Product Description
'Billy Collin's is one of my favourite poets in the world' Carol Ann DuffyReaders will only have to open this book at random to realize the privation a life without Billy Collins has been.A writer of immense grace and humanity, Billy Collin's shows how the great forces of history and nature converge on the tiniest details of our lives - and in doing so presents them in a new radiance. He is also unbelievably funny.'The most popular poet in America' New York Times'Billy Collin's writes lovely poems...Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides' John Updike'Billy Collin's medium is a rare amalgam of accessibility and intelligence. I'd follow this man's mind anywhere. Expect to be surprised' Michael Donaghy'Smart, his strings tuned and resonant, his wonderful eye looping over the things, events and ideas of the world, rueful, playful, warm voiced, easy to love' E. Annie Proulx ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Who can resist anything by Billy Collins?
I suppose it's possible but not his collection in particular. There are poems in Taking Off...that I return to time and again. A wonderful achievement. No wonder he was our poet laureate.

A delicious collection in every way
Ah, the pleasure Billy Collins brings his readers!This collection is spilling forth with gems:Wry poems.Gentle ones.Discreetly but breathtakingly erotic poems, as with the title poem.Poems that are delicate.Elegant and elegiac poems. Poems that make one chuckle.Poems that make one shake with laugther.Pointed, ironic, bemused, observing, warm poems.And windows.Lots of windows. ... 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

Product Description
PREFACE.
The verses of Emily Dickinson belong emphatically to what Emerson long since called "the Poetry of the Portfolio,"—something produced absolutely without the thought of publication, and solely by way of expression of the writer's own mind. Such verse must inevitably forfeit whatever advantage lies in the discipline of public criticism and the enforced conformity to accepted ways. On the other hand, it may often gain something through the habit of freedom and the unconventional utterance of daring thoughts. In the case of the present author, there was absolutely no choice in the matter; she must write thus, or not at all. A recluse by temperament and habit, literally spending years without setting her foot beyond the doorstep, and many more years during which her walks were strictly limited to her father's grounds, she habitually concealed her mind, like her person, from all but a very few friends; and it was with great difficulty that she was persuaded to print, during her lifetime, three or four poems. Yet she wrote verses in great abundance; and though brought curiously indifferent to all conventional rules, had yet a rigorous literary standard of her own, and often altered a word many times to suit an ear which had its own tenacious fastidiousness.
Miss Dickinson was born in Amherst, Mass., Dec. 10, 1830, and died there May 15, 1886. Her father, Hon. Edward Dickinson, was the leading lawyer of Amherst, and was treasurer of the well-known college there situated. It was his custom once a year to hold a large reception at his house, attended by all the families connected with the institution and by the leading people of the town. On these occasions his daughter Emily emerged from her wonted retirement and did her part as gracious hostess; nor would any one have known from her manner, I have been told, that this was not a daily occurrence. The annual occasion once past, she withdrew again into her seclusion, and except for a very few friends was as invisible to the world as if she had dwelt in a nunnery. For myself, although I had corresponded with her for many years, I saw her but twice face to face, and brought away the impression of something as unique and remote as Undine or Mignon or Thekla.
This selection from her poems is published to meet the desire of her personal friends, and especially of her surviving sister. It is believed that the thoughtful reader will find in these pages a quality more suggestive of the poetry of William Blake than of anything to be elsewhere found,—flashes of wholly original and profound insight into nature and life; words and phrases exhibiting an extraordinary vividness of descriptive and imaginative power, yet often set in a seemingly whimsical or even rugged frame. They are here published as they were written, with very few and superficial changes; although it is fair to say that the titles have been assigned, almost invariably, by the editors. In many cases these verses will seem to the reader like poetry torn up by the roots, with rain and dew and earth still clinging to them, giving a freshness and a fragrance not otherwise to be conveyed. In other cases, as in the few poems of shipwreck or of mental conflict, we can only wonder at the gift of vivid imagination by which this recluse woman can delineate, by a few touches, the very crises of physical or mental struggle. And sometimes again we catch glimpses of a lyric strain, sustained perhaps but for a line or two at a time, and making the reader regret its sudden cessation. But the main quality of these poems is that of extraordinary grasp and insight, uttered with an uneven vigor sometimes exasperating, seemingly wayward, but really unsought and inevitable. After all, when a thought takes one's breath away, a lesson on grammar seems an impertinence. As Ruskin wrote in his earlier and better days, "No weight nor mass nor beauty of execution can outweigh one grain or fragment of thought."
—-Thomas Wentworth Higginson ... Read more

Product Description
Emily Dickinson was a prolific writer and yet, with the exception of four poems in a limited regional volume, her poems were never published during her lifetime.It was indeed fortunate that her sister discovered the poems—all loosely bound in bundles—shortly after Dickinson died.
Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson is the complete collection of the first three volumes of poetry published posthumously in 1890, 1891, and 1896 by editors Mary Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson.The volumes were all received with high acclaim and contain some of her best-known poems.It was in the twentieth century, however, that Dickinson was finally recognized as one of the great poets and, without dispute, the most popular.
The name Emily Dickinson is a legend now, but she never had the opportunity to taste the wine of success and fame in her lifetime.In fact, if there was any legendary status she received in her life, it was not for poetry but for the way she lived her life.She received local notoriety in her native town of Amherst, Massachusetts, as an eccentric recluse who, with few exceptions, would never set foot outside her house.Yet, as her poetry will attest, she had a keen insight of life, love, nature, and death and seemed to be content with her station in life.
Reading through the poems in Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson, you will see that she was indeed a woman of independence and spirit, a poet that lives today in our hearts and minds. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (18)

Emily Dickinson
Great replacement for my paperback edition of Emily Dickinson's poems.Good value and prompt service, as always.

Better World Books / Dickinson
Excellent condition and Better World Books has an amazing mission.Why not get what you need and feel secure in knowing you are also impacting the world. :)
Thanks!

My namesake!
Random trivia: Emily Dickinson is actually my namesake--my mom was obsessed with her poetry at the time of my birth.

Enough about that: these are great poems, of all subjects. Those who think that Emily Dickinson was totally depressed needs to start reading her wide range of observances: friendship, love, death, life, nature, etc. The list goes on and on.

I like the way this book organized her works by subject, and the introduction is very special.

Emily Dickinson rocks.

Auctioning off her soul
This is just the kind of "collection" that not just purists but ordinary knowledgeable fans of the Belle of Amherst hate. Edit Emily Dickinson? As much to say edit Michaelangelo's "Pieta," Leonardo's "Last Supper," put a brassiere on the "Venus de Milo!" Whether or not one may agree with me that Emily is America's greatest poet, most who have bothered at all to savor her stark little stanzas in their purest original forms are bound to be deeply offended by editorial attempts, no matter how clever, to gild these admittedly difficult lilies of Emily's. Unless you may have a reason, of course, as I have, for wanting to get a copy of them in this form -- in which case I would say this is an excellent specimen edition, reproducing as it does something of the poetry's early publication history without the trouble and expense of seeking out rare first editions.

In my case, I'm currently at work on a play that touches upon that history and its mighty early publication struggles, a fascinating story in itself, so for all that the mighty wrassling matches of Todd, Higginson et al to smith Emily's barbaric stanzas into what they imagined to be publishable shape may sadly becloud the poetry's primal beauty, it's a needful resource and a cloud that for me is not without its silver lining.

Nor is that the only silver lining, when one stops to think about it. Today, for all that Higginson may look rather an imbecile to us who only remember his name at all because of his chance connection with Emily, he really was quite an interesting and important historical personality in his own right, back in the day, whose life and works (this being one of those works) can tell you quite a lot about the crucial period of American history he inhabited. And Mabel Loomis Todd, who lovingly and laboriously transcribed Emily's hundreds of barely decipherable manuscripts and brought the project to Higginson's attention, was a multitalented, genuinely brilliant woman, who would also have settled for a lot less editing in the final published versions, especially the ham-handed assignments of poem titles by Higginson, had she had more say in matters.

In fact, we have a lot of sheer dumb luck to thank for the fact that we have Emily's oeuvre at all. We can thank her sister Vinnie for discovering the poetry and perceiving its worth, while going through her things after the poet's death, and being bright enough not to burn it along with her correspondence, and for her fanaticism about pushing first her sister in law, then Mabel Todd, in a four year campaign to find a way to get it published. We can thank Mabel for her fanaticism in rounding it up, transcribing it by midnight oil, and pushing first Higginson and then Thomas Niles of Roberts Brothers to bring out an edition of a mass of poetry that they all considered hopelessly unpublishable. It is fortunate for us, after Niles stipulated that the edition should be very small and the family must pay for the plates, that the reading public thought otherwise, and the first printing created such a sensation that the printers couldn't print subsequent editions fast enough to keep the bookstore shelves filled.

The thing is, lame as the editorial monkeyshines of Higginson et al may look in 20/20 hindsight, they are about as competent a job as anyone could have made of such materials at the time, and without which none of Emily's poetry would ever have been published at all, in any form. Today, of course, we can enjoy wonderful editions by Johnson and Franklin that give us as much of Emily's poetry as has been discovered, in a form as true and faithful as possible to the ways she originally wrote it. The brilliance of the poetry in Emily's original form, as compared to the ways subsequent lesser lights from Higginson right up to Billy Collins have mucked it up and marred Emily's tale in the telling, is a point, I think, generally conceded. What might be borne in mind, though, is the debt we all owe to the original muckers-up whose sometimes thankless labors were ultimately the only reason the poetry survived the poet, such that we can have Franklin's and Johnson's masterful handiwork available to us today.

Warning
This book may be interesting to experts who want to see how the first "editors" Todd and Higginson, alterated Dickinson's poems, "by smoothing out the rhymes and meter, changing line arrangements, and rewriting the dialect of the local area", as the introduction plainly states.
Is it naivety, stupidity or cold deliberation that this book is still sold under the innocent title of "collected poems", as if it presented the original texts? It should come with a warning. ... Read more

Product Description
Emily Dickinson noted "death's tremendous nearness" in one of her poems.Of course, she'd been dead 100 years when her admirers came to Amherst to celebrate her at a memorial symposium.

Among them was Homer Kelly, distinguished Thoreau scholar and ex-detective, who had himself dealt with murder -- a form of death -- in the past.To his amazement he finds himself once again embroiled in sudden death when murder stalks the symposium. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Emily Dickinson is dead but this book is not!
I've read several Jane Langton mysteries and this one and "The Transcendental Murder" are so far my favorites. The sly humor and colorful characters are so interesting and entertaining, that the mystery for me became almost a sideshow. Jane Langton is at her best here in her depiction of eccentric characters and portrayal of puffed-up academic types. But she pokes only gentle humor, never mean or malicious.

I liked the book so much, I was sad when I finished. That is a sign of a good book!

A perfect blend of personalities
I wonder if there is a writer more perfectly suited to exploit Emily Dickinson than Jane Langton simply becuz Jane has qualities that evoke Emily -- a beautifully disciplined tone, New England quaintness, mixed with a sparkling imagination. That's in addition to the plot of this novel which is a complex mystery surrounding a newly unearthed photo of a woman who might be Emily Dickinson (in addition to the one irrefutable photo which exists). It's set in Emily's hometown of Amherst during a symposium where conflicts abound. Jane gives this story a mixture of wry humor and homespun drama, and she contributes her own line drawings. This is for those types of people who prefer quiet, thoughtful movies to loud, blazing action one. I found this novel pure joy.

A Wonderful Mystery!
As a life-long resident of Amherst, I was thrilled to see the sketches of familiar places, and read in such vivid detail a beautifully written persective of my town.A wonderful, wonderful mystery as well.Guaranteed to tickle the funny bone as well as keep you on the edge of your seat!
Well done, Ms. Langton!

Emily Dickinson Lives!
I chose the book because a friend is an Emily Dickinson fan, I'm a mystery fan, I was charmed by the author's sketches, and delighted by the snippets of Dickinson's poetry.What a fine discovery!The characters are complex,subtle, and interesting.The college town setting is vivid. The plot hadunexpected twists and turns that kept me guessing.I learned somethingabout the workings of dams and reservoirs, and I learned something aboutEmily Dickinson and her poetry, enough so I followed up "EmilyDickinson is Dead" by reading her biography. This was my first JaneLangton book. She has managed to do what a lot of writers only aspire to --her writing is so transparent I forget the story and setting were coming tome through print on a page.

Marvelous Characters tangled in a Whimisical plot
I have to totally disagree with the previous review. I found this Homer Kelly mystery refreshing and fully of marvelous characters full of human foibles. The descriptions were subtle but often verged on the hilarious.This is the book that hooked me on Jane Langton. It's too bad that theprevious reader did not read the dust jacket before purchasing this book.It very clearly identifies itself as a mystery and not an study in EmilyDickinson. It's not surprising that she did not enjoy the book since itmocks stuffy Emily Dickinson scholars. But I found this book to be askillfully written romp in weakness of human nature. ... Read more

Product Description
Emily Dickinson is one of our most original writers, a force destined to endure in American letters. In this comprehensive volume over 200 of her major poetic works have been assembled, including "The Lonely House", "Cocoon", "Let Down the Bars, O Death", "Parting", "Autumn"and "My Cricket." ... Read more

Product Description
Using updated scholarship and never before published primary research, this new biography peels away the myths surrounding Emily Dickinson and takes a fresh look at the complex and busy life of this genius of American letters. As a research tool, the volume is also useful for its explanation of current nomenclature for the poems, mysteries and controversies, and the poet's influence on American poetry and culture. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

You'll wish the book was longer

Kirk states that this is a book written for beginners, when it comes to Emily Dickinson. If you're a beginner, you couldn't ask for a better introduction. She helps the reader understand why a poem by Dickinson is printed in various ways using different words and punctuation. Kirk writes just enough about Dickinson's life to ruin your delight when reading pre-2005 biographies. I had no success reaching the website Kirk gives to find photographic copies of Dickinson's originals. But she's upped my interest and I'm still searching.

The Definitive Young Adult Biography
This book is for young adults of the early 21st century what the National Book Award-winning Richard B. Sewall account was for adults 30 years ago--the definitive biography of the poet's life, including updated and new research that dispels many long-held Dickinson myths.Emily Dickinson sought advice on her writing and even collaborated with a close friend on at least one poem; she traveled; she had a circle of friends and family who meant a great deal to her and who received hundreds of letters from her; she loved her dog and hated housecleaning.She was not only aware of the Civil War during her most prolific years, but she also wrote poems about the war's soldiers and suffering.This is the living, breathing Emily Dickinson as a woman young people of today need to read about and think about in relation to her extraordinary poetry.Adults wishing to read a shorter account will also find much fresh and well-researched information here about a great American poet. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Uncovering Emily's Secrets
While this earlier work does not have the high level of dramatic power evidenced in his books on John Keats and Edgar Allan Poe, there is certainly no fault here on Mr. Walsh's part.In fact, he has brought to light some very intriguing, if not disturbing, details related to how Emily Dickinson approached her craft, the secrets she and her cousins worked to conceal, and the political family wrangling over the poetess's literary estate.His literary research is again top notch and very impressive.Mr. Walsh is clearly a brilliant man; his excellent unravelling of confused or once-unknown details enhances anyone's understanding of Emily Dickinson's genius. ... Read more

Product Description
Emily Dickinson, at an early age, became enlightened. Ego-transcendence awakened her to the Higher Self, and this unleashed a torrent of creative energy that sustained her for 35 years, producing hundreds of poems dealing either the phenomena of cosmic awareness. This also made her a heretic, for she (like the Buddhists) recognizes no creator god, much less a deathless ego-self on the form of a soul. Hence the secrecy of her poetic enterprise. Over the years she wrote her poems and stashed them away, to be discovered posthumously.

Dickinson's work view was first described by the Buddha, and has been examined at length in countless Buddhist commentaries, which makes the dharma accessible to rational understanding. This provided the cognitive framework of Emily Dickenson: Accidental Buddhist. It consists of lucid close readings demystifying man of Dickinson's most "enigmatic" poems.

The author, RC Allen, is a retired humanities professor, and a veteran student of the Spanish transcendentalist poets. This experience and familiarity with archetypal discourse are now devoted to the Dickinson oeuvre. His previous book, Solitary Prowess: The Transcendentalist Poetry of Emily Dickinson (Saru Press International), appeared in 2005. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A Ground-breaking Study of Emily Dickinson's Poems
The great Indian Buddhist philosopher, Nagarjuna, tells us that:

When buddhas don't appear
And their followers are gone,
The wisdom of awakening
Bursts forth by itself.

To fully understand Emily Dickinson one needs to realize that wisdom - insight into the true nature of the reality in which we are all enmeshed - had burst forth spontaneously in this amazing woman and that her poems were written from an enlightened or non-dualist point-of-view. R. C. Allen's well-illustrated, thorough and fascinating study of Emily Dickinson's poems will clue you in as to just what that means. Allen succeeds brilliantly in making perfectly intelligible the many obscurities that have always puzzled readers of Dickinson.

See also the same author's Solitary Prowess: The Transcendental Poetry of Emily Dickinson. ... Read more

Product Description
Visions in Poetry is an innovative and award-winning series of classic poems reinterpreted for today's readers by outstanding contemporary artists in distinctively beautiful editions. This is My Letter to the World and Other Poems by Emily Dickinson is brilliantly illustrated by Isabelle Arsenault. The artist's interpretation displays a rich understanding of Dickinson's poetry, which is known for its economy, unexpected imagery and hauntingly personal point of view.Arsenault has created a subtle meditation on Dickinson's life and its intersection with her verse. In the dream-like illustrations, the poet - sometimes serene, often sad and always enigmatic - is an omnipresent figure in her ghostly white dress. Dickinson's 'letters,' the words she left to the world, have found their ideal visual complement. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Total Downer
I retired as a professor of English a few years ago.I have read Emily Dickinson most of my life.She is a very special poet whose musings speak various things to various readers.This is what makes great poetry.

However, Emily Dickinson did not write this book.I personally believe it is the lowest in plagarism to take any writer's own words out of context and run them together as though they were one, cohesive story, which is not true.

I found it more depressing than any of the poems used here, taken alone.The book won an AWARD, alright, for its ILLUSTRATIONS, which, while interesting, are actually depressing and a bit scary for children.

An exceptional book
"My Letter to the World and Other Poems" is an exceptional book.

Isabelle Arsenault illustrates seven of Emily Dickinson's poems--still so new--with great artistry.The overall production of the book is beautiful as well (KCP Poetry, An Imprint of Kids Can Press).

I first bought this book at Mead Public Library in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, USA.It was part of a collection of books that people could donate to the library.

Because you will not stop for this book, it will kindly stop for you.
The great children's collections of Emily Dickinson's poems... I'm sure they exist. They'd have to. We're talking about one of the greatest (THE greatest?) American poets to put pen to paper. It would be patently ridiculous if there weren't a couple collections for kids out there. A quick search of my library's catalog and I see things like Poems for Youth which collected seventy-eight of her poems alongside illustrations, published in 1996. Or there was A Brighter Garden with illustrations by Tasha Tudor, which came out in 1990 with Philomel. Still, when all is said and done the Dickinson poetry section of my children's room looks a bit spare. And maybe it takes something a little shorter like My Letter to the World and Other Poems, produced by Kids Can Press's Visions in Poetry series to capture children's attention. A slim volume of a mere seven poems, this introduction to Emily Dickinson will lure in new fans with the woman's innate sense of mystery. Accompanied by illustrator Isabelle Arsenault's signature style, this book that will offer children an Emily finally worth getting to know.

The seven poems in this book include Dickinson's best-known work. "I'm Nobody! Who are you?" snuggles up alongside "Because I could not stop for Death - He kindly stopped for me-" And from the first gessoed page that sports the titular opening poem to the well-known " `Hope' is a thing with feathers" found at the end, the book invokes Dickinson's life. Arsenault's mixed media works in watercolors, paints, inks, newsprint, photographs, you name it. But rather than give the book a crazed slapdash appearance, the images are cool and collected. They work seamlessly with the poetry, offering sparing jolts of color whenever you least expect it. This is not your standard Dickinson fare, a fact which gives you all the more reason to purchase it for a kid you know pronto.

Recently I saw the actor Simon Callow perform Shakespeare's sonnets in a newly established order that told a kind of story. If a person had half a mind to, they could certainly do the same kind of performance with Dickinson's poetry as well. In fact, as I was reading My Letter to the World I tried to ascertain if the editors and illustrator were consciously attempting that kind of storyline. The transition between "I cannot live with you" to " `Hope' is a thing with feathers," suggests at a kind of continuity, but that may just lie within the brain of the reader. I guess that one of the things I appreciated about this book was that if you were looking for some kind of a tale (and I'd say a large percentage of your child readers will be) then you could probably find one here. If, however, you found such a notion unpleasant then you could simply say that these poems were placed together due to a pleasing continuity and not some grossly forced narrative. However you chose to look at it, I'm just grateful that they ended with the "hope" poem. Maybe you think that was a given, but considering the subject matter of the previous poems, it makes sense to end on a mildly lighter note.

Americans love outsider art. I think it appeals to our sense of art as something spontaneous and wild, growing up in unconventional areas. To call Dickinson "outsider" because she wrote primarily (though not exclusively) for herself may sound like a bit of a stretch but it's not wholly inaccurate. In fact, the real problem may come in considering her not outsider enough. There is a danger inherent in any Dickinson collection for kids; the possibility that the editors will present her as twee. This is not a cutesy writer. Sure, she wrote little poems that begin with sentences like, "I'm Nobody! Who are you?" with their misleadingly sweet overtones. A little delving, though, and you begin to see how dark even Dickinson's lightest work was. That's where Isabelle Arsenault comes in.

Now this Visions in Poetry series produced by Kids Can Press has been pairing hip, alternative, and generally magnificent artists alongside classic poems for a couple years now. It's hard to forget Joe Morse's inner city Casey at the Bat or the stunning take on Owl and the Pussycat, The attempted by Stephane Jorisch. That the producers of this series selected Ms. Arsenault, an artist of the adult persuasion, is notable. Arsenault's style is by turns bleak and thoughtful, stunning and contemplative. Her previous children's book, Mr. Gauguin's Heart was released in the United States just last year as her children's debut. So what I found I admired most about her work on this book was her rejection of the sentimental. I am not saying that her style precludes emotion, but rather that she clearly "gets" Dickinson. Somehow this artist and this author belong together. See if you don't agree.

At the end of each Visions in Poetry title there is a lengthy biography of both the poet and the illustrator. Sometimes when it comes to the latter you can find yourself wondering just how much of the information there was provided by the artist and how much was extrapolated by the editors. For example, in the case of Ms. Arsenault there is a great deal of attention paid to her visual symbolism and references. I did not know that Dickinson was prone to wearing a lot of white, but Arsenault makes certain to include all pictures of Emily in this book in dresses of that color. But then there are sentences like, "The twin-towered cathedral and ominous shadow in `There's a certain Slant of light,' eerily suggestive of the events of 9/11," that give me pause. I guess I can read that interpretation into the work if I want to, but was that the artist's real intent? The editor certainly thinks so but on this and other notes I should like a little additional confirmation, please.

When Poetry Month rolls around my library will be swamped with kids holding up their school assignments. Some of them will be assigned Emily Dickinson, or maybe just one of her poems. How satisfying it will be to hand then My Letter to the World. Oh sure, they'll probably wrinkle their noses at the odd professionalism of the packaging. A smyth sewn caseboard? Puh-leeze. But after some trial and error they will see how engrossing, or at the very least stimulating, this Arsenault/Dickinson combo can be. I can't claim that My Letter to the World will convert your reluctant readers into poetry-popping addicts, but at the very least it won't turn them off the woman. And who knows? Maybe they'll even find themselves reading and rereading a line here and there, just to taste the flavor of it. A great new addition to the Visions in Poetry series and an artist worth keeping an eye on. ... Read more

Product Description
This collection contains the complete Series One, Two, and Three of Emily Dickinson's poems in one volume.Dickinson was a reclusive and introverted person who nonetheless produced a prodigious volume of work and maintained a number of acquaintances, mostly through correspondence.The true extent of her writing was not known until after her death.

Fewer than a dozen of her nearly eighteen hundred poems were published during her lifetime.Since her death in the late 19th Century, Dickinson has come to be regarded as a major American poet.

This ebook is DRM free and includes an active table of contents.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Charming, intimate letters of Emily Dickinson
This is a short but charming book from Amherst College Press, published for the centennial of Emily Dickinson's 1886 death, edited with an introduction and manuscript comments by R. W. Franklin.Ralph Franklin is arguably the best current Dickinson manuscript scholar and also edited 'The Poems of Emily Dickinson', to my eyes the current definitive edition of Dickinson.

The Master Letters are three letters, actually drafts of three letters, to a person Emily addresses as 'Master'.They are undated by Dickinson, but some sleuthing and careful handwriting analysis described in the introduction put them in a credible chronological order.No other version of these letters or the other side of this correspondence is known.A wonderful mystery.

For decades only a fragment of one letter was known to the public, published with Dickinson poems because of the poetic qualities abundant in these letters.The full letters were suppressed, presumably because of their intimate emotional content.The mildest letter was published in 1931, the final two waited until 1955 for publication.

Because of Dickinson's original and idiosyncratic use of punctuation, capitalization, and word and line spacing, it is currently fashionable to read Dickinson in the original, usually meaning reproductions of the handwritten originals.Standard print has no equivalent of her dashes of various lengths, for example.This text includes full page photographs of every page of the letters with a faithful printed version on the facing page. Plus, as a real treat, an insert envelope contains complete reproductions of all the original leaves.A beautiful touch.The hand of the author is very present in scratch outs, overwrites, and corrections - giving hints at Emily's creative and editing process.The handwriting is clear and legible but takes some study to read fluidly.

I feel very close to Emily Dickinson reading and holding these letters.This text is a must for Dickinson fans, and will be appreciated by many bibliophiles and scholars. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Terrific Help To Understand Emily Dickinson
Cristanne Miller, who is now English department head at State University of New York in Buffalo, authored this book before she was such a giant among Emily Dickinson scholars and professors. It's easy to see in this fairly early work why Miller has found such high regard in literary circles. Aspects of Dickinson's strategies are organized and approached very systematically. Without assuming that she can divine the mind of Dickinson, Miller takes her readers as nearly inside the tactical thoughts of the poet as I think is possible. Those who enjoy Emily Dickinson poetry will thank their lucky stars for the "leg up" on understanding the poems after reading "A Poet's Grammar." ... Read more

Product Description
Very little is known about the life of Emily Dickinson. As a woman, she is most known as a recluse who lived her entire life in Amherst, Massachusetts, in the home of her birth; as a poet, she wrote some of the most daring and original poetry of the nineteenth century. This verse is often said to be her only contact with the outside world, but not much is understood about the inner world that gave rise to it.

The Sister probes into this world, revealing Emily Dickinson's tense relationship with her parents, her hidden passions and aspirations, the men in her life, and her secret views on religion and love, all seen through the eyes of her younger sister Lavinia. Drawn from authentic journals, documents, and letters from the Dickinson family, The Sister fills in a vital missing piece of the jigsaw, getting us closer to understanding the enigma that is Emily Dickinson. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

"Tell all the truth..."
Lavinia's actual voice comes to us in a very few fragments, but the attentive reader of Emily's poems has many questions for the almost-mute sister to genius.What of the awesome moment in that Amherst bedroom when she discovered the extent of her siters writings, for example; how thrilling to have this premier event of American literature imaginatively explored.Kaufmann's boldness in choosing to write of Dickinson's sister is admirable, of course, and any attempt to enter into the life of the Dickinson Homestead presents alluring possiblities.Unfortuantely Kaufmann's attempt rings false from start to finish. There are some glaring anachronsims, such as Emily's mother serving a "casserole" in the 1850's, which lends a Brady Bunch touch to an otherwise dramatically rich moment early on in the narrative. Another such moment occurs when Emily asks her apparently more experienced siste whether "intercourse...hurts?" Emily's sexuality is of course the subject of intense academic speculation, but the baldness of this awkwardly rendered scene reads like something out of a Judy Bloom novel. If somehow the author had managed to answer the reader's ultimate question for Lavinia:"What was Emily like?"Kaufmann's attempt, though bold, leaves us with grotesque caricatures of the poet and her sister.As is so often the case with Dickinson, she leaves us behind baffled,her monumental poetry her sole and fitting life commentary.

The magical world of Emily
Sometimes I imagine the life of Emily. Her home, her family.
With this book, I can live that world, I can see Emily, Vinnie, Austin, Sue... For me, this is so special because Emily is my favorite writer.
Now, I am reading the book in Spanish.
Paola Kaufmann was a great writer. I am enjoying her book.
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Product Description
A truly useful collection of literary criticism on a widely studied author, this collection of essays, selected and introduced by a distinguished scholar, makes the most informative and provocative critical work easily available to the general public. KEY TOPICS: Offers volumes of the same excellence for the contemporary moment. Captures and makes accessible the most stimulating critical writing of our time on a crucial literary figure of the past. Also included is an introduction to the author's life and work, a chronology of important dates, and a selected bibliography. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Success is counted sweetest by those who ne'er succeed
This is a review of the anthology edited by Richard B. Sewall. It gives much useful information and analysis of the poetry of Dickinson. Sewall's provides a useful introductory essay in which he centers on the significance of the 1955 first complete edition of her poems ed. by Thomas Johnson.
I was surprised however by so many negative notes on her poetry, especially those of Yvor Winters, and Richard Blackmur. It is as if they were truly to hold her and judge her by some kind of objective rule for poetry.
But a great poet and she is truly a great poet makes a rule of their own.
Emily Dickinson creates a language and a world, a way of seeing things and feeling things so deep so unique so metaphorically adventurous and beautiful that it is one of truly great works of poetic art that we have.
"Speech is a symptom of affection
And Silence one,
The perfectest Communication
Is heard of none..

True art escapes categories.
EMILY DICKINSON: A COLLECTION OF CRITICAL ARTICLES.Edited by Judith Farr.New Century Views.268 pages.Upper Saddle River, NJ: 1996.ISBN 0-13-033524-X(pbk).

After an interesting, informative, and vigorously written Introduction by Judith Farr, eighteen articles of varying quality follow.Of the eighteen, at least eight are definitely worth reading.From these eight, the reader comes away with an enhanced appreciation of ED's work, with a better idea of how to go about reading and understanding her poems, and in awe of her giant sensibility.

Most of the remaining essays, unfortunately, seem to a greater or lesser extent to share the same defect.They have been written from either a Christian or feminist perspective, and seem determined at all costs to find ways of making ED fit the procrustean beds of their respective ideologies.As such they end up telling us much more about their writers than about ED, and I personally found many of them unreadable.

There are so many today who seem determined to reduce ED, to cut her down to their own diminished size and rope her in for their particular cause, so many partisans who are desperately pretending: "In fact, you know, Emily Dickinson is really one of us!"ED, it is stridently affirmed, was an American, a Christian, and a female poet ofthe 19th century.But we all know that there were many such poets.And where are they now?Who is reading them?No-one.And if that's all ED had been I don't think anyone today would be reading her either.

ED escaped all bounds.She was, in a sense, not an 'American,' certainly not a 'Christian,' and not even a 'woman.'She wasa human being immersed like all of us in the human condition, and speaking to us out of that condtion in a way no-one has ever spoken before."Truth is so rare a thing," she once said, and her poems offer us that commodity in abundance, irrespective of our nationality, religion, or gender.

Relevant here is the indignant remark of Georgia O'Keefe which Judith Farr quotes in her fine Introduction: "I am not a _woman_ artist, I am an Artist."Farr comments: "True art, as Dickinson herselfsuggests . . . finally escapes categories: national, temporal, sexual" (p.15, italics in original).In other words, as a poet, ED addresses herself, not to that which divides us, but to our shared humanity.

Besides Judith Farr, I think that of the critics in the present collection at least eight others would probably agree with this.The general excellence and unbiased quality of their pieces make this collection well worth having:

Richard Wilbur, for his extremely interesting "Sumptuous Destitution," (a piece which is immediately followed by a rather weak and unconvincing feminist riposte).

Cynthia Griffin Wolff, for her Bakhtinian '[Im]pertinent Constructions of the Body and Self.'

Suzanne Juhasz, for her stimulating "The Landscape of the Spirit."

David Porter, for his 'Strangely Abstracted Images,' an extract from his The Modern Idiom (1981).

Cristanne Miller, for her 'Dickinson's Experimental Grammar: Nouns and Verbs,' an extract from her Emily
Dickinson: A Poet's Grammar (1987).

Kamilla Denman, for her superb 'Emily Dickinson's Volcanic Punctuation.'

Judy Jo Small, for her 'A Musical Aesthetic,' an extract from her Positive as Sound (1990).

Jerome McGann, for his brief but important 'Emily Dickinson's Visible Language.'I was particularly impressed by this as it seems to me to demonstrate conclusively the pressing need for an edition of ED's poems that would finally respect her lineation. ... Read more

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Poems by Emily Dickinson, Three Series, Complete ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Look elsewhere
No Table of Contents - Good luck finding a specific poem.

Does not have Emily Dickinson's original punctuation that adds so much to the cadence and meaning of her work.

I'm going to go to a good bookstore and browse books on Emily Dickinson's poems until I find one with a table of contents, her original numbering system and original punctuation.

Fortunately, this was only .99 cents.Still..... ... Read more

Product Description
When Klaus Lubbers's meticulously detailed Emily Dickinson: The Critical Revolution appeared in 1968, examining Dickinson criticism up to 1962, a second revolution in Dickinson criticism was already gathering force, as a new generation of scholars representing a wide spectrum of critical perspectives began reassessing the poet's life and work. In the intervening forty years, approximately 100 books about Dickinson and her oeuvre have appeared, making her one of the most extensively studied American poets in history. Approaching Emily Dickinson provides an objective examination of that vast body of scholarship. It gives detailed attention to the principal trends in Dickinson scholarship during the past half-century: biographical studies; feminist perspectives on the poet's life and work; rhetorical and stylistic analyses; textual studies of the bound and unbound fascicles and the so-called worksheet drafts; studies of Dickinson's social and cultural milieu, including influences on her spirituality, and of her theories of poetry. Fred White also examines Dickinson's artistic reception -- an area of ever-growing fascination, not only among Dickinson scholars but among artists, creative writers, dramatists, and musicians for whom Dickinson's genius has proven to be a powerful conduit for insights into the human condition. A fundamental research tool for both scholars and students, Approaching Emily Dickinson also enables fruitful comparisons both among and within the different critical and artistic perspectives. ... Read more