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    The Poems of Emily Dickinson
    The Poems of Emily Dickinson
    The Poems of Emily Dickinson
    Ebook237 pages3 hours

    The Poems of Emily Dickinson

    By Emily Dickinson

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    Although Dickinson was a prolific private poet, fewer than a dozen of her nearly eighteen hundred poems were published during her lifetime. The work that was published during her lifetime was usually altered significantly by the publishers to fit the conventional poetic rules of the time. Although most of her acquaintances were probably aware of Dickinson's writing, it was not until after her death in 1886-- when Lavinia, Emily's younger sister, discovered her cache of poems-- that the breadth of Dickinson's work became apparent.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherStart Publishing LLC
    Release dateDec 28, 2012
    ISBN9781625583994
    The Poems of Emily Dickinson
    Author

    Emily Dickinson

    Emily Dickinson was an American poet. She was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, into a prominent family with strong ties to its community.

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    Reviews for The Poems of Emily Dickinson

    4.5/5

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    • 5/5
      One of my top dozen pre-WWII poets in the English language, alongside Shakespeare, Dryden, Wordsworth, Keats, Emerson, Wadsworth Longfellow, Whitman, Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Yeats, and Wallace Stevens.
    • 4/5
      Gorgeous and melancholy. Some pieces were of course more beautiful than others, but I cannot fathom anyone not loving at least ONE of her poems.
    • 5/5
      I once decided to read through this list of 100 Significant books--there were only 3 women on that list: Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Emily Dickinson. Many would name her as the greatest women poet, and there are few rivals for the title of best American poet. She's definitely a personal favorite of mine. I have more than one edition of Emily Dickinson's poetry: A collection of selected poetry in hardcover, much loved, and a recently acquired ebook of the complete poems. I do recommend this edition--but with a caution. This is perhaps not the first exposure you should have to Dickinson--or to poetry. I think poetry, like classical music, improves enormously upon repetition. I remember once not much liking classic music. But a music appreciation class was required to graduate from my college, so I took it. And you know, I found that say, Bach, was a composer I appreciated much more upon repetition. Dickinson, I found to my surprise in the complete edition, isn't as familiar as I thought. She's much, much more prolific than I thought. There are, 1,775 poems in this complete edition. That's right--over a thousand. Nor are all her poems as deeply steeped into the culture as say Keats--or even Frost. Dickinson was ahead of her time and her works only trickled down slowly. She published only a handful of poetry in her life time. A few years after her death in 1886 an edition of little more than a hundred of her poems was published--and heavily edited to suit the tastes of the time. There are poems here that weren't published until 1961!They're all short--often just a few lines, half a page--the longest isn't very long--just a few pages. This means this book will defeat you if you try to read it cover to cover. Mind you, I did fine doing that with Keats and Frost--but somehow I found Dickinson harder, more enigmatic than I expected. And since the poems are in chronological order... well, her earliest poem is, would you believe it? A not very good Valentine's poem. Not the best introduction to her. I'm still giving this book five stars--because what I loved, I loved. And I suspect what I didn't love, I may love yet. I really can't just pick out favorites here--the list would just go on and on. Although I have a soft spot for "Why Have They Shut Me Out of Heaven" since it was introduced to me at the Julliard recital of a young coworker--to Aaron Copland's setting. I do recommend you get his cycle of 12 Dickinson poems if you like classical music at all. There is a gorgeous recording with Leontyne Price of an orchestral rendition of 8 of them. And if you're not a big fan of poetry but want to get a taste of it, perhaps an edition of only selected poetry would be the best place to start. It's just I so quickly got glutted. There's so much here. Here's a short one I found striking I'm still mulling over:177Ah, Necromancy Sweet!Ah, Wizard erudite!Teach me the skill,That I instil the painSurgeons assuage in vain,Nor Herb of all the plainCan Heal!(Published 1929)Uh... did Dickinson just wish she could practice black magic on an enemy? I didn't just read that, did I? I don't see any references to the history and politics of the day, and little that can be gleaned of her personal life. But there are riches here to be discovered no slim little volume can offer.
    • 5/5
      My own copy of this is the original hardcover brought out by Little Brown in the early 1970's. The Thomas Johnson edition is the only one to have; others, earlier, tidied up the remarkable poems of this writer. This edition contains them all, from the sweet nature poems that made me hate her when I was 11 and memorizing poetry, to the unflinching and often erotic poetry that came in such a rush in the 1860's to her pen. (and were then written and faircopied and tucked away in little booklets). Her work is a jolt to the heart at its best. (and at its worst, trivial and coy. But, my god, nearly 2000 poems?).
    • 5/5
      Dickinson is arguably the greatest poet in the history of the language; her 1776 poems, give or take a few, are so concentrated they require the same time commitment for reading as, say, Shakespeare's collected plays. She made out of the humble ballad form (or hymnody's "common measure") an entirely new vehicle, so that it is hard to write ballad form uninfluenced by Dickinson, just as it is nigh impossible to write iambic pentameter uninfluenced by Shakespeare. Like Jane Austen in size--and in both writing at tiny desks, for tiny women--she like Austen revolutionized her chosen literary form. I read her, three or four poems a day, for a year. A very fine teacher of mine (a well-known critic and reviewer) read all her poems in a couple months--and all her critics. He was not as impressed as I was, I think because he did not commit the necessary time--and ear. Her poems on specific natural phenomena--natural creatures, the weather, the dawn--are unsurpassed. One of her greatest poem evokes the Blue Jay, a mean bird: "No Brigadier throughout the Year / So civic as the Jay..." After describing him as a good neighbor, buddy of snow and winter's severity, Dickinson spells out her theological position, why she never attended the Congregational Church her brother Austin built diagonally across the street. For the Jay: "His character--a Tonic--/ His future, a Dispute--/Unfair an Immortality / That leaves this Neighbor out." Talk about universalism. ED includes even the unkindly, but neighborly Jay among the Saved.
    • 5/5
      My life closed twice before its close; It yet remains to seeIf Immortality unveil A third event to me,So huge, so hopeless to conceive, As these that twice befell.Parting is all we know of heaven, And all we need of hell.I've never before read a work by an author that so completely encapsulated everything that I was feeling and wanted to say but didn't have the poetic verve to express. Emily Dickinson's words are like lyrics in a song. Instantly expressive and vibrant they are cloaked with hidden meaning comprehensible only by those who understand the subject upon which she is writing. There is virtually no human experience that escapes the reach of her pen.You either love her poems or hate them but I fail to believe there is a middle ground.
    • 5/5
      “I taste a liquor never brewed” by Emily DickinsonI taste a liquor never brewed –From Tankards scooped in Pearl –Not all the Vats upon the RhineYield such an Alcohol!Inebriate of air – am I –And Debauchee of Dew –Reeling – thro' endless summer days –From inns of molten Blue –When "Landlords" turn the drunken BeeOut of the Foxglove's door –When Butterflies – renounce their "drams" –I shall but drink the more!Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats –And Saints – to windows run –To see the little TipplerLeaning against the – Sun!Inebriated by poetry"I taste a liquor never brewed" a poem by E. DickinsonFor me, this is an hymn to poetry and what is sacred about the act of writing. I read line after line as an invocation to beauty in all its natural forms until I got drunk with it, until I, the reader, was able to reach the heavens and join its inhabitants, Seraphs and Saints, along with Emily, who is writing from there.In this sense, I guess that we, the readers who are able to share beauty through words, are rewarded with the admittance in Dickinson's house of possibility and poetry.The poem read also as an hymn for me because of its musicality and rhyme which I became aware of when I first read the poem out loud. The way the words sang by themselves came as a surprise, and the lack of punctuation, only the dashes and the capital letters to emphasise some words, made the poem more open and infinite.Analysing stanza by stanza, the poem starts with a reference to a certain liquor, which is a strange one, because it was never brewed and because its vastness wouldn't fit into such a huge river as the Rhine. There's also the reference to the ancient age of this liquor, because the Rhine, along with the Danube, appeared as important rivers in historical texts during the Roman Empire.So, going forward, this strange alcohol, makes the " I " in this poem inebriated. I understand this " I " as the writer, in this case, Emily. She speaks of herself being drunk with this strange liquor, a liquor which comes from dew, air and summer days melted in endless blue skies. As I see it, in this second stanza, Emily is describing the beauty of the natural world as overwhelming, she is dizzy, intoxicated with it, and she drinks it in the inns of Nature.And in the third stanza she stresses out this last idea even more, because the more the inhabitants of this natural world, the bee, the foxglove, the butterfly, are denied by foreign "Landlords", emphasised by quotation marks, the more she drinks of this natural liquor, the more inebriated she becomes.As for the interpretation of these Landlords, I take it as if they were the real world, the rationality, Emily's house of prose. The ones who call the imagination back to earth and out of this world of poetry and possibility.The last stanza is for me, the most difficult to analyse. Emily is intoxicated by the beauty of nature and ultimately, of poetry, but she keeps drinking and drinking in it, until the whole act of writing becomes sacred. I understand that she reaches heaven in the Biblical sense, and salvation if I dare say. I'll risk it by saying that this "Tippler" might be Jesus, leaning against this sun, this shinning light, waiting for her to reach out for her destiny, her fate, her mission in life, which is to write, to become a poet.And just another conclusion after rereading the whole thing again.I also think, that the metaphor of liquor and inebriation is not a casual one. If you think of men drinking in inns and socialising in the XIXth century, you might wonder how a reclusive person as Emily might view this kind of activity. Surely she might have disapproved of someone getting drunk, and this poem might also be a criticism to such behaviour and at the same time, she elevates something she finds ugly or negative to an utterly magnificent and celestial act, the act of writing, proving its capacity to transform the dull world of reality into a beautiful fan of possibilities.
    • 5/5
      This book contains the best of Emily Dickenson. It is one of my favorites; because I love her simple and solitary poems.
    • 5/5
      How does one review Emily? One of a kind.
    • 5/5
      If I were shipwrecked on a desert island, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson is definitely one of the books I would swim back to the scuttled ship to bring back with me to the shore. I would look for the Complete Works of Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson's poems, and of course, a book on how to survive on a desert island.
    • 4/5
      Please do not mistake my relatively low rating (3.5 stars) as a judgment on Dickinson's achievements. My rating is soley based on the edition on my bookshelf, edited by Thomas Johnson way back in 1960. I'll quote Chrisopher Benfey in the New York Review of Books: "There were problems with the Johnson edition, and they increased over time. Forced to work from photostats of many of the poems, Johnson made errors of transcription. Manuscripts unknown to him, generally variants of already familiar poems, continued to surface. And scholarly debates about the dating and the arrangement of poems on the page proliferated. For some time it has been evident that a new edition of Dickinson's poems was needed." And a new edition has appeared -- 10 years ago! I need to get off my duff and go out and do the right thing, "because I could not shop for death."
    • 5/5
      There's an Emily Dickinson poem for every kind of day, and every life event.Indispensable.
    • 5/5
      It was wasted on me in High School... Now I would willingly sit down and read a few poems. The poems of Emily Dickinson, not much else needs to be said.
    • 5/5
      The Soul...softer than snow, faster than light.
    • 5/5
      My divine emily dickinson who deems more understanding even today!
    • 5/5
      My grandfather gave me this book for my birthday or Christmas or something when I was about 10 or 11.It's brilliant. I used to read one poem every night before going to bed.
    • 4/5
      A wonderful revelation: This is NOT the Emily Dickinson that you remember from your tenth-grade English class. Be prepared to pay attention . . .
    • 5/5
      One of the great works of modern editorship, an Emily Dickinson who can breathe, pause, look, dance, commune. Read with Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson, it's like plunging into blue morning.

    Book preview

    The Poems of Emily Dickinson - Emily Dickinson

    Preface I.

    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

    This is my letter to the world,

    That never wrote to me, —

    The simple news that Nature told,

    With tender majesty.

    Her message is committed

    To hands I cannot see;

    For love of her, sweet countrymen,

    Judge tenderly of me!

    Preface II.

    The eagerness with which the first volume of Emily Dickinson’s poems has been read shows very clearly that all our alleged modern artificiality does not prevent a prompt appreciation of the qualities of directness and simplicity in approaching the greatest themes,—life and love and death. That irresistible needle-touch, as one of her best critics has called it, piercing at once the very core of a thought, has found a response as wide and sympathetic as it has been unexpected even to those who knew best her compelling power. This second volume, while open to the same criticism as to form with its predecessor, shows also the same shining beauties.

    Although Emily Dickinson had been in the habit of sending occasional poems to friends and correspondents, the full extent of her writing was by no means imagined by them. Her friend H.H. must at least have suspected it, for in a letter dated 5th September, 1884, she wrote:—

    MY DEAR FRIEND,— What portfolios full of verses you must have! It is a cruel wrong to your day and generation that you will not give them light.

    If such a thing should happen as that I should outlive you, I wish you would make me your literary legatee and executor. Surely after you are what is called dead you will be willing that the poor ghosts you have left behind should be cheered and pleased by your verses, will you not? You ought to be. I do not think we have a right to withhold from the world a word or a thought any more than a deed which might help a single soul. . . .

    Truly yours,

    HELEN JACKSON.

    The portfolios were found, shortly after Emily Dickinson’s death, by her sister and only surviving housemate. Most of the poems had been carefully copied on sheets of note-paper, and tied in little fascicules, each of six or eight sheets. While many of them bear evidence of having been thrown off at white heat, still more had received thoughtful revision. There is the frequent addition of rather perplexing foot-notes, affording large choice of words and phrases. And in the copies which she sent to friends, sometimes one form, sometimes another, is found to have been used. Without important exception, her friends have generously placed at the disposal of the Editors any poems they had received from her; and these have given the obvious advantage of comparison among several renderings of the same verse.

    To what further rigorous pruning her verses would have been subjected had she published them herself, we cannot know. They should be regarded in many cases as merely the first strong and suggestive sketches of an artist, intended to be embodied at some time in the finished picture.

    Emily Dickinson appears to have written her first poems in the winter of 1862. In a letter to one of the present Editors the April following, she says, I made no verse, but one or two, until this winter.

    The handwriting was at first somewhat like the delicate, running Italian hand of our elder gentlewomen; but as she advanced in breadth of thought, it grew bolder and more abrupt, until in her latest years each letter stood distinct and separate from its fellows. In most of her poems, particularly the later ones, everything by way of punctuation was discarded, except numerous dashes; and all important words began with capitals. The effect of a page of her more recent manuscript is exceedingly quaint and strong. The fac-simile given in the present volume is from one of the earlier transition periods. Although there is nowhere a date, the handwriting makes it possible to arrange the poems with general chronologic accuracy.

    As a rule, the verses were without titles; but A Country Burial, A Thunder-Storm, The Humming-Bird, and a few others were named by their author, frequently at the end,—sometimes only in the accompanying note, if sent to a friend.

    The variation of readings, with the fact that she often wrote in pencil and not always clearly, have at times thrown a good deal of responsibility upon her Editors. But all interference not absolutely inevitable has been avoided. The very roughness of her rendering is part of herself, and not lightly to be touched; for it seems in many cases that she intentionally avoided the smoother and more usual rhymes.

    Like impressionist pictures, or Wagner’s rugged music, the very absence of conventional form challenges attention. In Emily Dickinson’s exacting hands, the especial, intrinsic fitness of a particular order of words might not be sacrificed to anything virtually extrinsic; and her verses all show a strange cadence of inner rhythmical music. Lines are always daringly constructed, and the thought-rhyme appears frequently,—appealing, indeed, to an unrecognized sense more elusive than hearing.

    Emily Dickinson scrutinized everything with clear-eyed frankness. Every subject was proper ground for legitimate study, even the sombre facts of death and burial, and the unknown life beyond. She

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