Experimental feature: Order Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson from the UK, Canada, Germany or France by clicking an appropriate flag below.

               

Some items available at Amazon.com are not available in all countries.

Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 811.4
EAN: 9780517362426
ISBN: 0517362422
Label: Gramercy
Manufacturer: Gramercy
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 288
Publication Date: 1988-11-30
Publisher: Gramercy
Product Release Date: 1988-11-30
Studio: Gramercy

Emily Dickinson was a prolific writer and yet, with the exception of four poems in a limited regional volume, her poems were never published during her lifetime. It was indeed fortunate that her sister discovered the poems—all loosely bound in bundles—shortly after Dickinson died.
Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson is the complete collection of the first three volumes of poetry published posthumously in 1890, 1891, and 1896 by editors Mary Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. The volumes were all received with high acclaim and contain some of her best-known poems. It was in the twentieth century, however, that Dickinson was finally recognized as one of the great poets and, without dispute, the most popular.
The name Emily Dickinson is a legend now, but she never had the opportunity to taste the wine of success and fame in her lifetime. In fact, if there was any legendary status she received in her life, it was not for poetry but for the way she lived her life. She received local notoriety in her native town of Amherst, Massachusetts, as an eccentric recluse who, with few exceptions, would never set foot outside her house. Yet, as her poetry will attest, she had a keen insight of life, love, nature, and death and seemed to be content with her station in life.
Reading through the poems in Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson, you will see that she was indeed a woman of independence and spirit, a poet that lives today in our hearts and minds.

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Auctioning off her soul
Review: 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.

---

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Warning
Review: This book may be interesting to experts who want to see how the first "editors" Todd and Higginson, alterated Dickinson's poems, "by smoothing out the rhymes and meter, changing line arrangements, and rewriting the dialect of the local area", as the introduction plainly states.
Is it naivety, stupidity or cold deliberation that this book is still sold under the innocent title of "collected poems", as if it presented the original texts? It should come with a warning.

---

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: A prism which captures the white light of reality
Review: 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.

---

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Not the original versions!
Review: 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.

---

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: What was Higginson Thinking?
Review: 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' 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.

---

---