Product Description

A collection of all of Emily Dickinson's 1775 poems, which enables readers to see her work as a whole, the complexity of her personality, the fluctuation of her moods, and the development of her style.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #24129 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

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.

One of the few poets who ever perfected a method.
I have 1000 words to tell what Dickinson means to me, an impossible task I gladly take up. I'd like to respond to others on this page. I once called Dickinson the "patron saint of lonely people everywhere," so I can identify with what one person said about teenage shut-ins. And I don't blame the person who snubbed her for not leaving a name--I'd be embarrassed to as well. Emily egotistical? The poet who wrote, "I'm nobody"? Wow. I love Dickinson's work so much because her vision of life is so fully her own, so at odds with the views of those around her. Can you imagine knowing you are the most brilliant lyric poet of your time (Whitman was more an epic or narrative poet), and knowing no one understood you? It's like trying to communicate in a foreign language that only you know. In fact, that is exactly what she did--she explodes the syntax, vocabulary, and syllabication of English and transforms it into her own private means of communication. She demands that we meet her on her ground. True, reading her work is not "fun"--there's too much pain and burning beauty in it to be an easy ride. She is not for everyone--only for those who see that life's disappointments both destroy and liberate us at the same time: comparing human hurts to trees destroyed by nature's forces, she says (in poem 314), "We--who have the Souls-- / Die oftener--Not so vitally--." Those may be the finest lines any poet ever wrote in English.

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.