Books with author Dickinson Emily

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), the reclusive and intensely private poet saw only a few of her poems (she wrote well over a thousand) published during her life. After discovering a trove of manuscripts left in a wooden box, Dickinson's sister Lavinia fortunately chose to disobey Emily's wishes for her work to be burned after death. With the help of Amherst professors, Lavinia brought her sister's gifted verse into print. It is here, in "The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson", that we witness her singular poetic depth and range of style. Collected are the first three series of her posthumous publishing career coming out respectively in 1890, 1891, and 1896. The myth that surrounds Dickinson's life is enhanced by the ethereal quality of her poetry. With the coming of New Criticism in the 1930's and 40's, Dickinson experienced unprecedented posthumous acclaim, solidifying her place in American letters. Dickinson's idiom is as varied as her meter, and her unconventional use of punctuation, metaphor, and image make

"The Poems by Emily Dickinson" book has a beautiful glossy cover and a blank page for the dedication. "The soul selects her own society, Then shuts the door; On her divine majority Obtrude no more. Unmoved, she notes the chariot's pausing At her low gate; Unmoved, an emperor is kneeling Upon her mat. I've known her from an ample nation Choose one; Then close the valves of her attention Like stone.

Emily Dickinson, poet of the interior life, imagined words/swords, hurling barbed syllables/piercing. Nothing about her adult appearance or habitation revealed such a militant soul. Only poems, written quietly in a room of her own, often hand-stitched in small volumes, then hidden in a drawer, revealed her true self. She did not live in time but in universals―an acute, sensitive nature reaching out boldly from self-referral to a wider, imagined world. Dickinson died without fame; only a few poems were published in her lifetime. Her legacy was later rescued from her desk―an astonishing body of work, much of which has since appeared in piecemeal editions, sometimes with words altered by editors or publishers according to the fashion of the day.Now Ralph Franklin, the foremost scholar of Dickinson's manuscripts, has prepared an authoritative one-volume edition of all extant poems by Emily Dickinson―1,789 poems in all, the largest number ever assembled. This reading edition derives from his three-volume work, The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition (1998), which contains approximately 2,500 sources for the poems. In this one-volume edition, Franklin offers a single reading of each poem―usually the latest version of the entire poem―rendered with Dickinson's spelling, punctuation, and capitalization intact. The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition is a milestone in American literary scholarship and an indispensable addition to the personal library of poetry lovers everywhere.

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.