Series One, Poems by Emily Dickinson

This 3-volume variorum edition is like new. It was carefully packed and arrived on time as the vendor promised. These books are pristine and are a great addition to my library. I foresee hours and hours of pleasure carefully reading them. Highly recommended.

The poems in the book are technically correct, but the strange use of capitalization and dashes that her poetry is famous for have been edited out of this edition. While this would be fine for casual reading, one cannot do any objective literary analysis. It has been edited to death.

One either hates or loves Emily Dickinson. I'm one of those who love her. She is able to capture tremendous thoughts in such a few words - and being a "woman of few words" myself, I enjoy that. I would like to know, as I suppose many would, why she became such a recluse. That's probably a mystery we will never understand completely. I do wish this paperback version was a little larger and hence a little thinner. I'm afraid its very thickness may cause it to not wear well.

Although I have always enjoyed poetry and especially Emily Dickenson, finding this collection for my Kindle saves space, money, and the time to shop in stores. Although I gave not yet finished it, It will be stored to read at my leisure

I bought this book for my daughter for Christmas, she had dabbled in poetry over the years. Well she loves this collection, there was a short biography at the beginning that gave some background. Needless to say this a good book, that keeps my 19 year old daughter interested in poetry. Give it a try.

From the way this book was listed on your web site, I expected it to be the kindle version of "The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson" edited by Thomas H. Johnson, first paper back edition 1961, it was not. It was merely a volume of some of her poems, a volume that had been published earlier.

From the way this book was listed on your web site, I expected it to be the kindle version of "The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson" edited by Thomas H. Johnson, first paper back edition 1961, it was not. It was merely a volume of some of her poems, a volume that had been published earlier.

Some really good poems, others have lost their impact due to the time passing. She is a typical, introspective 'female' poet. These days female poets are a bit more 'gutsy' and succinct. Nevertheless, As a poet I prize other poets' work and she has some 'neat' phrases in there.

I decided to spend the extra few dollars to get the book new. Don't get me wrong, it's a great book, but it came very chewed up. It kind of takes away from the excitement of having a brand new fresh book.

This is a fairly complete edition. Emily Dickinson is Emily Dickinson. Brilliant. I don't have other editions of the collected works to compare it to. Bookstores don't carry full product lines of poetry books. Have to go to the store or other sites to obtain out of print or even modern editions of poetry.

I was excited (not to mention naive) to think I could get the Franklin ed. of Dickinson's poetry for a mere 99 cents. But then I saw that the ed. is only the old Todd-Higginson, which is free elsewhere. I would pay, say, 10 bucks for the Franklin, but it's apparently not available for Kindle. Shame. Neither is the slightly less authoritative Johnson ed. from the '50s. It's sad that, by and large, the Dickinson most people read and have read--in books, websites, and now e-readers--is bad versions of her poetry. Emily liked the dashes above all, and Higginson, among others, arrogantly "corrected" Emily's poetry for her, since she was not a "professional poet." Well, no one needs (or needed) to "correct" Dickinson's poems for her. They are very great, almost all 1800 of them. They are little gems, filled with wonder, elliptical diction, symbols that work in multiple ways, doubts, love for nature, love for love, and a great working knowledge of the ideas (and pop culture) of her day. So get with it, somebody, give us Kindle readers the Dickinson we deserve! What we have now is fine for someone living in 1900, but we are, or should be, beyond that.

I love Emily Dickinson! She is one of my most favorite poets. She wrote many years ago but much of her writing can easily be related to today. I don't think that it reads very easily on Kindle. It much nicer to experience in book format.

I have never been much into poetry, getting caught up in some other reading and other work, so hoping to start reading soon, always trying to broaden my views on reading and music, so expaning into poetry.

I thought that I was getting the complete poems of Emily Dickinson, but instead I got a smaller book of just a small portion of her poems, titled "Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson". I'm not happy with the book at all even though its in good condition, it's not the one I ordered. It's poems are not in the original format and punctuation and all of the poems that I was hoping for are not in this book.

"Complete Poems of Emily Dickenson" is not complete. It is a selection and not even a good selection. There is no good selection available for kindle. However," Final Harvest Emily Dickenson" has poems selected by Thomas H. Johnson and is first rate.

This is available in the store paperback but not kindle.

The book was good as new, the only thing that wasn't so good was the timing. I have a six week course and didn't get the book until the 3rd week of the course after ordering it the 1st Monday that I started the course. So it took 3 weeks to come. other then the timing I think that the book is great and was in great condition, good as new.

Emily Dickinson, a now-famously reclusive lifelong resident of 19th century Amherst Massachusetts, preserved way way too many of her poems; nowadays she is down to a few fine entries in anthologies. R. W. Franklin's 1999 Reading Edition of some 2,000 ED poems is definitive; I propose three stars.

I'm not sure why anyone would want to publish or buy this book. It is like a Xerox copy of her poems in fine print without a table of contents or an index. The far superior Franklin edition is available for only a few dollars more. I suggest interested readers look there.

If you like Emily Dickinson, this book is as good as any, I guess. We used this for class. The professor would say what the poem meant, and we were all looking at each other like, "Did you see that in this poem? Are we on the right poem?" We tried to help each other before class. There was a huge discussion/debate before the professor walked in all through Emily Dickinson. We finally gave up, and just did the best we could until it was over. We all enjoyed the class, but could have done without the Emily Dickinson part. It was horrid.

Three series are collected into one volume. Each series is organized into four parts: Life, Love, Nature, and Time & Eternity. The connection between these themes and the verse contained therein is generally clear, and the latter category is largely concerned with death—a popular topic for Dickinson. While Dickinson is known for being morose, her poems often manage to be both playful and dark at the same time. The best example of this odd combo of grim / playfulness may be one of her most quoted poems, The Chariot:

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

Dickinson's life story is well-known, at least in broad brushstrokes. She was a 19th century poet who was introverted in the extreme, and eventually became an outright recluse. According to her own words, she didn’t take up writing poetry until she was in her 30s. This existence was facilitated by the fact that she was from a well-to-do family and had no pressing need of a husband or an income.

Dickinson’s introverted nature is touched on throughout her work, and no doubt contributes to her appeal among those similarly afflicted. The opening poem of the Second Series, another of Dickinson’s most famous, speaks to this aspect of her personality.

I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us! Don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know.

I enjoy Dickinson’s work, but it’s the playful nature, rather than the macabre, that appeals to me. This is accomplished by short lines, use of rhyme, or at least slant rhyme, that makes the poems melodious to the ear. I’m fond of lines such as:

Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne’er succeed

God permits industrious angels
Afternoons to play

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul

Faith is a fine invention
For gentlemen who see;
But microscopes are prudent
In an emergency!

A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day.

There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,

You cannot fold a flood
And put it in a drawer,--
Because the winds would find it out,
And tell your cedar floor.

He fumbles at your spirit
As players at the keys
Before they drop full music on;
He stuns you by degrees,

Deals one imperial thunderbolt
That scalps your naked soul.

For we must ride to the Judgement,
And it’s partly down hill.

While simple-hearted neighbors
Chat of the ‘early dead,’
We, prone to periphrasis,
Remark that birds have fled!

And if my stocking hung too high,
Would it blur the Christmas glee,
That not a Santa Claus could reach
The altitude of me?

This Kindle version is readable. A common complaint about good books, particularly those that are cheap or free, is that the Kindle formatting detracts from the reading experience. That is not the case here. There is a first line index at the back. This is useful as most of the poems don’t have titles, and Dickinson’s first lines are often attention grabbers.

I’d recommend this for poetry readers.

There are many collections of Dickinson's poems out there, so here's a quick guide.

The best and most recent version, from 2005, is The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, edited by R. W. Franklin. The hardcover is from Harvard University, the paperback from Belknap Press.

There is no Kindle version of this edition yet.

Another authoritative version, and the best one until Franklin's, is the one on this page, the 1955 Johnson edition, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, from Harvard University, which also worked from her original manuscripts. You can find both hardcover and paperback versions of it on the store, though for some reason they're not listed together.

Johnson also put out an abridged version of what he considered her best poems, called Final Harvest: Poems.

There are no Kindle versions of Johnson's editions, either.

Nearly every other edition offered on the store is a version of the 1890 Higginson edition, which changed all her poems to the more conventional punctuation and capitalization of the time. Click on the one-star reviews of the Johnson edition and you'll find many people frustrated that the Kindle edition listed with the Johnson edition are not the same book at all. Some are also poorly formatted, missing breaks between verses.

If do you want the Higginson edition, it's now in the public domain. Which means you can find Kindle versions of it for free, as with Poems by Emily Dickinson, Series One and similar editions.

Emily Dickinson is read in almost every High School class, along with Silvia Plath. It feels like they're sometimes the only two female poets talked about, which is crap. However, if I were to choose just one woman to introduce students/friends to poetry, it would be Emily Dickinson. Her poems are driven by emotional pondering and at such a base level of existence speak to a wide swath of the population. Which is a round about way of saying, everybody experiences feelings of love and hope, we all contemplate life and death so this poetry can speak to anyone. It's also full of beautiful imagery and delicately-chosen wording. So even if you've read an abundance of poetry and a seasoned veteran of analysis, this is still worth your time to read.

When you pay 99 cents for this because you clicked on the T.H. Johnson version you end up paying for what turns out to be the Higginson version. The Johnson version preserves her original format, while the Higginson version is heavily edited and changed. I'm glad I read another review that warned about this fraud, as I had already downloaded the Higginson (for free - if you want that version buy the public domain version on Kindle) and did not need another copy. I downloaded the sample and confirmed what the earlier reviewer pointed out. When you click the Kindle version and look at the info, it actually shows that it has been changed to the Higginson version. The Johnson version is not available for Kindle. Shame on the store for this deception.

The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson contains a sizeable sample of the total works of the reclusive poet, who only came to prominence after her death. Containing 593 poems separated into five different themes, roughly a third of her overall productivity, this collection gives the reader a wonderful look into the talent of a woman who hid her art not only from the world but also her own family. Besides nearly 600 poems of Dickinson’s work, the reader is given a 25 page introduction to the poet and an analysis of her work by Dr. Rachel Wetzsteon who helps reveal the mysterious artist as best as she can and help the reader understand her work better. Although neither Wetzsteon’s introduction and analysis nor Dickinson’s work is wanting, the fact that this collection gives only a sample of the poet’s work is its main and only flaw.

I will be honest--I had never just loved Emily Dickinson before I read this volume. I'd covered her in a quite a few classes I've taken, read all of the typical highlights, and I'd often found the rhyme and rhythms of her language repetitive and the images obvious and dull.

I thought she deserved another chance, though, seeing as she's Emily Dickinson, and so I've been slowly reading my way through this volume of verse, taking my time and rereading if something struck me.

A lot of things struck me, much more than I'll cover here. Mainly, the "repetitive" sound of the language became, paradoxically, much less repetitive and full of variant beauties to me. And it set off her poetry in this stark and heightened space for me. The more I read it, the more it allowed the images to speak.

And the images do speak, often quite surprisingly. And I found myself drawn into Dickinson's endless questioning, her search for joy, and her capacity for reverence.

XCVII

TO make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,--
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do
If bees are few.

So often misunderstood and ill-served by her editors and publishers, Emily Dickinson is a rara avis among major American poets. She shunned the spotlight, kept to herself and her family in her home in Amherst, MA, refusing to cater to popular tastes. She never published in her lifetime, made in fact only a few overtures to editors who were so staid and conventional that they hadn't the insight or imagination to appreciate her originality. Yet on her death she left a dresser drawer-full of thousands of poems, variant versions, snippets, notes, a massive welter of handwritten manuscripts that required a herculean effort to sort and assemble into the works she considered "poetry" and to file the detritus as "jottings, random thoughts, random expostulations." Not until this definitive edition of her texts appeared in the early 1960's edited by the scrupulous, meticulous textual scholar and Dickinson expert Thomas H Johnson, did this poet get a fair shake and accurate representation in print of her life's work.

Sadly most of what is parlayed online and in stores as her "poetry" is still butchered, and only amounts to sanitized, "regularized" versions of what she actually wrote, and the unsuspecting reader is none the wiser unless he or she happens to have studied Dickinson under a knowledgeable instructor or at the university level.

If you want to read and understand her work, this edition of her poems must be the basis for your appreciation and judgment, and none other. All of her other so-called "editors" changed her meter, spellings, capitalizations (all of which were "odd" yet deliberate departures from the norm for poetic effect). I also highly recommend Richard B. Sewell's incomparable biography, The Life of Emily Dickinson. Immensely readable, even compelling, and bristling with telling details that place the poet within the context of her times and New England heritage, it gives one an even deeper appreciation of what she overcame ("renounced") to pursue her art, and illuminates dimensions and aspects of the poems otherwise hidden to the modern reader.

I've studied Dickinson for over 30 years and written articles and a few books on her work and life, and I must say to any new reader: don't fall for the stereotypes, the cliches, and the b.s. aplenty that have always clouded her reputation and led the general public astray. Read deeply and see for yourself. Start by reading the "real" thing. Her finished poems as she wrote them, not as her editors "corrected" them and not the snippets and notes she made to herself to possibly work into poems.
Both as an individual and as a poet she will always remain elusive, but then she believed in the mystery at the heart of life herself, considered her own life a mystery, but tried to approach the essence and experience of the luminous "mysterium tremendum et fascinans" by capturing its beauty and profundity with metaphor and lyric.

Her Letters are also a treat, a treasure, for she was a devoted, loyal friend and tireless witty letter writer all of her life. Her epistolary style reflects to some degree her poetic penchants and inclinations, highly metaphorical, striking, surprising. In some ways they (the letters) are even more revealing of how she interacted with those whom she loved the most and are most telling of the qualities of her character and resonant of(if not fully disclosing) the particular pivotal events of her life.

Certainly she was one of a kind, far more sophisticated and worldly than most think even today, shrewd, widely read, a critical insightful reader and observer of life's conundrums and vagaries, current events, including the Civil War, the issues of the day... Anyone who has read her seriously would be hard put to find a comparable poet or life in literature or body of work. As for myself, I cannot even think of any poet or body of poetry that "reminds me of Emily Dickinson" or is "reminiscent of Emily Dickinson."

After Poe, Emily Dickinson is my favorite nineteenth-century American poet. She was perhaps the first truly great female poet this nation has produced (not being an expert on women's studies, I cannot be sure). Walt Whitman was a long-winded bore who blew his own horn too loud and too often. Also, the cornball optimism of the Transcendentalists has always been hard for me to take. Dickinson provided a much needed feminine counterpart to the hairy-chested machismo that has been a hallmark of American literature from James Fennimore Cooper to Norman Mailer (as often as not concealing repressed homosexual urges.) Her experiments in meter, diction, rhyme, were light-years ahead of her contemporaries. Along with Dante and William Blake she is one of the great visionaries of western civilization.

ED arguably surpasses Chaucer and Shakespeare as the greatest poet to have written in English if for no other reason than concision. A great critic and teacher of mine, his name a household word among readers of the NYT Book Review, made the great mistake of reading all of ED and her critics in a couple months. Not a good idea. I read through this edition over a year and a half, two to five poems a sitting. Like the Bible. Like Gilbert White the English naturalist. Astonishing. Rewarding. Irreplaceable.
The peculiar vocal rhythms--hesitations, pauses, and ZAP! words like lightening--only can be heard after slow aloudreading, over time. Her hyphens suggest pauses, vocal gestures and discoveries, immediacy, though in fact we know from the 3 volume edition the immediacy was an artful mask applied to multiple word choices. WB Yeats chose words similarly, but not Shakespeare (from the only MS we have that may well be his, in the Book of Sir Thomas More, his section--the D Hand--revises whole lines, but not individual words).
I have spoken from memory ED's bird poems in the garden of her house, the Dickinson Manse. Six poems on birds, a couple on Robins, her Oriole (One of the ones that Midas touched), and especially her Blue Jay:
No Brigadier throughout the Year
So Civic as the Jay--
A Neighbor--and a Warrior too--
With shrill Felicity
Pursuing winds that censure us
A February day...
I write this in a February day, and my father's business was in the Dawes Building, Springfield, MA,
named for the Dickinson friend and newspaper publisher who printed six poems in her lifetime.
But as I was going to say when Truth broke in (the other Amherst poet said), her Blue Jay poem ends with an accusation of
the Deity, and the reason she never attended the Congregational church her brother built across the street from her home.
Of the Jay, she concludes:
His character--a Tonic--
His Future--a Dispute--
Unfair an Immortality
That leaves this Neighbor out.
Yes, the Jay is predatory, and martial, but he is a neighbor, and as deserving as we humans, of immortality.
Quite a claim, slipped in, an aside--and not the only one in Dickinson's opus. I have argued elsewhere that
to read Dickinson well requires about the same time as reading complete Shakespeare, the 38 plays.
Her concision is deceptive.

Emily Dickinson is incredible. I suppose I am intriqued by her unique life and this adds to the allure of her poetry for me. I cannot say I always fully understand her poetry. Her poems tend to be brief and melodious. I wish I could have read her own distillation of her meaning.

I have come to feel that poets and Emily Dickinson have added much to my life. I am an older male. Recently I was at lunch with a group of other older males. They were talking about the rapid crashing and burning of the career of a particular politician who had been a "rising star". I mentioned Emily Dickinson's poem poem 1659, "Fame Is A Fickle Food". Mostly I was greeted by blank stares. Their loss. Thank You...

The cover of the book pictured with the option Kindle edition to click on leads the reader to assume he/she can get Thomas H. Johnson's edition of the poems, published in 1960 and containing 1775 poems, by opting for Kindle. But the Kindle has only the 1890, 1891, and 1896 books -- over-edited, public domain versions of a few hundred poems.

I am not so much a poetry person, until now I owned 2 poetry books, one volume of Gary Snyder, which I often reread, and another of "New England Poets Since Frost", which didn't excite me except for the 4 Frost poems. Well and Shakespeare, which is kind of poetry, but really plays.)

One day I decided to learn more about poetry and the English language and I bought 4 complete works of 4 famous poets, one of which was this volume.
I cannot put my reaction into words. I grew up in Amherst and Emily Dickinson was always a background figure of the town, a famous shut-in, a romantic figure of mystery and an in-joke at the same time. But to me she was just another one of those old-time ppl in big dresses and probably a bonnet. Not bad but not remarkable or interesting to me.

Reading this, I cannot imagine her as a shut-in anymore, in the sense of someone depressed and moping. Perhaps she gave up on the outside world, but I would guess from a position of knowing better, not of simple frailty. This is a burning moving vein of molten magma. It wasn't tragic or a pity that her work couldn't be more published and known in her lifetime. She knew no-one would get it. A pity maybe for the uncomprehending, but Emily knew what she was about and didn't need their approval.

SO, THE POEMS. Well, like I said I can't put my reaction into words. So many of her works paint a vivid image you can see unfold in front of you like you were there, maybe as if you had already seen it and you were being reminded of it, and then, usually in the last lines, something too beautiful or too true, or sometimes even too obvious is written, such that I felt I had suddenly been cut by a knife. I don't know if that can explain the feeling, but I found it surprising to being reduced to tears, a few times by a poem I didn't even truly understand. Something so beautiful as to be painful. I have never read anything like this, in religious work, philosophy of the East, any novel whether poetic imagist or straight story, nothing has had this power. It is one-half her observations, usually of the natural world unfolding before her, things you too may have seen a 1000 times but not noticed, and one-half her arrangement of the English language which lines you up for the sucker-punch so effectively. The feeling is of being washed, having something unnecessary taken out, not of someone's ideas entering. Re-freshing.

THIS BOOK: It is all of her poems. There are many that are not her best, and many that are unfinished and many that are incomprehensible. Maybe you don't want all of them, (though I don' regret getting this edition). Check out "Final Harvest" by the same editor. It is about 1/3 of the poems, the ones he thought were the most complete or accessible. The poems in this book stand on their own, there is no introduction or analysis of them whatsoever. While this is welcome, in that I don't want somebody's dumb analysis to wade through, there could be some introductions to some poems that might make them more comprehensible, like, this was written after x died, or, this poem was included in a letter sent to y. Also, a bit on her life would be nice.

WARNING: If you decide to get an anthology by another editor, check that the edition is based on this editor's work, Thomas Johnson, or on Franklin. When Emily was alive and after, her poems were published by editors who took liberties with her style, changing her quirky punctuation and even wording apparently. Johnson and Franklin changed all that, and have been the standard since.

In any case, don't waffle, get this book, you won't regret it and your eyes will be opened.

Emily Dickinson, the recluse poet of Amherst, Massachusetts had many things to say, on paper that is. Except for brief trips to Worcester, Boston, and Washington, D.C. (the last to visit her father whilst he served as a member of Congress), Emily spent her lifetime ensconced in her home at Amherst, from her birth in 1830 till her death in 1886. A quiet life she may have led, but Emily lived entire lifetimes through her poems. Within them, the reader experiences death, life, and immortality.

This gorgeous 1980 Easton Press edition titled "Poems of Emily Dickinson" is part of its Masterpieces of American Literature series. It comes handsomely bound in a rich, forest green leather, moire endpapers, and a satin ribbon pagemarker. This edition contains a large number of Emily's poems, and contains illustrations by Helen Sewell. There is also a frontispiece portrait of Emily Dickinson by Lynn Sweat. The pages have also been gilded. The overall impression and feel therefore is of a luxurious book that is heirloom quality. Highly recommended!

I will be honest--I had never just loved Emily Dickinson before I read this volume. I'd covered her in a quite a few classes I've taken, read all of the typical highlights, and I'd often found the rhyme and rhythms of her language repetitive and the images obvious and dull.

I thought she deserved another chance, though, seeing as she's Emily Dickinson, and so I've been slowly reading my way through this volume of verse, taking my time and rereading if something struck me.

A lot of things struck me, much more than I'll cover here. Mainly, the "repetitive" sound of the language became, paradoxically, much less repetitive and full of variant beauties to me. And it set off her poetry in this stark and heightened space for me. The more I read it, the more it allowed the images to speak.

And the images do speak, often quite surprisingly. And I found myself drawn into Dickinson's endless questioning, her search for joy, and her capacity for reverence.

XCVII

TO make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,--
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do
If bees are few.

So often misunderstood and ill-served by her editors and publishers, Emily Dickinson is a rara avis among major American poets. She shunned the spotlight, kept to herself and her family in her home in Amherst, MA, refusing to cater to popular tastes. She never published in her lifetime, made in fact only a few overtures to editors who were so staid and conventional that they hadn't the insight or imagination to appreciate her originality. Yet on her death she left a dresser drawer-full of thousands of poems, variant versions, snippets, notes, a massive welter of handwritten manuscripts that required a herculean effort to sort and assemble into the works she considered "poetry" and to file the detritus as "jottings, random thoughts, random expostulations." Not until this definitive edition of her texts appeared in the early 1960's edited by the scrupulous, meticulous textual scholar and Dickinson expert Thomas H Johnson, did this poet get a fair shake and accurate representation in print of her life's work.

Sadly most of what is parlayed online and in stores as her "poetry" is still butchered, and only amounts to sanitized, "regularized" versions of what she actually wrote, and the unsuspecting reader is none the wiser unless he or she happens to have studied Dickinson under a knowledgeable instructor or at the university level.

If you want to read and understand her work, this edition of her poems must be the basis for your appreciation and judgment, and none other. All of her other so-called "editors" changed her meter, spellings, capitalizations (all of which were "odd" yet deliberate departures from the norm for poetic effect). I also highly recommend Richard B. Sewell's incomparable biography, The Life of Emily Dickinson. Immensely readable, even compelling, and bristling with telling details that place the poet within the context of her times and New England heritage, it gives one an even deeper appreciation of what she overcame ("renounced") to pursue her art, and illuminates dimensions and aspects of the poems otherwise hidden to the modern reader.

I've studied Dickinson for over 30 years and written articles and a few books on her work and life, and I must say to any new reader: don't fall for the stereotypes, the cliches, and the b.s. aplenty that have always clouded her reputation and led the general public astray. Read deeply and see for yourself. Start by reading the "real" thing. Her finished poems as she wrote them, not as her editors "corrected" them and not the snippets and notes she made to herself to possibly work into poems.
Both as an individual and as a poet she will always remain elusive, but then she believed in the mystery at the heart of life herself, considered her own life a mystery, but tried to approach the essence and experience of the luminous "mysterium tremendum et fascinans" by capturing its beauty and profundity with metaphor and lyric.

Her Letters are also a treat, a treasure, for she was a devoted, loyal friend and tireless witty letter writer all of her life. Her epistolary style reflects to some degree her poetic penchants and inclinations, highly metaphorical, striking, surprising. In some ways they (the letters) are even more revealing of how she interacted with those whom she loved the most and are most telling of the qualities of her character and resonant of(if not fully disclosing) the particular pivotal events of her life.

Certainly she was one of a kind, far more sophisticated and worldly than most think even today, shrewd, widely read, a critical insightful reader and observer of life's conundrums and vagaries, current events, including the Civil War, the issues of the day... Anyone who has read her seriously would be hard put to find a comparable poet or life in literature or body of work. As for myself, I cannot even think of any poet or body of poetry that "reminds me of Emily Dickinson" or is "reminiscent of Emily Dickinson."

After Poe, Emily Dickinson is my favorite nineteenth-century American poet. She was perhaps the first truly great female poet this nation has produced (not being an expert on women's studies, I cannot be sure). Walt Whitman was a long-winded bore who blew his own horn too loud and too often. Also, the cornball optimism of the Transcendentalists has always been hard for me to take. Dickinson provided a much needed feminine counterpart to the hairy-chested machismo that has been a hallmark of American literature from James Fennimore Cooper to Norman Mailer (as often as not concealing repressed homosexual urges.) Her experiments in meter, diction, rhyme, were light-years ahead of her contemporaries. Along with Dante and William Blake she is one of the great visionaries of western civilization.

ED arguably surpasses Chaucer and Shakespeare as the greatest poet to have written in English if for no other reason than concision. A great critic and teacher of mine, his name a household word among readers of the NYT Book Review, made the great mistake of reading all of ED and her critics in a couple months. Not a good idea. I read through this edition over a year and a half, two to five poems a sitting. Like the Bible. Like Gilbert White the English naturalist. Astonishing. Rewarding. Irreplaceable.
The peculiar vocal rhythms--hesitations, pauses, and ZAP! words like lightening--only can be heard after slow aloudreading, over time. Her hyphens suggest pauses, vocal gestures and discoveries, immediacy, though in fact we know from the 3 volume edition the immediacy was an artful mask applied to multiple word choices. WB Yeats chose words similarly, but not Shakespeare (from the only MS we have that may well be his, in the Book of Sir Thomas More, his section--the D Hand--revises whole lines, but not individual words).
I have spoken from memory ED's bird poems in the garden of her house, the Dickinson Manse. Six poems on birds, a couple on Robins, her Oriole (One of the ones that Midas touched), and especially her Blue Jay:
No Brigadier throughout the Year
So Civic as the Jay--
A Neighbor--and a Warrior too--
With shrill Felicity
Pursuing winds that censure us
A February day...
I write this in a February day, and my father's business was in the Dawes Building, Springfield, MA,
named for the Dickinson friend and newspaper publisher who printed six poems in her lifetime.
But as I was going to say when Truth broke in (the other Amherst poet said), her Blue Jay poem ends with an accusation of
the Deity, and the reason she never attended the Congregational church her brother built across the street from her home.
Of the Jay, she concludes:
His character--a Tonic--
His Future--a Dispute--
Unfair an Immortality
That leaves this Neighbor out.
Yes, the Jay is predatory, and martial, but he is a neighbor, and as deserving as we humans, of immortality.
Quite a claim, slipped in, an aside--and not the only one in Dickinson's opus. I have argued elsewhere that
to read Dickinson well requires about the same time as reading complete Shakespeare, the 38 plays.
Her concision is deceptive.

Emily Dickinson is incredible. I suppose I am intriqued by her unique life and this adds to the allure of her poetry for me. I cannot say I always fully understand her poetry. Her poems tend to be brief and melodious. I wish I could have read her own distillation of her meaning.

I have come to feel that poets and Emily Dickinson have added much to my life. I am an older male. Recently I was at lunch with a group of other older males. They were talking about the rapid crashing and burning of the career of a particular politician who had been a "rising star". I mentioned Emily Dickinson's poem poem 1659, "Fame Is A Fickle Food". Mostly I was greeted by blank stares. Their loss. Thank You...

The cover of the book pictured with the option Kindle edition to click on leads the reader to assume he/she can get Thomas H. Johnson's edition of the poems, published in 1960 and containing 1775 poems, by opting for Kindle. But the Kindle has only the 1890, 1891, and 1896 books -- over-edited, public domain versions of a few hundred poems.

I am not so much a poetry person, until now I owned 2 poetry books, one volume of Gary Snyder, which I often reread, and another of "New England Poets Since Frost", which didn't excite me except for the 4 Frost poems. Well and Shakespeare, which is kind of poetry, but really plays.)

One day I decided to learn more about poetry and the English language and I bought 4 complete works of 4 famous poets, one of which was this volume.
I cannot put my reaction into words. I grew up in Amherst and Emily Dickinson was always a background figure of the town, a famous shut-in, a romantic figure of mystery and an in-joke at the same time. But to me she was just another one of those old-time ppl in big dresses and probably a bonnet. Not bad but not remarkable or interesting to me.

Reading this, I cannot imagine her as a shut-in anymore, in the sense of someone depressed and moping. Perhaps she gave up on the outside world, but I would guess from a position of knowing better, not of simple frailty. This is a burning moving vein of molten magma. It wasn't tragic or a pity that her work couldn't be more published and known in her lifetime. She knew no-one would get it. A pity maybe for the uncomprehending, but Emily knew what she was about and didn't need their approval.

SO, THE POEMS. Well, like I said I can't put my reaction into words. So many of her works paint a vivid image you can see unfold in front of you like you were there, maybe as if you had already seen it and you were being reminded of it, and then, usually in the last lines, something too beautiful or too true, or sometimes even too obvious is written, such that I felt I had suddenly been cut by a knife. I don't know if that can explain the feeling, but I found it surprising to being reduced to tears, a few times by a poem I didn't even truly understand. Something so beautiful as to be painful. I have never read anything like this, in religious work, philosophy of the East, any novel whether poetic imagist or straight story, nothing has had this power. It is one-half her observations, usually of the natural world unfolding before her, things you too may have seen a 1000 times but not noticed, and one-half her arrangement of the English language which lines you up for the sucker-punch so effectively. The feeling is of being washed, having something unnecessary taken out, not of someone's ideas entering. Re-freshing.

THIS BOOK: It is all of her poems. There are many that are not her best, and many that are unfinished and many that are incomprehensible. Maybe you don't want all of them, (though I don' regret getting this edition). Check out "Final Harvest" by the same editor. It is about 1/3 of the poems, the ones he thought were the most complete or accessible. The poems in this book stand on their own, there is no introduction or analysis of them whatsoever. While this is welcome, in that I don't want somebody's dumb analysis to wade through, there could be some introductions to some poems that might make them more comprehensible, like, this was written after x died, or, this poem was included in a letter sent to y. Also, a bit on her life would be nice.

WARNING: If you decide to get an anthology by another editor, check that the edition is based on this editor's work, Thomas Johnson, or on Franklin. When Emily was alive and after, her poems were published by editors who took liberties with her style, changing her quirky punctuation and even wording apparently. Johnson and Franklin changed all that, and have been the standard since.

In any case, don't waffle, get this book, you won't regret it and your eyes will be opened.

Emily Dickinson, the recluse poet of Amherst, Massachusetts had many things to say, on paper that is. Except for brief trips to Worcester, Boston, and Washington, D.C. (the last to visit her father whilst he served as a member of Congress), Emily spent her lifetime ensconced in her home at Amherst, from her birth in 1830 till her death in 1886. A quiet life she may have led, but Emily lived entire lifetimes through her poems. Within them, the reader experiences death, life, and immortality.

This gorgeous 1980 Easton Press edition titled "Poems of Emily Dickinson" is part of its Masterpieces of American Literature series. It comes handsomely bound in a rich, forest green leather, moire endpapers, and a satin ribbon pagemarker. This edition contains a large number of Emily's poems, and contains illustrations by Helen Sewell. There is also a frontispiece portrait of Emily Dickinson by Lynn Sweat. The pages have also been gilded. The overall impression and feel therefore is of a luxurious book that is heirloom quality. Highly recommended!

I will be honest--I had never just loved Emily Dickinson before I read this volume. I'd covered her in a quite a few classes I've taken, read all of the typical highlights, and I'd often found the rhyme and rhythms of her language repetitive and the images obvious and dull.

I thought she deserved another chance, though, seeing as she's Emily Dickinson, and so I've been slowly reading my way through this volume of verse, taking my time and rereading if something struck me.

A lot of things struck me, much more than I'll cover here. Mainly, the "repetitive" sound of the language became, paradoxically, much less repetitive and full of variant beauties to me. And it set off her poetry in this stark and heightened space for me. The more I read it, the more it allowed the images to speak.

And the images do speak, often quite surprisingly. And I found myself drawn into Dickinson's endless questioning, her search for joy, and her capacity for reverence.

XCVII

TO make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,--
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do
If bees are few.

A lot of people don't like to read Dickinson. I confess that she isn't an easy poet to study; many either like her style or don't. Nevertheless, I have the pleasure of calling her MY favorite poet. The upside to Dickinson is that she wrote so many poems that even if you read 4 a day, it would still take over a year to complete her whole corpus.

About half of her poems are cryptically expressed. I've read some poems and thought that it was too difficult to understand, only to reread it without "trying" to understand to find that from her choice of words, I DO understand. Those poems have an underlying message that makes perfect sense.

My favorite poems of Dickinson's are not the usual favorites; I find that I'm drawn again to read "Nobody knows this little Rose", "Wild nights - Wild nights", "How happy is the little Stone", "Frequently the woods are pink" and "Our lives are Swiss". Her writing is succinct; she says more with less. They open a micro-world and magnify the simple things most would overlook.

It doesn't matter what mood I am in, I can always read this. Even if I'm sad, I can often read anything of Dickinson's and after savoring the lines, find that I'm happier than before I started. Her anthology has the same therapeutic effect of reading from the Book of Proverbs, being so full of little jewels of wisdom like it is.

In her lifetime, she was so elusive that people called her "the Myth". But it's obvious by her poetry that she was a woman full of love and depth. If all you get out of the book is boredom, you are just a dull rock.

Dickinson is probably the one poet who best personifies mood, emotion, fears, hopes, dreams, and time and eternity with such few words and in the most illustrative way. Most of her subjects are ones we readily identify with--love, death, nature, religion, passage of time. Her ability to make so much out of so little is truly a gift, and, while her poetry can be a little hard to grasp at first, it is quite powerful if you pursue it. For this reason this volume of her poems is a treasure for anyone who loves poetry, or the power of its message.

Many of her poems have an ironic twist to them, or a paradoxical message. Consider the few first lines of "The soul unto itself", where the dual nature of the soul--good and bad--is explored:

"The soul unto itself
Is an imperial friend--
Or the most agonizing spy
An enemy could send..."

Another one of her poems, "Each life converges to some center" evokes the idea that we are part of some bigger plan in the universe. She clearly has a knack for taking the reader along on the journey in the poem, and feeling its magnitude along with the speaker.

In "The Future never spoke," Dickinson personifies the future as indifferent and unpredictable, a mysterious entity that has a will of its own:

"The Future never spoke,
Nor will he, like the Dumb,
Reveal by sign or syllable
Or his profound to Come.."

The power of Dickinson's words come to life in this book, and this is one of the best collections out there of her poems. There are also many of her more popular ones, such as "I'm Nobody", where she blasts the notion of having achievements publicized and being popular and "Because I could not stop for Death", where the speaker is taken on a journey through time by Death. Over all this is a powerful collection that no literature teacher should be without. Great for anyone though, and, if you aren't a poetry fan, try this one out and maybe you'll be one.

Definitely recommended!

This is just the kind of "collection" that not just purists but ordinary knowledgeable fans of the Belle of Amherst hate. Edit Emily Dickinson? As much to say edit Michaelangelo's "Pieta," Leonardo's "Last Supper," put a brassiere on the "Venus de Milo!" Whether or not one may agree with me that Emily is America's greatest poet, most who have bothered at all to savor her stark little stanzas in their purest original forms are bound to be deeply offended by editorial attempts, no matter how clever, to gild these admittedly difficult lilies of Emily's. Unless you may have a reason, of course, as I have, for wanting to get a copy of them in this form -- in which case I would say this is an excellent specimen edition, reproducing as it does something of the poetry's early publication history without the trouble and expense of seeking out rare first editions.

In my case, I'm currently at work on a play that touches upon that history and its mighty early publication struggles, a fascinating story in itself, so for all that the mighty wrassling matches of Todd, Higginson et al to smith Emily's barbaric stanzas into what they imagined to be publishable shape may sadly becloud the poetry's primal beauty, it's a needful resource and a cloud that for me is not without its silver lining.

Nor is that the only silver lining, when one stops to think about it. Today, for all that Higginson may look rather an imbecile to us who only remember his name at all because of his chance connection with Emily, he really was quite an interesting and important historical personality in his own right, back in the day, whose life and works (this being one of those works) can tell you quite a lot about the crucial period of American history he inhabited. And Mabel Loomis Todd, who lovingly and laboriously transcribed Emily's hundreds of barely decipherable manuscripts and brought the project to Higginson's attention, was a multitalented, genuinely brilliant woman, who would also have settled for a lot less editing in the final published versions, especially the ham-handed assignments of poem titles by Higginson, had she had more say in matters.

In fact, we have a lot of sheer dumb luck to thank for the fact that we have Emily's oeuvre at all. We can thank her sister Vinnie for discovering the poetry and perceiving its worth, while going through her things after the poet's death, and being bright enough not to burn it along with her correspondence, and for her fanaticism about pushing first her sister in law, then Mabel Todd, in a four year campaign to find a way to get it published. We can thank Mabel for her fanaticism in rounding it up, transcribing it by midnight oil, and pushing first Higginson and then Thomas Niles of Roberts Brothers to bring out an edition of a mass of poetry that they all considered hopelessly unpublishable. It is fortunate for us, after Niles stipulated that the edition should be very small and the family must pay for the plates, that the reading public thought otherwise, and the first printing created such a sensation that the printers couldn't print subsequent editions fast enough to keep the bookstore shelves filled.

The thing is, lame as the editorial monkeyshines of Higginson et al may look in 20/20 hindsight, they are about as competent a job as anyone could have made of such materials at the time, and without which none of Emily's poetry would ever have been published at all, in any form. Today, of course, we can enjoy wonderful editions by Johnson and Franklin that give us as much of Emily's poetry as has been discovered, in a form as true and faithful as possible to the ways she originally wrote it. The brilliance of the poetry in Emily's original form, as compared to the ways subsequent lesser lights from Higginson right up to Billy Collins have mucked it up and marred Emily's tale in the telling, is a point, I think, generally conceded. What might be borne in mind, though, is the debt we all owe to the original muckers-up whose sometimes thankless labors were ultimately the only reason the poetry survived the poet, such that we can have Franklin's and Johnson's masterful handiwork available to us today.

Emily Dickinson is easily my favorite poet. It was unfortunate that she was essentially undiscovered during her lifetime. This may remind us of one of her poems:
----- 441
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
-----
However, I think this poem is a more likely biography and more personal poem:
----- 404
How many Flowers fail in Wood --
Or perish from the Hill --
Without the privilege to know
That they are Beautiful --
How many cast a nameless Pod
Upon the nearest Breeze --
Unconscious of the Scarlet Freight --
It bear to Other Eyes --
-----
There are 1775 poems in all, but the following poem is my favorite. It is also on display in her house in Amherst (MA) in various renditions. Make sure to visit there if you are ever in the area.
----- 67
Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne'er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.
Not one of all the purple Host
Who took the Flag today
Can tell the definition
So clear of Victory
As he defeated -- dying --
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Burst agonized and clear!
-----
There are so many fantastic poems that I wish I could list them all. I did type them all (!) in once for my personal use and that has been of great benefit. However, I still keep this book that is marked with my own notes. A real treasure.

One of my favorite poets since being assigned "I'll Tell You How the Sun Rose" in eighth grade, Dickinson has always struck a chord within me. Despite having lived over a century prior, the feelings and ideas expressed within her work are just as relevant today as ever.

The sparse beauty of Dickinson's words can both evoke loneliness and the certainty that the poet shares your pain. Her topics encompass everything from death to literature to the soul; and her mood is often somber, but also very often playful.

This particular collection is a volume I had to purchase for a graduate course on Dickinson I once took -- and it is one of the very few texts I never wanted to sell back! Margins are wide, allowing for ample underlinings and notations as readers peruse and mull the verses. At the rear is an index of first lines, in alphabetical order, to allow for easier location of particular works. This volume also preserves Dickinson's tendency to use dashes, which was often "corrected" in past versions -- also contributing greatly to the readers' ability to fully appreciate Dickinson's legacy.

Emily Dickinson, who lived from 1830 to 1886, is to me the symbol of a poet with a unique and distinctive voice, a voice that seemed strange to her contemporaries but that gradually came to be recognized and cherished by lovers of poetry everywhere.
She led a life withdrawn from the world and, in some ways, reality as most of us know it, for she lived mainly in her imagination. She found no recognition in her day and only six of her poems were published, all modified and conventional-ized by the editors to suit their readers, who liked old-fashioned verse and were not appreciative of new styles and innovative forms. But that didn't seem to bother Dickinson too much. In fact, she didn't even seem to take too much pride in her talent, even if she knew the full extent of it. For one thing, she kept it very private, except with a few correspondents. In fact, her poetry wasn't even discovered until after her death. Her sister went through her belongings in her room and found the many, many loose scraps of paper covered with poems that had been written down through the decades by Dickinson. So, although she was never to attain fame and success in her lifetime ("fame is a bee. / It has a song-- / It has a sting-- / Ah, too, it has a wing"), she eventually had to settle for "fame of the mind"--recognition of her talent in her own mind. It was for posterity to discover her. That didn't take long. Her first collection was put out only a short 4 years after her death.
The specific reason why so little of her poetry found its way in print while she was still alive was, largely, because her use of metre, punctuation, and rhyme was so irregular and unusual. Editors mistook her offbeat application of these elements as flaws of "technical imperfections". They did not understand that these "imperfections" were not mistakes at all on her part, but rather, poetic experimentations. But their error can be well understood, of course, when one realizes that what Emily Dickinson was doing was something they just had not seen attempted, by anyone. Even Walt Whitman, another highly experimental American poet of the time, was doing something completely different from her poetry. But like his poetry, hers too was considered uncontrolled and eccentric. It seemed to follow no set of rules for verse in a time when poetry had very clearly defined rules of composition.
Times have completely changed and poets today enjoy the fredom of unlimited expression. No longer are there any set rules for this or that, and all styles, forms and uses of punctuation (or lack of) are acceptable. In fact, newness and innovation are now considered a plus, all thanks to true and pioneering originals like Emily Dickinson.
David Rehak
author of "Poems From My Bleeding Heart"

The complete poems of my favorite American poet, presented as she wrote them, with her idiosyncratic capitalization and punctuation intact. This is the edition to get--there are many bargain-priced collections that use older texts in which editors "corrected" these idiosyncracies. Dickinson's poetry is crystalline--cold, precise, and exquisitely shaped. The poet herself is famously enigmatic, both because of the privacy of her life and her "hiddenness" within her poetry. (Despite the fact that most of her poems are written in first person, they are never "about" her in the way Whitman's are, and they seem to conceal her worldview as much as, or more than, they reveal it.) This enigmatic quality makes her poems particularly rewarding to reread, and teaching them as I have over the last decade and a half has been a joy.

This is the standard and authoritative collected edition of Emily Dickinson's poems. It is a book that will stay with you for the rest of your life. I can think of no finer writer of poetry in English who manages to invest so short and simple a construction - no more than a couple of lines in some cases - with such emotional force. I say 'simple', but her poems are simple only in a deceptive sense. An unfinished poem like "A letter is a joy of earth/ It is denied the gods -" (that's the whole poem) says more about the joy of constructing prose than any number of effusive efforts from the Romantics.
Miss Dickinson has suffered from having been appropriated by the rather dreary crowd of 'cultural critics' who cannot grasp that a work of art tells us primarily not about the social mores of the time it was written in but about the human spirit. She is especially vulnerable to this sort of irrelevant sophistry, having lived as a recluse for much of her life and thus being ripe for 'interpretation' that is nothing more than a recitation of modern political sensibilities. That's a shame, and it certainly shouldn't put you off reading her. So far as I'm concerned, there is no one - not even Shakespeare, not even Jane Austen or Dickens - whom I read more frequently, and with greater pleasure and benefit.

Hand to hand like a tool her volume went, in this to prepare
I could get to saying so little that would honour this woman.
Come another think much of, scratch purr in turf
cannot come in, called by some obliquity;
oh now we are prepared!
...that I could have seen those Graces of Socrates!
That; Yeah! that one, son of Sophroniscus
who aired at Hellenica. His work of hands, they said,
that stood at the Acropolis as Pausanias tells us.
Why do some think so, talk so to extent
about this "Barefoot" one?
Because it appears his said, and did too,
were the sofarbeyond, inreach all men see,
but they nightwatch on the boneless ladder harrow to pick.
Then to say this is a work of Art is to never reach
enough, even with the capitalization.
I cry when I feel spirit usually. This Lady for me
in my reads, Lady Emily Elizabeth Dickinson,
(more Dickinsdóttir) makes the choke-hollow
midpoint in breast that brings the eye wash
at her craft, eye and heart, and is my kind of hero.
What she knew, she knew from
the deep incrementlessness of what animates form.
Titled, clothed ever to accept the recognition
let fly by a stumbler she believed in,
who may have been right about that day's audience,
as today's will experience the far reach of her craft,
but they should have had the choice.
She knew from her reads that her probity was good,
real good. How could she not! For there is some sense that
if effort and not settle rod, one may acquire and believe in
as meal at an inn against the open roads' fires
a boon to contend with, the dry sweat in book form.
She wrote early `she'd never seen a Moor, or the sea,'
this with her unpublishment was, harken,
a Calvinism Calvin to please.
Anyone that loves the wind, flora, bees
and never-cowed butterfly as did this Emily,
has to take rank as friend of mine,
and teacher most evident.

As a few have stated already, a lot of Emily Dickinson's poems appear simple on the surface. Don't let the simplicity or brevity fool you, boiling underneath the metaphors of Dickinson's poems are some of the most beautiful visions I've ever read. Intelligent, thoughtful..haunting are all words I'd use to describe her poems. She has quickly vaulted to the top of the list of my favorite poets along with William Blake and Edgar Allan Poe.
And speaking of her poems, there are plenty. All of them in fact, in chronological order allowing the reader to see the progession in her poems. This is a great book at a great price to be able to own all she has written.
Since her poems have no titles, there are two invaluable features included at the back to help aid the search for the desired poem. One is an alphabetical subject index, with words and lines linked to poems with which they belong. The other index includes the first lines of all 1775 poems.
An excellent all around souce for all your Emily Dickinson needs. Enjoy.

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.

Emily Dickinson is one of the greats of world poetry. A language, a style , a world of her own. She writes memorable lines slanted to the heft of her own cathedral tunes. Success counted sweetest on her dying ear was distant sounds of triumph burst agonized and clear. She loved to lick the valleys up in skies of molten blue .She died twice before her death, and yet remained to see if immortality would reveal another event awesome as these. Intoxication was the going of an inland soul to sea, past the houses past the headlands into deep Eternity .

She gave us lines which live in our minds, and come back to us time and time again, rhymes off - rhymes too which take flight as poems of broken wings.

She enriches our life. She exalts us.

Read her and be enriched, the fragrant longing of a spinster's kiss.

This is not the Johnson edition, and not the Franklin-- it is a compilation of editions edited (perversely) by her family that takes out what they thought in the prim Victoria minds were things unfit for a lady to say, let alone write. Get the Johnson or better the Franklin. There is not a good online choice.

If you want to read Emily Dickinson's poetry in their original form and you want to discover the incredible vitality of this poet's intellect, imagination, and artistic skill, don't buy this book. The poems in this collection are "improved" versions of the original poems which can be found in other available editions. Moreover, the selections include most of ED's least interesting work. When ED died two people selected some of her poems and prepared them for publication by adding punctuation, altering words, and even omitting words, lines, and whole stanzas so that the polite readers of her day would find ED's poems more palatable and less offensive.

There's no need for me to comment on Emily Dickinson, or her phenomenal poetry that is the content of this book. It will speak for itself. What I will comment on is the authenticity of this book compared to others in that this book preserves Emily's poetry the way it was, with all the "mad" dashes, to convey the uncontainable element within her that she was only able to release through her poetry. The author is the primary researcher of Emily's poems and has thoroughly researched the world to compile the collection pretty much as the world knows it, and he has presented it in this book in full. If you are to have a collection of Emily Dickinson's poetry, it should be this one. No questions about it!

Nearly everyone who's had a brush with American lit knows the story of Emily Dickinson - her poetry unpublished in her lifetime, and then even after her death, her verses seeing the light of day only after having been "improved" on by an editor who found her rhymes imperfect and her meter "spasmodic." He even went so far as to make her metaphors "sensible." The fact is, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, to whom Dickinson had sent her poems, was a representative of the poetic establishment, and as with all artistic establishments then and now, was too rigid in his thinking and too impoverished in his imagination to comprehend a new voice of genius. As Editor Thomas H. Johnson writes in his terse but very instructive Introduction, "He was trying to measure a cube by the rules of plane geometry."

Of course other women of literature suffered something similar during the nineteenth century. What I wonder is, who is being misread, ignored or denied today?

Anyway, suffice it to say that this IS the definitive one-volume collection of the poetry of Emily Dickinson. It includes all the 1,775 poems that she wrote in her lifetime, and they are presented here just as she wrote them with only some minor corrections of obvious misspellings or misplaced apostrophes. Johnson has retained the sometimes "capricious" capitalization, and preserved the famous dashes.

There is a subject index, which I found useful, and an index of first lines, which is invaluable.

Dickinson can be playful...

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you - Nobody - too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise - you know!

...she can be sarcastic...

"Faith" is a fine invention
When Gentlemen can see -
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency.

[Alas, the the store.com editor does not support italics. The words "see" and "Microscopes" are italicized above, and it really does make a difference!]

...and grave...

I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air -
Between the Heaves of Storm -

...and observant...

I like a look of Agony,
Because I know it's true -
Men do not sham Convulsion,
Nor simulate, a Throe -

...and profound...

Love reckons by itself - alone -
"As large as I" - relate the Sun
to One who never felt it blaze -
Itself is all the like it has -

..and desperate...

"Hope" is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all -

...and self aware...

I meant to have but modest needs -
Such as Content - and Heaven -
Within my income - these could lie
And Life and I - keep even -

...and even radical...

Much Madness is divinest Sense -
To a discerning Eye -
Much Sense - the starkest Madness -
'Tis the Majority
In this, as All, prevail -
Assent - and you are sane -
Demur - you're straightway dangerous -
And handled with a Chain -

...and much more.

She is a poet of strikingly apt and totally original phrases imbued with a deep resonance of thought and observation, especially on her favorite subjects, life, death and love. She can be cryptic and her references and allusions are sometimes too private for us to catch. She can also be amazingly terse. But the intensity of her experience and the "Zero at the Bone" emotion displayed in this, her "letter to the World/That never wrote to me -" are second to none in the world of letters. Unlike Shakespeare, who mastered the psychology of people in places high and low, Dickinson mastered only her own psychology, and yet through that we can see, as in a mirror, ourselves.

--Dennis Littrell, author of "Like a Tsunami Headed for Hilo: Selected Poems"

Valley Gay Press Book Review by Liz Bradbury (Author of Angel Food and Devil Dogs - A Maggie Gale Mystery)
Emily Dickinson wrote over 1700 poems in her lifetime with a new and vibrant rhyme scheme. Her poems express every emotion and show passionate love for both men and women - especially women. She fought the pressure of her family and friends to become a reborn Christian, choosing instead her own spirituality that had nothing to do with organized religion and quite a bit to do with anger toward a God that would allow innocents to die untimely deaths. There is an Emily Dickinson poem for every occasion, all of them are worth study, and all of them are in this book.

Emily Dickinson's expressional language of yesteryear is still the je ne sais quoi of today. The genius that comes forth from her consciousness seems rather simplistic at first, but when you truly contemplate her writing style true enlightenment develops in what I'd refer to as the dimensions of humanity. These dimensions consist of the soul (psyche,) the spirit (nous,) and the body (soma).
I don't think there is anyone who could read Dickinson's poems and not have these dimensions of the self-affected.
A case in point: one of her poems goes like this.

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And Sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

This is one of her most recited poems to date. I sometimes wonder how most people would interpret it?
How I ascertain it is in this contexts. I believe it's about a bird that with a little help will be able to withstand the evening chill.
On it's own, it wants to persevere no matter what the odds, but the pangs of the world rest upon its shoulders.
The bottom line is that the bird needs support.
This bird is the mother of baby chicks who are in disparate need of nurturing, and protection simply because the dead of night is creating trepidations in their souls.
For you see, without trust there is no hope. That is why hope is a thing with feathers because the bird represents a better tomorrow. A tomorrow that will come someday. It will be a day when we can all freely trust one another. And that my friends is the definition of true freedom.
The bird also is the representation of man's struggle with pride. When we (in unison) humble ourselves in all aspects of life then and only then will we be successful.
GIVE A HELPING HAND to whoever needs it, and don't be arrogant, or too proud to receive help either. Those are words to live by.

Here is another good poem I cited.

I Gave myself to him,
And took himself for pay.
The solemn contract of a life
Was ratified this way.

The wealth might disappoint,
Myself a poorer prove
Than this great purchaser suspect,
The daily own of Love

Depreciate the vision;
But, till the merchant buy,
Still fable, in the isles of spice,
The subtle cargoes lie.

At least, `t is mutual risk,--
Some found it mutual gain;
Sweet debt of life,-- each night to owe,
Insolvent, every noon.

"A poem of unrequited love/faulty buisness transaction!" You truly can't help but love this stuff. Emily's poems will grab any reader's heart. If you are a lover of poetry then this is required reading. If these two samples of her work don't convince you to read her collection of poetry then nothing will.

I often thought I "knew" Emily in a personal way, though I knew that couldn't really be possible, her being dead and all. Still, I felt there was a connection and later, when I was working as a tarot card reader on Church Street in San Francisco I often met people in the course of a day who were sympathetic to this viewpoint. Of course, I wasn't doing much of a good job as a tarot card reader if I was telling people _my_ fantasies, so I quit and got my PhD studying--you got it--Emily Dickinson herself. Well, this is one heck of a book. From the familiar to the obscure, from the ridiculous to the sublime, this book hits a home run and doesn't miss a base as it jogs around the old sandlot diamond. The familiar ones are like old friends, of course, but every now and then there's a rare gem. I'd like to share this:
I'd Like to Get Out of this G-d D-mned F-cking Room
It'd be a big help
if I could get out of here for
just a minute.
What a bore this town can be.
They say, "Hey, it's grist for the
old artistic mill,
Emily."
I say--"What total b-llsh-t."
So let me out of here.
I always wanted to give copywriting
a try.
Let me be known as the Belle of
Madison Avenue for a change, already.
Screw this.
How I miss that woman.

Emily Dickinson lived her life in a solitary room; a place where she found amazing insight writing letters an poems. She marks her verses with simple phrases that show the reader a vision and not its personal interpretation. In some cases she puts into words what most of us attempt to capture with our thoughts. This extraordinary skill is a mark of only the best poets, but not all can write consistently as Emily can. Despite the mellow tone of the majority of her work, Emily still captures the flavor of life without compromising its tranquility. Emily never suffers from redundant confusion and her poems reflect a love for solitary beauty.

Just as a prism breaks up light into a band of colors - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet - and their infinite gradations, so do Emily Dickinson's poems become, as it were, a prism which captures the white light of reality, a reality which as it flows through the prism of her poem explodes into a multiplicity of meanings.
It is the rich suggestiveness of her poems, a suggestiveness which generates an incredible range of meanings, that prevents us from ever being able to say (to continue the metaphor) that a given poem is 'about red' or 'about blue,' because her poems, as US critic Robert Weisbuch has observed, are in fact about _everything_. This is what makes her so unique, and this is why she appeals to every kind of reader (or certainly to open-minded ones) and even to children.
Emily Dickinson's poetry is one of the wonders of the world.

And I still turn to it all the time. It is well-worn and well-read. There are newer editions of Dickinson's poetry, but this relatively compact book feels like an old friend. The use of language and phrasing is divine - so to speak. *smile* I cannot recommend this work enough.
Meeting by Accident,
We hovered by design -
As often as a Century
An error so divine
Is ratified by Destiny,
But Destiny is old
And economical of Bliss
As Midas is of Gold -

This collection of poems, tho representing a fine breadth of Dickenson's works, is in final assessment a crime against the poet's great talent. As is freely admitted in the introduction, the editor, Mr. Higginson, "worked on the mechanics of the poems by smoothing out the rhymes and meter, changing the line arrangements, and rewriting the dialect of the local area." This is a free admission of the book's guilt, having adulterated Dickenson's original poems in both content and form. Gone are the nuances and passions that make Dickenson one of the best American writers. Gone are the premeditated dashed and capitalizations that add depth and intensity to the poems' meanings. And, worst of all, gone or altered are many lines that contribute to the unique vision of the artist. As Thomas H. Johnson says in the Introduction to "The Complete Poems of Emily Dickenson," A representative mid-nineteenth century traditionalist was being asked to judge the work of a wholly new order of craftsman . . . which he was not equipped to estimate." Do yourself a favor and avoid this text. Instead, find one that is true to the original poems, one which preserves the intent and stylistic genius of the author, and one which will give you the full and lasting effect of Emily Dickenson.

After reading the reviews from many others pertaining to the varied versions of Emily Dickinson's poems available digitally, paying close attention to the "One Star" reviews, I decided to download the sample of this text before purchasing it. Was I glad I did! I figured, "0kay, those other copies ranged in price from free to $0.99; what can one expect?" Surely if they are charging $7.99 they have retained Ms. Dickinson's punctuation and capitalization and everything about her poems that make her unique...

This edition is just as much a mess as the other ones! Why can the store and these publishers not get this right? The formatting is poor, but even messier is the layout of the book. There are misspelled words, random words in bold, Roman numerals indicating the start of new poems, sometimes they are in bold, sometimes not... sometimes they are not even centered properly - in a way that they align with the other Roman numerals. To top it off, the poems aren't separated with spaces or paragraphs... One poem ends, the next line is a Roman numeral (maybe it's offset by bold characters, maybe it's not) and then the next poem begins.

I love the poetry of Emily Dickinson and I WOULD be willing to pay, as would others, for an eBook version of her poetry that will allow me - or any other user/reader - the full experience of her special way with language! This is very unfortunate!

Emily Dickinson is an poet that has poems that are usually taken the wrong way. This book is an excellent way for people to understand the meaning of the poetry by Emily Dickinson. I personally enjoy poetry, and I especially think that Emily Dickinson is a very profound poet. She is one of my favorites. This book is an excellent way to start out in poetry if you have not paid any attention to poetry before. It is also an EXCELLENT way for people who are poetry lovers to expand your horizon.

This review concerns the kindle version of The Poems of Emily Dickinson, with which the name Thomas Johnson is associated. Beware: these are NOT the poems as edited by Mr. Johnson. They are the early public domain versions which veer significantly away from the poems as Dickinson wrote them.

"Your thoughts don't have words every day..." But, oh, how skilled was Emily Dickinson at finding words to match her thoughts. And what intriguing thoughts they were - clever, insightful, playful, impassioned, meticulous... Whether describing life from the point of view of a bee or pondering the ravages of death, Dickinson was unique in her approach to her work and the world she saw around her. One of her poetic gifts was finding ways to express profound thoughts through brevity.

Most of us are exposed to Dickinson only through the most publicized and commercialized selections of her work. This complete compilation offers us a chance to see Dickinson in her entirety and find the many treasures that have not been exposed to the masses. I first really discovered Dickinson in college, and I clung to a paperback of her complete works for years and was happy to at last be able to replace it with a more durable hardback. Not only are we treated to her life's work here, but in some cases we get different drafts of a single poem - giving us a window into the development of her thoughts. Crack open the cover, and it is as if we have been allowed to wander unsupervised into Emily's room and peruse her papers. And we discover how true the poet's own words can be:

"A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.

I say it just
Begins to live
That day."

Formatting! Unfortunately i don't know much about how to do this, but a huge improvement for me would be some form of page break after each poem. I repeat the complaints of others when I say it often divides a poem or even a stanza over two pages. It is poetry, and this takes away from the experience usually had with a book of poetry without adding anything good.

That said, the table of contents and index of first lines at the end (linked to from the table of contents) are very good, and the poems are amazing. This is the best kindle version i could find, and it's free. Get it if you can tolerate the weirdness with pages.

True that I'd requested it, but I didn't realize I'd be reading it so often over these last few months...and surely I'll be reading more. The language may be difficult compared to our daily use, but her works were radical even by the standards in her day (it was judged as discombobulated or erratic). This is the charm of the writings though. You won't read anything like it then nor now.

*****

I can't believe that even though Dickinson was a prolific and brilliant private poet, fewer than a dozen of her nearly eighteen hundred poems were published during her lifetime! It's harder still to believe that the work that actually was published during her lifetime was altered significantly by the publishers back then to fit the conventional poetic rules of the time. It make you appreciate an anthology such as this.

*****

These are not the poems as she wrote them. They were edited by well-meaning contemporaries to make her style "fit" the rules of the day. Unless you're interested in comparing her original work with the "improved" versions, skip this and look for a later edition.

The words of America's greatest nineteenth-century poet stand for themselves---when they are allowed to be read as written---so I'll offer no comment on them, merely say in all humility that I am glad to live in an era when Dickinson's poems are available to be read as she wrote them. If you're serious about wanting to read the life-altering works of this great, quiet voice, seek out this volume, or another that features her work in its original, purest form.

It can be fairly said that Emily Dickinson is the most sensible American poet up to this date. Her themes range from love to death, but she prefers the latter; and her poetic artistry is far more musical than Baudelaire's, more vivid than Christina Rossetti's. In her way of writing her soul and senses in a poem, she can only be compared to Spanish Romantic, Gustavo A. Becquer; both in themes, and metaphorical pictures, although not in style. She is one true American classic. I am rating the book with nine points, not because the selection is poor or weak; rather because a selection is not enough when dealing with Dickinson. Her minor poems are her finest and, because each person has his own favorite, a title having the words "Complete Works" is more appropiate. However, it is a good start for a poetry lover, and Dickinson's Poems are esay to find.

The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, is the ultimate collection of poems. By organizing the poems into chronological order, Johnsonj has created a timeline of situations and emotions Dickinson went through in her life. Johnson provides the reader with two different indexes, a subject index and an index of the first lines. These prove to be very helpful in finding the exact poem or poems you are looking for.
Dickinson captures the intense struggles of life, as well as the hard work and complicated aspects of society for a woman, in the late 1800s. Dickinson includes her personal feelings, which allows the reader to relate to the poet. The powerful wording Dickinson uses in her poems compels the reader to continue on. Along with the intense wording of the poems, there is a meaning to be found in each poem. It is obvious Dickinson had spent time on each poem, carefully selecting the proper words and phrases.
Poems such as "Because I Could not Stop for Death," "This is My Letter to the World," and "Success is Counted Sweetest" are only a few of the impressive poems that can be found in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. This collection was skillfully put together and is an amazing selection of poems.

here is a voice undimmed. A voice so rare it's no wonder that the life lived behind it was as it was. Perfect voice, perfect life. Like others here, I too see there's no need to "review" a thing like Emily. I merely take this opportunity in this new medium to state that Emily lived in Gnosis...this is her mysterious subject. Here is where she becomes seemingly impenetrable...until you know her terms and her Terms, and then--she stands revealed as the Mystic she was and is.

I've always been a fan of Emily Dickenson. This book is a full collection of her poems. I memorized some of her poems when I was young, but this book made me really stop and realize how varied in content her poems were. Her poems continue to amaze me. Reading some of her poems in this book that I was not familiar with made me stop and think--they are quite beautiful and some quite thought-provoking.

The added photo of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson Edited by Thomas H Johnson is not the correct photo for this edition. The Cream colored cover with the illustration of 3 blue bachelor button flowers framed is the cover for the 1960 paperback edition that contains 770 pages. ISBN 0-316-18413-6, UPC 9 780316 184137 Retailed for USA $16.95, In Canada $22.95.

I bought this book and have tresured it for its diverse collection because I really have always admired her creative linguistic language. I loved visiting her home town last year and exploring the places to which her writings refer. Very special.The Fifteen Houses: A Novel [...]

These poems are deep and inspiring.Where other poets would use twice as many words to say half as much she uses half as many words to say twice as much.Her poems are sometimes melancholy,sometimes very happy or even mysterious.Since she did not usually write to be read it is sometimes nearly impossible to understand what she meant.But that doesn't take away from the fun of reading her work.No matter who you are Emily Dickinson has a poem you will love.

I would like to know what Higginson was thinking when he obliterated Emily's poetry. He actaully had the arrogance to think that he knew what she 'intended' to write. This is an absolute farce of a book. Compare the hacked and pieced poems in this 'book' <and I use the term loosely> to the ones you find in 'The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson' edited by Thomas H. Johnson. That is the book to get. Johnson was part of the team that maticulously read her hand-written versions and published a word for word, dash for dash version. If you want to read what the genious Emily originally wrote seek the REAL works, not this attrocious adaptation! The print speaks for itself.

I couldn't always appreciate Dickenson and perhaps you may not yet be ready to appreciate her work. I can't comment on how it feels to be touched by her because it defies description and rather than try, I would suggest you give her a read. If her metaphor is not lost on you, you will be glad you made the effort. Also, spring for the extra $7 to get the hardcover... if it doesn't speak to you today, tuck it away on a shelf and someday you'll pick it up and wonder why you let it sit for so long...

Under a surface of innocence, Emily Dickinson's witty, acerbic, playful & profound poems are America's wisest contribution to poetry. Sometimes she riddles, sometimes she puns--she puns not only in ambiguous word choice, but also in ideas and topics. Her small gems are the unique response of genius to the world, a dialogue on the most inspiring level--and from a given woman's experience, too. But I think Dickinson surpasses the merely human--she was sent from another planet to rescue us from Whitmanesque excesses.

The added photo of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson Edited by Thomas H Johnson is not the correct photo for this edition. The Cream colored cover with the illustration of 3 blue bachelor button flowers framed is the cover for the 1960 paperback edition that contains 770 pages. ISBN 0-316-18413-6, UPC 9 780316 184137 Retailed for USA $16.95, In Canada $22.95.

I bought this book and have tresured it for its diverse collection because I really have always admired her creative linguistic language. I loved visiting her home town last year and exploring the places to which her writings refer. Very special.The Fifteen Houses: A Novel [...]

These poems are deep and inspiring.Where other poets would use twice as many words to say half as much she uses half as many words to say twice as much.Her poems are sometimes melancholy,sometimes very happy or even mysterious.Since she did not usually write to be read it is sometimes nearly impossible to understand what she meant.But that doesn't take away from the fun of reading her work.No matter who you are Emily Dickinson has a poem you will love.

I would like to know what Higginson was thinking when he obliterated Emily's poetry. He actaully had the arrogance to think that he knew what she 'intended' to write. This is an absolute farce of a book. Compare the hacked and pieced poems in this 'book' <and I use the term loosely> to the ones you find in 'The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson' edited by Thomas H. Johnson. That is the book to get. Johnson was part of the team that maticulously read her hand-written versions and published a word for word, dash for dash version. If you want to read what the genious Emily originally wrote seek the REAL works, not this attrocious adaptation! The print speaks for itself.

I couldn't always appreciate Dickenson and perhaps you may not yet be ready to appreciate her work. I can't comment on how it feels to be touched by her because it defies description and rather than try, I would suggest you give her a read. If her metaphor is not lost on you, you will be glad you made the effort. Also, spring for the extra $7 to get the hardcover... if it doesn't speak to you today, tuck it away on a shelf and someday you'll pick it up and wonder why you let it sit for so long...

Under a surface of innocence, Emily Dickinson's witty, acerbic, playful & profound poems are America's wisest contribution to poetry. Sometimes she riddles, sometimes she puns--she puns not only in ambiguous word choice, but also in ideas and topics. Her small gems are the unique response of genius to the world, a dialogue on the most inspiring level--and from a given woman's experience, too. But I think Dickinson surpasses the merely human--she was sent from another planet to rescue us from Whitmanesque excesses.

Patron Saint of the intellectually inquisitive Teenage Shut-in, Emily Dickinson's work is a treasure-trove of timeless poetry and verse. Initially introduced in a High School English class, I have often returned to this anthology for personal enrichment and enjoyment and would recommend this collection to any admirer of Dickensons' work. Highly Recommended.

This is a great collection of Emily Dickinson's poems. Every poem she ever wrote, from her earliest verses as a teenager to later, even unfinished fragments, is here, arranged in chronological order. I was first drawn to her work in high school and fell in love with this volume when I first came across it, a little later. The breadth of her work - as well as the themes and ideas she explores - is astonishing. A superb book, for anyone wishing to become fully acquainted with Dickinson.

There was a time in the history of the world when great literature was for the rich - so those without means were impoverished twice over! But this is a remarkable example of how the work of poetic genius can touch the lives of every reader in an edition that is complete, exhaustive and affordable. For anyone who adores Emily or wants to learn what all the fuss has been, here's the best buy.

She is one of the best poets I have ever read. I'm a student now and I'd almost lost my desire to write poetry. But after reading Dickinson again I'm inspired. Reading her poetry and reading her life story has given me a new view on writing. She's the best, read her!

I think we can all agree that Emily Dickinson was very eccentric. But weird or not she managed to write some good poems. I enjoy this book a lot. It has so many good poems and I don't really like poems! My only complaint is that Emily tends to be a little depressing sometimes. Only sometimes though. So you have a great book by a great author all for free. Go on, buy this book and get comfortable.

Wonderful, Thank you ! I ordered this for a dear friend of mine who had been missing it for years. She had leant out her own copy but never got it back and didn't want to ask for it. This is an elderly friend of mine who does not use computers. She described the looks of the cover - I searched for it and you had it ! - She was thrilled to receive her "old lost book".

I am a big fan of Emily Dickinson, I love her poetry, but this edition is thoroughly rotten. It is not Emily Dickinson's poetry, but the edited version of her poetry, significantly changed by the same editor who rejected Dickinson's poems while she was alive. This edition is changed so much from the original poems that most of Dickinson's meaning is lost. If you want to read what Emily Dickinson really wrote, I reccomed the complete poetry of Emily Dickinson edited by Thomas H. Johnson, it is the complete and original poetry of Dickinson.

This was a delightful read, I really love it!! It was hard for me to stop reading once I started. An absolute joy...!!! I would also like to recommend another absolutely astounding work of poetry A Romantic's Passion: The Tenth Muse

Dickinson's place in the pantheon of American poetry is secure. She is the subject of numerous college courses, anthologies, and sitcoms, and enjoys near-universal adulation. Her poems are usually short, pithy, and concise - I doubt if even her most fervent admirers could have gotten through a poem by her of similar length to "Paradise Lost" or Pound's "Cantos." Nevertheless, in her brief excursions, Dickinson manages to touch on many subjects, for example, the meaning of life:

Because I could not stop for death,
He kindly stopped for me,
And so, between the two of us,
We licked the platter clean.

There's geography:

To make a prairie, it takes one bee,
One bee, and allergy.
The allergy alone will do,
If bees are few.

And nature:

I heard a fly buzz when I died,
It buzzed again,
THWACK!
I hate flies.

A meditation on fame:

I'm nobody. Who are you?
Are you nobody too?
Well, then shut up.

And even love:

- so that thy cock -
might safely dock -
- and find - a port - in me -

These are just a few of the treats awaiting the curious reader. For anyone who has committed to reading every word ever written, Emily Dickinson is not to be missed.

Now that the wonderful three volume Franklin edition Dickinson's poems exist, I don't see how this old Johnson edition could be taken seriously. Johnson's choices for a particular reading were not always the best -- many of Dickinson's poems don't have a sanctioned "final" form from the poet. Franklin's edition presents the poems with all the variations in words and phrases so that the reader could decide which of the variations works best when Dickinson herself was undecided. If you love Emily Dickinson, invest in the Franklin Variorum edition. It's worth every penny of it's rather high price.

the store is so stupid and so to the "rave reviews" of this mangled tripe from the 19th c. Don't waste your time. Get the Johnson edition and spend some time being confused and amazed by Emily's quirky brain. These sanitized Disney versions are puke. Sorry but I don't care about the store's "rules." Only fools believe the store is concerned with quality rather than the next buck.

Hard to believe I'm the first review of this major important book. Hello? I don't own it, but I've spent a good long time in a bookstore reading it. Perhaps Congress should enact a law that made it a requirement of citizenship. Dickinson gave her life for us and we all should devote more than a few days of our lives honoring her. I hope I live long enough to see the next definitive Dickinson. What courage! Can we make this an event please?

I was looking at the poetry section at my local library, because I love poetry, and I found this book, I never thought they had the complete collection of Emily Dickinson, It was really cool, by just reading the 2 poems, i fell in love with the 3rd one!! If you love poetry and Emily Dickinson, this is the book to get!

Amazingly enough, some of her UNEDITED poems are just recently being published....Although they're still hard to find. Anyone who has read her biography will understand why her unedited writings do not exist until at least 2005. And what has been promised is still not altogether available, as far as I can find.

I buy the earliest editions of her poetry (and biographies) because I find her connection with Emily Bronte beyond fascinating. Yet, I can't find a book on the subject. I think Dickinson was extremely interested in the writings and the person who was Emily Bronte. But all she had to go on at the time was Mrs. Gaskell's biography of Charlotte Bronte. And I'd appreciate it if someone would tell me about a book that plunges into this vortex, because I've yet to find one. Dickinson had a poem read at her funeral that she THOUGHT Emily Bronte had written. Well, Emily Bronte surely did, but we'll never know how much Charlotte edited it. A word here and there....

Meanwhile, people like me are reading the edited poems and trying to see them through the eyes of people like Emily Dickinson who didn't have the advantage of knowing the writings had been edited.

Round and 'round we go, eh?

I really am not a fan of poetry. I enjoyed this collection though. I find Dickinson's poems to be about as exciting as poetry has gotten for me. The fact that the structure of her writings is so unconventional makes them even more endearing. I found it hard to understand the meaning of many of the poems though. My attention span for poetry is short so take my review with a grain of salt.

Assent-and you are Sane-
Demure- you're straightway dangerous-
And handled with a Chain-
E. Dickinson
I like the way she manipulates language...how everything is more than it seems, and I love her slashes and dashes. Slash and Dash.

The Cream colored cover with the illustration of 3 blue bachelor button flowers framed is the cover for the 1960 paperback edition that contains 770 pages. ISBN 0-316-18413-6, UPC 9 780316 184137 Retailed for USA $16.95, In Canada $22.95.

Emily Dickinson was a wonderful poet along with Poe...Her poems were mostly about depression, and death. Althought her poems werent found till after she died she still wrote beautiful poems that just want to make you cry.

I've been trying to read more poetry these days so as to get some inspiration for my own poetry writing, thus I decided to read this collection. 

Since Emily Dickinson is one of the most famous female poets I expected quite a lot from her collection, but I didn't get exactly what I expected. I had forgotten that Emily Dickinson wrote a lot of religious poems, which were all quite boring and repetitive. I found myself skimming most of them. 

Still I did enjoy all her other poems.  There were lots of nature and love, and especially liked the love poems. There were several times where she would write the same poem twice, once referring to a male love interest and then again referring to a female. Before reading this collection I was under the impression that Dickinson was a lesbian, but it seems to me that she's another example of bi erasure. None of the ''scholars" seem to know that bisexuality is a thing. Which is frustrating. 

In the end I gave this book 3 stars, maybe more like 3.5 stars, I haven't really decided. I would have liked the collection a lot more if I could have skipped all the religious poems entirely.