Emily Dickinson - Poems by Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Emily Dickinson - Poems by Thomas Wentworth Higginson

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 desk drawer, revealed her true self. She did not live in time, as did that other great poet of the day, Walt Whitman, but in universals. As she knowingly put it: There is one thing to be grateful for--that one is one's self and not somebody else.

Dickinson lived and died without fame: she saw only a few poems published. Her great legacy was later rescued from her desk drawer--an astonishing body of work revealing her acute, sensitive nature reaching out boldly from self-referral to a wider, imagined world. Her family sought publication of Dickinson's poetry over the years, selecting verses, often altering her words or her punctuation, until, in 1955, the first important attempt was made to collect and publish Dickinson's work, edited by Thomas H. Johnson for the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Now, after many years of preparation by Ralph Franklin, the foremost scholar of Dickinson's manuscripts, a new comprehensive edition is available. This three-volume work contains 1,789 poems, the largest number ever assembled. The poems, arranged chronologically, based on new dating, are drawn from a range of archives, most frequently from holographs, but also from various secondary sources representing lost manuscripts. The text of each manuscript is rendered individually, including, within the capacity of standard type, Dickinson's spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. Franklin gives Dickinson's alternative readings for the poems, her revisions, and the line and page, or column, divisions in the source. Each entry identifies Franklin's editorial emendations and records the publication history, including variants. Fourteen appendices of tables and lists give additional information, including poems attributed to Emily Dickinson. The poems are indexed by numbers from the Johnson edition, as well as by first lines.

Franklin has provided an introduction that serves as a guide to this edition and surveys the history of the editing of Dickinson's poems. His account of how Dickinson conducted her workshop is a reconstruction of a remarkable poetic life.

Born in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1830, Dickinson began life as an energetic, outgoing young woman who excelled as a student. However, in her mid-twenties she began to grow reclusive, and eventually she rarely descended from her room in her father's house. She spent most of her time working on her poetry, largely without encouragement or real interest from her family and peers, and died at age fifty-five. Only a handful of her 1,775 poems had been published during her lifetime. When her poems finally appeared after her death, readers immediately recognized an artist whose immense depth and stylistic complexities would one day make her the most widely recognized female poet to write in the English language. Dickinson's poetry is remarkable for its tightly controlled emotional and intellectual energy. The longest poem covers less than two pages. Yet in theme and tone her writing reaches for the sublime as it charts the landscape of the human soul. A true innovator, Dickinson experimented freely with conventional rhythm and meter, and often used dashes, off rhymes, and unusual metaphors--techniques that strongly influenced modern poetry. Dickinson's idiosyncratic style, along with her deep resonance of thought and her observations about life and death, love and nature, and solitude and society, have firmly established her as one of America's true poetic geniuses.

Rachel Wetzsteon is Assistant Professor of English at William Paterson University. She has published two books of poems, The Other Stars and Home and Away.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781406701074
ISBN 10	1406701076
Title	Emily Dickinson - Poems
Author	Thomas Wentworth Higginson
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Read Books
Year published	2007-03-15
Number of pages	246
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.