Product Description

The startling originality of Emily Dickinson's style doomed her poetry to obscurity during her lifetime but her bold experiments in prose, her tragic vision and the range of her intellectual and emotional explorations have since won her recognition as a poet of the highest order.

This book, which includes the preferred form of each of the 1,775 poems that she wrote, enables the reader to see as a whole the work of this remarkable poetic genius, the complexity of her personality, the fluctuation of her moods and the development of her style.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #187056 in Books
• Published on: 1976-03-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 770 pages

About the Author
The editor, THOMAS H. JOHNSON is a distinguished Dickinson scholar. He edited the original 3-volume collection of her work (1955) and has written her biography.

Customer Reviews

Oh so tender
Sad to say I only discovered Emily Dickinson as an adult, but what a treasure of tenderness and sensibility she is. Fragrant and light as the blossoms in her garden she describes so lovingly, each poem breathes true originality.
This volume is complete and in chronological order which has the advantage of giving you almost an autobiography in verse, taking you on the life journey of her ideas and emotions. However, it also means you have to seperate the wheat from the chaff yourself. (If you fancy a bit of a 'best of' than this is the wrong book for you.)
A truely enjoyable book. Shame it is only a paperback.

An Excellent Edition
This definitive edition of Emily Dickinson's poems is the Editor's (THOMAS H. JOHNSON) gift to the author after her well intentioned sister-in-law and other editors imposed their own punctuation and metres on the poet's work, something still perpetuated by other publishing houses and their editors, and nearly always by anthologists. While Dickinson's style is idiosyncratic and highly individual it can startle the new reader with the depth of insight many of her poems show in confronting the human condition, not least in its most painful and mentally tortured moments. However Dickinson was also a keen observer of nature and had a strong independent mind when writing on faith and religion.

My only criticism of this edition is that the wealth of pages have been given too small a format and pages are apt to come loose if the book is used often. A superb edition is available in hardback but a more generous binding would have rendered the extra expense of a H/B copy unnecessary. That said the person who becomes an avid reader of Dickinson will not mind buying subsequent copies year by year.

Sophisticated intensity, lyrical, kind..
I came across ED when I was an angstful teenager, and loved her for the fact she could say in three and a half lines whatever profound thing I had recently come to realise. As I grew older I noticed her poems came with me - now she was taking to task the earlier self absorption, mocking it but saying new things that were profound in their turn. In the thirty years since, I've loved her poems for the fact they point to so many aspects of life we experience but don't always find voiced, or because she voices more familiar moments with originality, brevity, or style.

If you don't know her poems then a first glance might find them off-putting - there are so many, they are numbered not named, they are impossible to read in a straight line because of all the hyphens. But don't be put off by these things. They are not just not a major problem, once you 'get your eye in' they are actually good points! For example, she fits, by virtue of those initially - irritating - hyphens - things that ordinary sentences can't (like meaning several things at once). The huge number of poems mean she covers a huge range of life's moments, the numbers instead of titles mean come to them without any preconceptions of what they are about.

Her complete works are like a kind of journey, so wide ranging and varied that there is something for every person you are likely to be. Suitable (and comforting, thought provoking, satisfying) for reflective humans of every age, not just the teenage.