't tell anybody." Of course, this book also includes that characteristically bizarre and unforgettable final letter, which she wrote while suffering from the illness that would take her life just days later: "Little Cousins, Called Back. Emily." Especially enjoyable about this particular volume are the endnotes with which the editor follows up most letters. These brief but informed observations offer a fascinating and thorough glimpse into Dickinson's reading life, while also helping to illuminate her more obscure autobiographical allusions. This book is as fascinating an odyssey as Dickinson's complete poems, and I think readers do themselves a great service by delving into these letters alongside that more celebrated aspect of her genius.

Precious surviving fragments of a great oeuvre.
EMILY DICKINSON SELECTED LETTERS.Edited by Thomas H. Johnson. 364 pp.Cambridge, Massachusetts : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971.SBN674-25060-5 (hbk).

Emily Dickinson was a great letter writer, in all senses of theword.In fact one gets the impression that she actually preferred writing to people, than meeting and conversing with them, and for her the arrival of a letter was a great event.A letter was something she looked forward to with keen anticipation, and which she savored to the full whenever one arrived.

The present selection of letters represents only a small proportionof the letters Emily Dickinson actually wrote.She was an inveterate letter-writer, had many correspondents, and wrote thousands of letters.And peoplein those days collected letters just as today.

Unfortunately it was the custom, whenever anyone died, to make a bonfire of all of their correspondence, probably because of its personal and confidentialnature.In this way thousands of pages of Emily Dickinson's writings have been lost to posterity, and we would know much more aboute the details of her day-to-day life, and be able to date her poems more accurately, if it hadn't been for thistragic loss.

Just how great the loss is may be gaged by taking a look at the way Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith have treated her letters in 'Open Me Carefully : Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson' (1998).Whereas Thomas Johnson prints all of ED's letters as straight prose, which of course leads us to read them as straight prose, Hart-Smith give us theirparticular letters as they actually appear in the original draft - not as continous lines of prose but as very short lines with numerous line breaks - in other words, as poetry.

It would seem that at least some of ED's 'letters' are not so much letters as 'letter-poems,' and when read as poems produce a remarkable rangeof effects that are lost when all line breaks are removed and the 'letter' is regularized as straight prose.The loss of her letters now begins to look much more serious, for there seems to be a growing feeling among readers that her letters were every bit as great an artistic achievement as her poems.

Given this, the present book becomes something that should interest all serious students of ED, although before reading it they might (if they haven't already) take at look at the Hart-Smith, and keep it in mind while reading the Johnson.One wonders how much poetry may be lurking unrecognized in the regularized lines of 'EmilyDickinson's Selected Letters.'

A letter like immortality
...

If you are, like me, an Emily Dickinson's great admirer you will be genuinely drawn into this book. Emily Dickinson has bewitched and perplexed everyone with her extremely profound poetry disguised in apparent simplicity. However, in her book of letters we uncover the woman (and not the author) behind her work, whose main assets were acute sensitivity and lovingness. This collection, unlike other books of the genre, such as Elizabeth Bishop's One Art or Keats's book of letters, do not reveal much of her poetry, as her mental struggle with the work, her intentions, or choice of words. Even so, the reader is allowed into her family relationships, into her care and love for her few friends, and above all into her deep-set feeling of solitude. Besides, throughout her letters she discloses her main existential concerns, which are inevitably reflected in her poems. This book makes it possible to discover the books she read and the ones that offered her the greatest pleasure. As the collection includes from her juvenile writings to her latest letters when already living in social "exile," they form a most engrossing reading, with the characteristics of an autobiography, without the intention by the author to write one. In her very words, "my letter as a bee, goes laden." ... Read more

Product Description
The life of Emily Dickinson, Richard B. Sewall's monumental biography of the great American poet (1830-1886), wont the National Book Award when it was originally publsihed in two volumes. Now available in the one-volume eidtion, it has been called "by far the best and most complete study of the poet's life yet to be written, the result of nearly twenty years of work" (The Atlantic).

R.W.B. Lewis has hailed it as "a major event in Americn letters," adding that "Richard Sewall's biographical vision of Emily Dickinson is as complete as humans cholarship, ingenuity, stylistic pungency, and common sense can arrive at."
Amazon.com Review
Winner of the National Book Award, this massively detailedbiography throws a light into the study of the brilliant poet.Howdid EmilyDickinson, from the small window over her desk, come to see a lifethat included the horror, exaltation and humor that lives her poetry?With abundance and impartiality, Sewall shows us not just the poet northe poetry, but the woman and her life. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

Muddy waters
I was surprised to find this book so highly rated by other reviewers.I found it frustrating--Mr. Sewell spends a great deal of time and effort telling about different theories for events in Emily Dickenson's life, and then telling the reader that "I don't think that can be true".However, he never seemed to give any of his own answers to this enigmatic life.This is the first biographyI have read about ED, and I come away greatly puzzled . . .

Agreat book!
If you are looking to buy just one biography of this great poet, this is the one to buy. Extremely detailed with a lot of period photographs of Emily and her family and friends. The appendixes are full of source documents, including excerpts from personal correspondence. Not easy reading, but well worth the effort. If you really want to know Emily Dickinson, get this book.

Not really a biography
I have just read this book and enjoyed it thoroughly. However, the title is somewhat misleading, as this is not a conventional biography. Other than a few chapters on her childhood and early education, the book is arranged in "theme" chapters, each focussing on a particular person or aspect of her life, illustrated, and heavily annotated, with letters and poems related to that theme.

I ended the book with more questions about her life than I had at the beginning. Many of them are barely addressed in the book, or just hinted at. Perhaps the book was intended for readers who are already very familiar with the biographical details.

Just as one example, the author mentions several times the eye problem that led to one of Emily's rare trips away from her home for treatement in Boston. I kept thinking that sooner or later some further details about this eye problem would be revealed, but there was never more than a few widely scattered sentences about it. Perhaps there isn't enough evidence to be able to conjecture as to the nature of the problem, but the author doesn't even seem to think it's an important enough detail to require a weighing of the evidence.

Likewise her mother's long illness, which played a role in Emily's withdrawal from the world, is mentioned but its nature is not discussed, other than a mention that she was paralyzed near the end of her life. Did she suffer a stroke? Was she lucid? Since Emily was her primary caregiver, it would seem that these details might bear on her own emotional state during the years of this illness and would warrant at least some speculation.

Even Emily's own final illness remains a mystery. We learn that her sister blamed it on the ill treatment received from her sister-in-law, and that her doctor attributed it to "nerves". However, from other hints, it seems to be a progessively debilitating illness. There is never as much as a paragraph in the entire book which speculates on the nature of this fatal illness or how much she might have been incapacitated between the first attack in June 1884 and her death in May 1885. "Nerves" seems to me to be an insufficient explanation for the death of the poet after an illness of eleven months. Are we sure the fainting spell was related to the final illness? Was she ill for the entire eleven months? For how long was she bedridden? The author doesn't even pose these questions.

In a book of 821 pages, there is no index entry for "illness". "Death [of ED]" has 7 widely scattered and brief entries, one of which is a footnote, one of which is a 13-sentence entry on how her death affected her brother, one of which is the text of her obituary and three of which describe her funeral(on pages 273, 575 and 667, to show how scattered they are). The seventh entry refers to her obituary, but seems to be a mistake, as I find no mention of her death or obituary on the page cited.

The book is especially good on the life of her brother Austin, and is also good on her father. Her mother and sister remain mysterious, probably because they were not much more exposed to public scrutiny than Emily herself was. It is obvious that her sister was nearly as much of a recluse as Emily, or at least was perceived as such by their neighbors.

In such a scattered book, there is inevitably a good deal of repetition of details. The three mentions of Emily's funeral cited above, for example, are mostly identical. Poems are also quoted in part or in their entirety multiple times.

There is an index of the poems and the pages on which they are discussed, which is useful for understanding the context of some of these, although the author acknowledges that the dating of the poems presents many problems.

There is a chronology at the beginning of the book, which really is the closest there is to a temporal ordering of the poet's life. I would suggest photocopying it and using it as a bookmark, because there is little chronological ordering, even within chapters at times. I found myself asking such things as, "Was this before her brother's marriage or after? Was her father still alive when this happened?" As a matter of fact, because I didn't have the chronology in front of me, I was surprised to realize, when I had almost finished the book, that Emily's father was still alive during the period of her most intense literary activity. After the early chapter devoted to her father's life, he is not often mentioned again, and I had somehow remained with the impression that he had died much earlier in her life.

Much as I enjoyed this book, I am left wanting another book to fill in the gaps. However, I learned enough about the partisanal nature of her biographers to be wary of choosing one.

Find an editor
Somewhere among the 800 pages of this tome is a great 250-page biography. Mr. Sewall has assembled a massively detailed account of ED's life. I know presenting myriad detail of a subject's life is the biographer's method for removing themselves from the reader's relationship and experience of the subject, but I find this current trend of unleashing 800 to 1200 page biographies very taxing on the general reader.Although I wasn't completely disappointed in Mr. Sewall's biography, I was hoping for a tighter depiction of ED's life.I'm a general reader, not an academician. I was simply looking for an account of ED's life that would help me better understand her sublime poetry.This book delivered too much matter and not enough essence for me. However, the final chapter of the book entitled "The Poet" was very enlightening and poignantly written. This last chapter deserves 5 stars, the rest of the book 2.

Great for College Courses
Emily Dickinson is easily my favorite poet (also see my review on "Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson", which every poetry lover should own). I took a college course that focused on Emily Dickinson and these were the two books used for that course (there were optional books, which I also read, but nowhere near as good as these). The author's analysis of some poems can be questioned (whose cannot?), but the wealth of material presented is incredible. This is THE reference book about her life. So, if you want details about the woman behind the beautiful words, then get this book. Also consider visiting her house in Amherst (MA), which still has tours during the warmer months. All three things will give you a very good look into her writing. ... Read more

Product Description
"Starts off as a manifesto but becomes richer and more suggestive as it develops."—The New York SunWith exacting rigor and wit, Howe pulls Dickinson free of all the sterile and stuffy belle-of-Amherst cotton wool and shows the poet in touch with elemental forces of nature, and as a prophet in all her radical zealotry and poetic glory. Her Emily Dickinson is a unique American genius, a demon lover of poetry—no neurasthenic spider artist. Howe draws into her discussion Browning, Wuthering Heights, the Civil War, "Master," the great Puritan preachers, captivity narratives, Shakespeare, and phantom lovers. As she chases away narrow and reductive feminist readings of the poet, Howe finds instead a radically powerful and true feminism at work in Dickinson, focusing the whole on that heart-stopping poem "My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun."

A remarkable and passionate poet-on-poet engagement, My Emily Dickinson frees a great poet from the fetters of being read as a special female neurotic, and sets her against a fiery open sky where "Perception of an object means loosing and losing it...only Mutability certain." My Emily Dickinson won The Before Columbus Foundation Book Award. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Oddly composed, but with a few fine opals inside...
I have been pretty much obsessed with Emily Dickinson since 1980, and have enjoyed reading many treatments of her life and her poems, while enduring many other books about her. She is quite a mystery, and shall always remain so, becoming the kind of woman and poet that each generation seems to need. I did not like this author's prose style, which seemed to me to have many sentence fragments and many abrupt transitions which did not seem logical. However, it does contain one of the best meditations on Emily's literary and theological influences, including the preacher Jonathan Edwards, and the Brownings, and the Brontes, and Shakespeare. For that reason, it is worth reading if you care about the Belle of Amherst at all. I found myself drawn to her poetry from high school on, but over the decades, becoming much more fascinated with her life choices and experiences. We will never know for sure how many poems are autobiographical, how many actually describe her take on the experiences of her small but intense social circle, and how many are pure fiction. What an impact she has made on the literary world, by living the life of a fairly affluent New England spinster who did not get out much. That is endlessly fascinating to me. Unfortunately it is not the thrust of this volume. My recommendation is to start with Richard Sewell's huge biography of Emily from the 1970's. It covers the life AND the poetry in a reasonable and accessible manner. Some think Emily a secular nun, some think her a deeply closeted lesbian and/or incest victim, some feel she had many love affairs but was discrete about them. Some think her insane, some believe her to be the sanest of us all. Some find her an early feminist, and others see her as an oppressed woman. This book is one fellow female poet's appreciation of Emily's talents and circumstances. Wait another year and another scholar will present a different view. Emily left us 1,776 poems, give or take a few hidden in the text of letters, and someday there will be 1,776 books about her.

My Emily Dickinson
This book is not for the faint of intellect.It is a challenging book for most readers, I believe. Ms. Howe takes you on a poetic journey well worth taking.

Very Interesting Take
This book does more than just explore Dickinson's life and poetics, although it does that expertly. It falls in line with a tradition of books of poets writing about poets who have intensely figured in their conception of poetry. This is more personal than a biography in that it is a writer's concern with Dickinson's place in history and what she was trying to do with her poetry. Howe does a wonderful job of trying to get into the poems through playing with language. It's a place to meet Dickinson at as she was a lover of games and words.

If you think you know Emily...
This is a serious and personal literary study of Dickinson's work by a scholar and fellow poet who appreciates both the art and the attitude of one of her American literary forebears.

Howe points out how Dickinson'spoetry has been overlooked in light of her character and biography. Itseems that in the 19th century, it was remarkable for a woman to be a poetat all, let alone write original, rebellious, and quite modern poetry.Hence, the work itself, though enjoyed by schoolchildren all over America,has been little understood.

Delving into Dickinson's reading lists, hernotes and letters, and analyzing a few poems, Howe explores the workings ofan intricate mind. She uncovers connections between Dickinson and theBrownings, the Brontes, and James Fenimore Cooper, and she shows howseemingly submissive, soft spoken poetic lines are actually rebellious andeven at times angry. What Howe does not do is confuse the image of"The Belle of Amhearst" with the vital workings of the mind ofthis remarkable woman.

This book is an enjoyable read filled with Howe'sadmiration for her artistic predecessor and written in straightforwardlanguage, not literary jargon--a tribute from one poet to another. Foranyone who enjoys Emily Dickinson's poetry, it is not to be missed. ... Read more

Product Description
White Heat is the first book to portray the remarkable relationship between America's most beloved poet and the fiery abolitionist who first brought her work to the public. 
As the Civil War raged, an unlikely friendship was born between the reclusive poet Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a literary figure who ran guns to Kansas and commanded the first Union regiment of black soldiers. When Dickinson sent Higginson four of her poems he realized he had encountered a wholly original genius; their intense correspondence continued for the next quarter century. In White Heat Brenda Wineapple tells an extraordinary story about poetry, politics, and love, one that sheds new light on her subjects and on the roiling America they shared.
 
  ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

A beautiful portrait of Emily Dickinson, the passionate seductive poet of Amherst
Most people think of Emily Dickinson as a reclusive woman who never ventured far from home and stayed withdrawn composing poems while spending her days taking care of her parents. While this may be a superficially accurate picture in some respects, she was anything but reclusive in her connections with those she chose to include in her life like. She was a passionate and seductive genius. She danced and flirted in her poems and in her letters.
For decades, I've loved Emily's poems, the unique way she has in describing the world, the flowers she could see, the blossoms of her thoughts, and the passions of her dreams. After reading Brenda Wineapple's beautiful and poetic biography, I now have a truer appreciation of why her poetry sings with such resonance. She was a woman who reached out in love, so wanting to share what she felt. Thomas Wentworth Higginson -- her chosen Preceptor who she always felt had saved her life -- may not have been equal to the task of fully extending himself to her in all ways, but, still, she chose well. It was Higginson who was, in the end, instrumental in introducing to the world the poems of this beautiful little woman who sought love in her life and gave it to the world with unbounded clarity and brilliance that feels so alive and is so wonderful to behold. After reading this biography, you will, like I, fall in love with Emily Dickinson, and that, my friends, is all the recommendation you will need to know to own and read, again and again, this beautiful and poetic biography about a wondrous poet and introspective woman and a good man who tried to do right in the world.

An exceptional book that belongs in any personal library
Brenda Wineapple writes an intimate portrait of Higginson and Dickinson with sensitivity and elegance.I was afraid it would be rather dry, but just the opposite is true.The author is heady and scholarly, but the writing takes off like an engrossing story, lifts you with it.There is nothing stodgy or stuffy about this book. The narrative flows with grace, and her prose style engages you with its intelligent delivery.It is thoroughly researched--while reading it, I was brought back in time and place.I saw through their eyes.I was inside of Dickinson and beside Higginson.At Emily's home in Amherst, I easily felt what she felt when she looked out her window.

I look forward to more from this author.

A First Class Scholarly Work And Vastly Inspirational!
It is rare to find truly new information about Emily Dickinson's most elusive and private life. It is even more so when it occurs in first rate scholarly fashion by a great writer who understands the depth of ED's spiritual core. "White Heat" is a must-read for anyone serious about learning facts never before revealed concerning both Emily Dickinson's life and work. Incredibly to me was an astonishing additional bonus contained in this treasure of a book: namely, a newly discovered photograph of Emily Dickinson - in later life that will blow your socks off - the exquisite beauty of her; and the blaze of courage as well as resolve in that amazing face. Amazon is offering this wonderful work at a bargain - please don't miss out on the art, heart and inspiration gifted here to all.

White Heat is an excellent exploration of the poetry of Emily Dickinson and her relationship with TW Higginson
Emily Dickinson wrote over 1700 poems of lyrical complexity about nature, immortality, death and her love of nature. Thomas Wentworth Higginson was a man of Renaissance complexity, brilliance and service to his country. These two nineteenth century figures: a reclusive poetic genius and a man of action are the subjects of Dr. Brenda Wineapple's new duo biography. Wineapple is famous for her previous stellar biography of New England's genius Nathaniel Hawthorne.She knows New England life during the nineteenth century with a literary scholar's thoroughness.
Emily Dickinson "the Belle of Amherst" Massachusetts wrote Thomas Wentworth Higginson a letter asking if he thought her poetry was worthy of being published. He wrote her that her work was excellent. Thus from the early 1860's until her death the two were ardent pen pals
Higginson was a man of letters, an abolitionist who worked with John Brown on the latter's raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859, a U.S. Congressman and an advocate for Women's Rights. Higginson was also the first commander of the African-American regiment the First South Carolina which fought at Fort Wagner in the summer of 1863.
Dickinson corresponded with Higginson until she died in 1886. They met only a few times and their relationship was platonic. Dickinson was red headed and freethinking regarding spirituality. Higginson was deeply involved in the transcendalist circle of Concord Mass. He knew such literary giants as Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowe and Henry David Thoreau. Dickinson would not leave her well to do family's property while Higginson traveled to Europe and saw combat in the Civil War in which he was injured. Higginson wed twice but was probably in love with Dickinson as was she with him.
Brenda Wineapple is one of our finest American Literature scholars. She is especially good at:
a. Examining many of Dickinson's poems with a skilled eye.Emily Dickinson's poems were directly related to her life experiences in her sequestered old maidish milieu.
b. Wineapple also looks at the literary efforts of Higginson whose best writing was in his political articles defending freedom for slaves and supporting women in their long fight for the vote and social justice.
c. Wineapple is very familiar with Concord, Amherst and Harvard where much of the story of her two subjects was played out overe several decades. She explores the dynamics of both her subjects home lives.
Emily was the middle child of an austere set of parents. Her father was a congressman and Emily visited Washington DC. Her younger sister Vinnie
was a complex person as was Emily's older brother Austin. Austin became involved in an affair with Mrs. Mabel Dodge. The two eventually married. Dodge and Higginson worked hard in their joint effort to have Dickinson's poems published> In this they succeeded though they often disagreed on how the poems should be presented to the poem and what version to use in the printed book. There were also disuptes within the family regarding the arduous publishing of Emily's work. During her life only two of the poems had been published. Following her death is was Dodge and Higginson who got her poems in print beginning her journey to literary fame.
d. The author is good at explaining the New England literature in mid-nineteenth century American culture. We eat, sleep, write and dream with Dickinson. We also follow the amazing career of Thomas Wentworth Higginson a good man who fought for freedom for the downtrodden.
Emily Dickinson is not the tiny little wimp many people believe her to have been! Rather, she was a bold explorer of the use of language and her unorthodoxy was brave in a culture of conformity.
This is an excellent volume which is essential in understanding the genius of Dickinson and how she reached out to the world through her poetry and letters. Recommended.

very interesting!
This starts off the way things happened and is interesting from the first sentence on.I felt almost like the male character was telling me the story instead of me reading it. ... Read more

Product Description
Though generally overlooked during her lifetime, Emily Dickinson's poetry has achieved acclaim due to her experiments in prosody, her tragic vision and the range of her emotional and intellectual explorations. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

Best collection of Emily Dickinson's poems
This is the best collection/selection of Emily Dickinson's poems I have ever found. They're selected from a complete collection. What's special about this book is that none of the poems are edited, as is done in many other collections of her works - and excellent choices are made for which poems to include. Emily often used simple dashes at the ends of her lines, and this selection is true to her originals - and she never put titles on her poems, or indented lines - as many other collections of her poems have the audacity to do - as if the editors of those works knew better than this greatest poet the English language has ever known.

The special value of a volume of this kind
There are Emily Dickinson's greatest poems, most of which my guess is , have in one way or another been anthologized. There is her complete oeuvre of 1775 poems, a large volume indeed. I am not a Dickinson scholar and I found myself a bit lost with such a large number of poems to search through for new gems.
This present volume edited by the dean of Dickinson scholars purports to choose of the total oeuvre the very best of her work.
I truly appreciate this as a volume of this kind can extend my knowledge and appreciation of her poetry in a way which is most economical and helpful to me.

The Loaded Gun Which
Everyone who aims for the ultimate, the elusive, and the exquisite, ought to pack.The edition is affordable, durable, well-organized, comprehensive . . . and produced with care NOT to alter the form or format of the poems . . . which for some dreadful reason a lot of folks seem to feel compelled to do . . .

more importantly . . . all that white witchcraft still dazzles

For those whose aquiantance with the Belle of Amherst is limited to the classroom edition - i.e., There is no Frigate Like a Book, et al., look again.Dickenson really is the epitome of the rugged individualist - a free spirit - in ways surprisingly opposed to her contemporary, Whitman, she arrives at similar conclusions going no further than her garden. She is the inward sojourner - at home in the harshest tensions and conflicts of the psyche - where her distinctly feminine sensitivity speaks truth in "slant" - as she qualifies her enormous insight.

Most haunting: 'Success is counted sweetest', 'To learn the Transport by the Pain', 'My life closed twice before its close', and, "My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun -".Dickenson laments our sovereign anguish, our exile from the immediate truth or the comprehensive immediacy of truth, the quest for which her poems articulate an urgent hunger enveloped in alternately the most naturistically ambient references or stonily direct terms.

Perhaps we are looking at the wrong aspects...
Don't get me wrong, I truly love a large selection of the poems in this volume.However, that is a measure of Emily Dickenson and me, not T. Johnson's collection.What makes this book better than many that are around and about, as has been mentioned, is the lack of editing to her poems--something that has always bothered me.In this regard, the content of the poems is better than many others, however there are other issues of note.

This is, of course, an abridged collection.As such, we are forced to rely on the opinion of another.Granted this is common enough with poetry collections, but that doesn't change the very nature of each person having differing interests.There is no way to know if the ones he leaves out are just as good or even better, from each individuals perspective, without going to more comprehensive texts.

Regardless, I do have one gripe with this book that is unrelated to the above pettiness.The method of dating each poem seems silly to me.The reason is that they are all claimed to be from one of several (if memory serves 3) years separated out over several decades.That and there are two listings of dates for each poem, which I don't recall off hand why they did that, and it may serve some purpose, but it's not useful information if when these poems were written can only be pinned down to plus or minus five-ten years.I can't blame Johnson for this as I imagine that is as close as is known, but, by the same token, the dates could have been left out so that it doesn't detract from the actual poetry.

All in all I would recomend this book, but I might suggest getting a more complete version instead (so long as it is unedited--Emily hated it when people wanted to edit her poems, and I think that we should respect that).

Strong Medicine
I was never actually a fan of poetry until I encountered Emily Dickinson's poems.It seems as if she has written a poem for everyone.I strongly recomend this book, as my English teacher did to me, not only because of my love for Emily Dickinson, but for the quality of the book.It is obvious that Thomas H. Johnson, the editor, put many long hours of hard work into gathering this collection.Many of her poems were simply scribbled on little pieces of paper, which makes me wonder what kind of literary genius she must have been.With the help of this book, she has become my favorite poet, and I have learned that poetry can be strong medicine for the hurting soul.Final Harvest never leaves my side. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

An Emily Update
If you are a person like me who always has been bewitched by the poetry and legend of Emily Dickinson, but who has been busy living a life for the past 30 or 40 years and has not kept up with Dickinson criticism and scholarship, this book is for you.

The edition I bought was first published in 1998 and was slightly updated in 2005. It contains 22 new essays (including an introduction by the great Dickinson biographer Richard Sewall). The essays are the work of many of the most-published Dickinson-scholarship authors of the last few decades. All the 20- to 30-page essays are scholarly, but all but one avoid the dense impenetrability that too many other literary scholars seem to find necessary in order to get tenure. That makes this book well worth your time.

Essays range widely, including an overview of biographical studies, the poet's historical context, her manuscripts, and her letters. In addition, about half the book deals with Dickinson's poetics and her reception and influence.

The essays don't waste a lot of time chin-rubbing about Emily's possible lesbian love, or just who the "master" is. Instead, they discuss just what you want to know, including what I consider the best-ever reading of "My Life had stood - a / Loaded Gun" in an essay by Margaret H. Freeman. (Is there a Dickinson scholar who hasn't tackled that enigma?)

"The Emily Dickinson Handbook" also contains an impressive bibliography for those moved to dive into the poetry and her strange and wonderful genius. It is now (December, 2007) 121-plus years after her death. Criticism of her work has matured, especially in the last few decades, but it remains fascinating and delightfully unfinished. This is a great way to catch up.

Don't pass this one up! It's a gem!
THE EMILY DICKINSON HANDBOOK : Edited by Gudrun Grabher, Roland Hagenbuchle, and Cristanne Miller. 480 pp. Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, 1998. ISBN 1-55849-169-4 (hbk.)

For anyone who is seriously interested in Emily Dickinson, this is a marvelous book that provides up-to-date information about her life and works, her letters and manuscripts, the cultural climate of her age, her reception and influence, and what is going on in current Dickinson scholarship.

The book's 22 essays have been distributed in eight sections : Introduction; Biography; Historical Context; The Manuscripts; The Letters; Dickinson's Poetics; Reception and Influence; New Directions in Dickinson Scholarship.

Although I've read many critical collections, several of which were devoted exclusively to Dickinson, I can't remember ever having been so impressed. Usually an anthology will hold one or two outstanding contributions, with the rest being humdrum and of little real interest, but here pretty well all of them are outstanding, and I found only one that struck me as being both pretentious and obscure.

I was especially impressed by Robert Weisbuch's brilliant 'Prisming Dickinson, or Gathering Paradise by Letting Go,' by Josef Raab's 'The Metapoetic Element in Dickinson,' by Martha Nell Smith's 'Dickinson's Manuscripts,' by Paul Crumbley's 'Dickinson's Dialogic Voice,' by Roland Hagenbuchle's 'Dickinson and Literary Theory,' and in fact by many others. So much so that this seems to me the single most valuable book on Dickinson that I've ever seen, and the one from which I've learned most and continue to learn. It really is that good.

The book is bound in a full strong cloth, stitched, beautifully printed on excellent strong smooth ivory-tinted paper, has clearly been designed to withstand the heavy use it will be getting, and is excellent value for money. No serious student of Emily Dickinson should be without it. Weisbuch's essay, serving as it does to provide one with a whole new way of understanding ED, is pretty well worth the price of the book itself.

So don't pass this one up! It's a gem!

Do yourself a favor
If you are new to Dickinson studies, or if you simply want to read the most current thinking about the poems, The Emily Dickinson Handbook is a must.It contains essays on subjects ranging from the historical contextof the poems to the poet's metapoetic sensibility.This text is also awonderful introduction to the writings of the finest Dickinson scholarsextant.Richard Sewall, Paul Crumbley, Christanne Miller, Sharon Cameron,Martha Nell Smith, and many other great thinkers offer the reader a glimpseinto the realm of magic and poetry.If you love Emily Dickinson, doyourself a favor -- read this book. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (8)

Poetry for Young People
Poetry for Young People by Emily Dickinson is a wonderful book for young readers.Although I do not usually read poetry books I truly enjoyed Dickinson's poems. A lot of the poems in this book are very short but they are also very interesting. All of these poems are unique and very clever.Reading some of her poems is about the same as looking at a picture of what she is describing because she illustrates things so vividly and with so much imagery.I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys poetry.

Poetry and Art
This is a great collection of some of Emily Dickinson's most famous poems, and I love the paintings taken; they fit the poems so well. Great little collection.

Page turning poetry
what this little book does very nicely is make great poetry very accessible.The format is designed with 'young' people in mind, however I left my copy on a shelf during a recent family gathering and it was my 40 year old daughter who picked it up and without referring to her own children picked out her favourite poem.

This is a book for everyone, if you don't already know, Emily Dickinson is one of the explorers of human nature, and every other form of nature.

Finally, my favourite poem is Revery.

THIS IS ANOTHER GREAT ADDITION TO A WONDERFUL SERIES
I cannot think of a better way to introduce the poetry or Emily Dickinson than this small volume.The selection is excellent and of interest you the young reader.The commentary is quite relevant as are the pictures which accompany it.I find that often now, our young people go all the way through the early grades in school and many of them have never heard of Emily Dickinson,much less read their poetry.This was the sort of stuff my generation and the generation before it grew up on and cut our teeth on.I do not feel I am any worse for the wear.I am fearful that we are bringing up an entire generation (rightfully or wrong, although I feel it is the later) of young folks who will have no appreciation to this great art form and will miss a lot.This book helps.This entire series helps, as a matter of fact and I certainly recommend you add this one and the others to your library.Actually, it is rather fun reading these with the young folk and then talking about them.Not only do you get to enjoy the work your self and perhaps bring back some great memories, but you have the opportunity to interact with your child or student.It is actually rather surprising what some of the kids come up with.I read these to my grandchildren and to the kids in my classes at school.For the most part, when I really get to discussing the work with them, they enjoy it.Recommend this one highly.

Brandon's thoughts on Emily Dickinson
The book "Poetry for Young People Emily Dickinson" edited by Frances Schoonmaker Bolin and illustrated by Chi Chung is a wonderful book for the beginning poet or any person who likes poetry. It has good background information in the beginning of the book telling a little bit about Emily Dickinson and her life. I also liked the way any hard words in each poem are listed below each poem with their definitions.

There are also good illustrations for everyone of the poems. The pictures were well drawn and positioned through-out the book with each poem.

There were many good poems in the book but I really liked the one.The one poem which I liked very much is "The pedigree of honey Does not concern the bee - A clover, any time to him is aristocracy."

I would strongly recommend this book to other children between the ages of 9 and 13 years.

By: Brandon Ortiz
February 12,2006 ... Read more

Product Description

"How tame and manageable are the emotions of our bards, how placid and literary their allusions!" complained essayist T. W. Higginson in the Atlantic Monthly in 1870. "The American poet of passion is yet to come." He was, of course, unaware of the great erotic love poems such as "Wild Nights--Wild Nights!" and "Struck was I, nor yet by Lightning" being privately written by his reclusive friend Emily Dickinson.

In a profound new analysis of Dickinson's life and work, Judith Farr explores the desire, suffering, exultation, spiritual rapture, and intense dedication to art that characterize Dickinson's poems, and deciphers their many complex and witty references to texts and paintings of the day. In The Passion of Emily Dickinson the poet emerges, not as a cryptic proto-modern or a victim of female repression, but as a cultivated mid-Victorian in whom the romanticism of Emerson and the American landscape painters found bold expression.

Dickinson wrote two distinct cycles of love poetry, argues Farr, one for her sister-in-law Sue and one for the mysterious "Master," here convincingly identified as Samuel Bowles, a friend of the family. For each of these intimates, Dickinson crafted personalized metaphoric codes drawn from her reading. Calling books her "Kinsmen of the Shelf," she refracted elements of Jane Eyre, Antony and Cleopatra, Tennyson's Maud, De Quincey's Confessions, and key biblical passages into her writing. And, to a previously unexplored degree, Dickinson also quoted the strategies and subject matter of popular Hudson River, Luminist, and Pre-Raphaelite paintings, notably Thomas Cole's Voyage of Life and Frederic Edwin Church's Heart of the Andes. Involved in the delicate process of both expressing and disguising her passion, Dickinson incorporated these sources in an original and sophisticated manner.

Farr's superb readings of the poems and letters call on neglected archival material and on magazines, books, and paintings owned by the Dickinsons. Viewed as part of a finely articulated tradition of Victorian iconography, Dickinson's interest in the fate of the soul after death, her seclusion, her fascination with landscape's mystical content, her quest for honor and immortality through art, and most of all her very human passions become less enigmatic. Farr tells the story of a poet and her time. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Well Worth Reading
Ours is such an unpoetic age. The prevailing view that reality is only what you see and the electro-magnetic fields on which our cell phones depend make the investigations a true poet makes seem fantasies and certainly irrelevant. What is above us, the nature of the world of which we are a part, and in which any one human is only a brief, generally painful, episode, is quite unknown to most of us, and this is the world a good poet (in my opinion) tries to communicate, and this is the world Emily Dickinson took up every day. It is a dimension only understood with both mind and feeling together, it is learned about in confrontations with love, nature, suffering and eternity.

Anyway, I liked Judith Farr's book insofar as it agreed with my view of Emily Dickinson. Obviously, I love people who love Dickinson, and she clearly does. My only strong disagreement is with the idea that the Hudson River School painters could have played a very large role in the formation of her poetry, and even with the idea that there is a real similitude there.Generally speaking, Emily Dickinson is deeper than Cole, Church and the others. I like them, especially Kensett and Heade, but I've rarely felt the shock of revelation looking at one of their paintings, as I often have reading her poetry. I think probably the study of the Brontes, Brownings, Shakespeare and the Bible would reveal more of her actual source material, as would walking through fields, looking closely at flowers and listening to storms. Farr does supply a good deal of relevant literary material.

It's the type of study that is very helpful in attempting to give contexts to the poems, which can be completely opaque. A poem may be the continuation of an earlier conversation, which we can only conjecture about.

With Dickinson, you have to get what you can. We are surrounded by the unknown, the daily complacency is based on social convention and convenience, not on any understanding. It's a global self-deception. People who venture out into the unknown and report back are, in my view, the only really "distinguished" people. It's the only really worthwhile distinction.

I think anyone who is interested in Emily Dickinson will enjoy this work, but I would also recommend Helen Vendler's discussion of Emily Dickinson in "Poets Thinking"; Ted Hughes' excellent introduction to his collection of her poetry, which can be found in "Winter Pollen"; and Joyce Carol Oates' introduction in "The Essential Emily Dickinson". I would read any of those before I'd read this book again.

Fascinating Interpretation
This is one of the better books of critical interpretation of Emily Dickinson. Most of the books about her apart from biographies are so academic they have little appeal to the general reader. This one although long, does not go into literary criticism that becomes incomprehensible. Generally, it is a sensible interpretation of the meaning of Dickinson's poems through paintings of the time. Also considered are some of the references in the poems to popular Victorian literature. Poems themselves although they are emotion, are also in some sense philosophy. So, in this book, the author's exploration of general thought on a topic and then Dickinson's way of exploring it are fascinating. Farr covers some topics that are controversial here like the extent of Dickinson's relationship with Sue Gilbert Dickinson or the mystery of the identity of ''Master''. Whatever anyone's view of these topics, reading this book just to read this author's take on them is silly. This book is worthwhile to read for many other reasons. Fifty times over, this book is worth reading.

And all my House aglow (638)
Thirty years ago, I read ED in school, a few poems chosen for high school students, scrubbed by the sensibilities of that time and rural place. My remembered impression was of a strange recluse who wrote of flowers and death. On word of friends, I came to remake her acquaintance, and found passion, unconventional explorations, and wide knowledge of her moment. That a woman so contained in space should flow out through time touches and pauses me. I should like to have known her, to have had her as my friend (by email, or chat?), and been informed of her wider, richer world distilled ever smaller until its circumference reduced me, too; a term between eternity and immortality (ED, you amaze).

Judith Farr has wrought a miracle in bringing ED to me so compellingly (thank you, Judith). ... Read more

Product Description
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process.We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Good Poetry in almost good editions
This could be one of the best editions ever to be found for Dickinson's verse, if the editors had not choosed to arrange the poems thematically, rather than chronologically, as the "Complete poems" editors did. The book is divided into three sections, each one of them related to a specific topic: the poet's art, the works of love, death and resurrection. But the numeration is different from other editions, which makes it difficult to use in class, or to discuss in a scholar environment. However, as a home book it is perfect.
Some really important poems are not included, such as "Wild nights" or "there's a certain slant of light", although the selection is quite good in general.

"Exultation is the going of an inland soulto sea"
This is a fine selection of the poems of Emily Dickinson.
Dickinson is a great and distinctive poet of the kind who wrote concise, memorable , nay unforgettable lines and stanzas.
Here are a few of her great beginnings.

"Success is counted sweetest by those who ne'er succeed,
To Comprehend a Nectar requires Sorest Need."

"Exultation is the going of an Inland Soul to Sea,
Past the Headlands, Past the Houses into Deep Eternity."

"Are you Nobody? I am Nobody too.
Then there's two of us, you know. "

" I love to see it lap the hills
and likc the valleys up ...

" Parting is all we know of Heaven,
and all we need of Hell. "

To read Emily Dickinson is to know what True Poetry is. In its , metaphorical density, brilliance of perception and intensity of feeling.
After this one, get the Complete Poems and try to sense it all.

Why Do The Greatest Poets Write About Death?
Admittedly, I am taking a rather narrow view of America's greatest poet here. But the nub of the matter is this: poets, who have been revered historically (since Biblical times) by Kings, Queens, and the people were truly 'the celebrities' of their day. Frankly, I'd rather be in the company with the master poets than our current celebs but that's just a personal preference. The death issue is what makes most poets scale heights few can only imagine. For the poet's essential goal in any age is to trancend the world. That leads them to a vista where wisdom, courage, truth, and justice reside. Emily Dickinson's poetry as presented in this book (& the many pricelss others Amazon.com has for sale) - does just that. So be it.

An innovative poet
Emily Dickinson is one of the most strange and original poets of all. So many of her weird poems are about death (but I guess what poet doesn't write about death right?). So it was her themes and subject-matter as well as her poetic style and syntax that were very odd at times, especially for the Victorian age which had such strict set rules for poetry composition and whose poetry focused on "nice" themes. My favorite is "The Chariot", which happens to be one of her more conventional pieces. It begins: "Because I could not stop for Death, / he kindly stopped for me; / The carriage held but just ourselves / And Immortality." Wonderful. And certain poems are delightful, like the use of metaphor in her romantic poem "Wild Nights" or the simplicity of "I'm nobody, who are you?" Most of the poems however have no title, they're known by their first line.

A prism which captures the white light of reality.
Just as a prism breaks up light into a band of colors - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet - and their infinite gradations, so do Emily Dickinson's poems become, as it were, a prism which captures the white light of reality, a reality which as it flows through the prism of her poem explodes into a multiplicity of meanings.

It is the rich suggestiveness of her poems, a suggestiveness which generates an incredible range of meanings, that prevents us from ever being able to say (to continue the metaphor) that a given poem is 'about red' or 'about blue,' because her poems, as US critic Robert Weisbuch has observed, are in fact about everything. This is what makes her so unique, and this is why she appeals to every kind of reader, and even to children.

The present book, which has been edited by Brenda Hillman, gives us accurate texts of the poems in a 150-page selection taken from the authoritative variorum edition of Thomas H. Johnson, the well-known Dickinson scholar who worked many years to establish the correct texts.

The book is beautifully printed in two-colors on excellent paper, and in a tiny format which is perfect for the pocket.It would in fact make a very nice gift.You'd be making a gift of poetry which is one of the wonders of the world. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

"Complete" should be complete.
I was hoping to have a complete anthology of Emily's poetry.That's why I chose your "Emily Dickinson's Complete Poems" -- After I got the download, I went looking for her most famous works (Fly Buzz, Chariot, Apparently with No Surprise).They were all there.Then I looked for some of my personal favorites, particularly "The first day's night" which goes:

The first Day's Night had come --
And grateful that a thing
So terrible -- had been endured --
I told my Soul to sing --

She said her Strings were snapt --
Her Bow -- to Atoms blown --
And so to mend her -- gave me work
Until another Morn --

And then -- a Day as huge
As Yesterdays in pairs,
Unrolled its horror in my face --
Until it blocked my eyes --

My Brain -- begun to laugh --
I mumbled -- like a fool --
And tho' 'tis Years ago -- that Day --
My Brain keeps giggling -- still.

And Something's odd -- within --
That person that I was --
And this One -- do not feel the same --
Could it be Madness -- this?

Though I've read the TOC and used the search feature, this poem is not included in your version.Why is that?Even though your selection is long, I think you have to bill it as "Select Poems of Emily Dickinson" and not "complete poems." -- It is a shame and danger.If new readers believe they have the definitive Emily and you deprive them of this little gem, you've stolen something from both the memory of the author and the audience.I'd give the writing 5 stars but I have to give the whole book 2 stars because of the false advertising. Pity.

Easy to navigate & read ...
I found the active Table of Contents very useful in navigating through this very sizable collection.I can't speak for the edition and its accuracy, nor was I able to verify that it includes all E.D.'s poems, but the implementation is more than acceptable.Each poem is separated from the next by adequate space making the collection very readable even on my iPod.

Functional, but not close to urtext
Better formatting, but still with lots of errors. The numbering of the TOC and poems is non-standard, and the inconsistency of capitalization and dashes are disturbing, given the obsession of the author with those conventions.

I want to carry around a complete version of ED's poems, and this is the most tolerable version I've found to date. But it is irritating, and not remotely a substitute for the hard copy Thomas H. Johnson-edited "The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson".

The third star is for Ms. Dickinson's work. As an edition on its own, without ED's contribution, it would have gotten two stars. ... Read more

Product Description
Written in Dickinson's characteristic style and including twenty-five poems written in imitation of her, a fictional journal records the events of her daily life and reveals her private musings about God, family, nature, death, love, poetry, and womanhood. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Deceptive title and even more deceptive content!
This book is fiction and yet when I picked it up I thought I was getting the actual diary of Emily Dickinson!The writing is similar to what Emily might have written in her diary but she did not write any of this.The author takes way too many liberties with this title and deceives those of us who are true fans of the immortal Emily Dickinson.Read Emily's poetry instead and you will find a living diary directly from this beautiful woman's life.

from a person who is in her own way a Dickinson scholar...
Customer reviews prior to this one here, as well as the author andpublisher's manner of presention of this book blatantly titled THE DIARY OFEMILY DICKINSON, present a kind of ethical dilemma to this reader and loverof Dickinson's poetry.

Unless literary history has changed mightilywhile I, like a modern Rip Van Winkle, slept right through it, the fact isthat IF Emily Dickinson ever kept a diary or journal, it was eithersuppressed or destroyed. Probably the latter, by the same friends andfamily members who heavily edited (and had the audacity to change Emily'swords in) the first printings of her poems.

You will note, if you readthe reader reviews posted here before this one, that two out of threeamazon.com readers believed they were reading a diary actually written byEmily Dickinson herself.

I am frankly distressed by the publication of abook that does not make its fictional nature more obvious and upfront.

It's a great work of HISTORICAL FICTION
I just bought this book to help me do some research on Emily Dickinson and did not realize the "diary" is actually fictional.The "novel" is so well done that you will believe that you arereading actual diary entries written by Emily Dickinson.There are eveneditorial notes throughout the diary to help clarify the entries.Theprologue doesn't even clue you in to this "April Fool's".I wasflabbergasted when I was halfway through the book and so happened to glanceat the back cover and realized this diary was actually fictional!Verywell done!Very well done! No matter, it has helped me understand EmilyDickinson's poetry a lot better . . . Jamie Fuller threads throughout thediary actual events with likely events . . . oh it's brilliant.Absolutelybrilliant! Bravo! I am laughing hard still from the shock of discovering myerror.

To get to know the mind of one of America's greatest poet
To be honest, I never was able to get fully into Emily's poetry. I always thought that her poems were a bit too remote for me to reach, for example, themes like death, eternity, etc. I have always wondered what kind of person can really write these poems. After reading this diary of hers, Ireally must say, it just seems that I have made a new friend. It just makesme get to know more about the thoughts, the beliefs, the anxiety and theinner world of a very talented woman. Now, after finished reading herdiary, I am really able to appreciate her poetry fully. I recommend thisdiary to anyone who likes Emily's poetry, or, to people who like me, haveat first found her poetry a bit hard to get into. I am sure that afterreading this book, you will get to understand and like her better.

Beautiful as anything
This book is intruiging to read. I first read this book before i read her actual poems. And i must admit that i like her diary more than her actual poems. I guess it is the depth of her thoughts into a diary than herthoughts of seeing. Some of her poems were inspiered from here entries intoher diary. There are many exerts of various poems into this book, which isa real treat to get more than you payed for. =) I would reccomend this bookto anyone who would like to gain a perspective of the artist by her daily,weekly entires. ... Read more