Product Description

Over 100 best-known, best-loved poems by one of America’s foremost poets, reprinted from authoritative early editions. "The Snake," "Hope," "The Chariot," many more, display unflinching honesty, psychological penetration, technical adventurousness that have delighted and impressed generations of poetry lovers. No comparable edition at this price. Index of first lines.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #326339 in Books
• Published on: 1990-07-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 64 pages

Review
At Length
The Battlefield
Beclouded
The Bee
Bequest
The Bluebird
The Brain, Within Its Groove
The Chariot
Chartless
Choice
Clock
Colloquy
Compensation
Contrast
A Country Burial
A Day
Day's Parlor
Delight Becomes Pictorial
Disenchantment
Dying
The Dying Need But Little, Dear
Enough
Escape
Evening (1)
Evening (2)
Experience
Farewell
The First Lesson
Forbidden Fruit: 2
The Forgotten Grave
Fringed Gentian
Ghosts
The Goal
Good Night! Which Put The Candle Out?
Griefs
The Heart Asks Pleasure First
Hope (1)
Hunger
I Breathed Enough To Learn [or, Take] The Trick
I Felt A Funeral In My Brain
I Had No Time To Hate
I Know A Place Where Summer Strives
I Lived On Dread; To Those Who Know
I Meant To Find Her When I Came
I Went To Heaven
I'm Nobody! Who Are You
If I Can Stop One Heart From Breaking
If You Were Coming In The Fall
Immortality
In Shadow
In The Garden (1)
In Vain
Intoxication
It Was Not Death, For I Stood Up
It's All I Have To Bring To-day
The Journey
The Letter
A Light Exists In Spring
A Little Road Not Made Of Man
The Lost Jewel
The Lost Thought
March
The Master
Me! Come! My Dazzled Face
Memorials
Mother Nature
My Nosegays Are For Captives
The Mystery Of Pain
Nature Rarer Uses Yellow
The Nearest Dream Recedes, Unrealized
The Only Ghost I Ever Saw
The Pedigree Of Honey (diff. Vers.)
Playmates
Post-mortem
Presentiment
The Railway Train
Retrospect
Returning
Safe In Their Alabaster Chambers
The Sea
The Sea Of Sunset
A Shady Friend For Torrid Days
The Show
Sleeping
The Snake
So Bashful When I Spied Her
So Proud She Was To Die
The Soul's Storm
Summer Shower
There's A Certain Slant Of Light
There's Been A Death In The Opposite House
They Say That 'time Assuages'
This Is My Letter To The World
The Thought Beneath So Slight A Film
A Thought Went Up My Mind To-day
A Thunder-storm (2nd Version)
To My Quick Ear The Leaves Conferred
Two Voyagers
Utterance
Victory Comes Late
We Outgrow Love Like Other Things
We Play At Paste
The Wife
Wild Nights! Wild Nights!
The Wind (1)
The Wind's Visit
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Customer Reviews

This is not really the edition you want.
I don't doubt that it's possible to enjoy Emily Dickinson's poems in editions like this. But you should be aware that you are not really reading what she wrote. You are reading what earlier editors _wish_ she had written - a sort of 'tidied-up' and regularized version, a badly-tampered-with-text of a genius by those who weren't.

In a way, the situation is a bit like the one that prevails with regard to food. Would you rather eat natural food or genetically modified food? Maybe the modified food doesn't taste any different, but it might be doing harmful things to us that the author of real food never intended. So why take a risk when we can have the real thing ?

There are two major editors who can be relied on for accurate texts of ED's poems. These are Dickinson scholars R. W. Franklin and Thomas H. Johnson. Both produced large Variorum editions for scholars, along with reader's editions of the Complete Poems for the ordinary reader. Details of their respective reader's editions are as follows.

THE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON : Reading Edition. Edited by R. W. Franklin. 692 pp. Cambridge, Massachusetts : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-674-67624-6 (hbk.)

THE COMPLETE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON. Edited by Thomas H. Johnson. 784 pp. Boston : Little, Brown, 1960 and Reissued. ISBN: 0316184136 (pbk.)

For those who don't feel up to tackling the Complete Poems, there is Johnson's abridgement of his Reader's edition, an excellent selection of what he feels were her best poems:

FINAL HARVEST : Emily Dickinson's Poems. Edited by Thomas H. Johnson. 352 pages. New York : Little Brown & Co, 1997. ISBN: 0316184152 (paperbound).

Friends, do yourself a favor and get Johnson's edition. Why accept a watered-down version when you can have the real thing?

Good poet, bad edition
Although Emily Dickinson is a marvelous poet, this edition is not a good one to buy. The catalogue claims it is printed from "the earliest, most authorative editions" without noting that the earliest editions were heavily edited, eliminating much of what makes Dickinson unusual and brilliant. For example, another reviewer quotes from poem 258, which should read "There's a certain slant of light, / Winter Afternoons-- / That oppresses, like the Heft / Of Cathedral Tunes--"; the first editor didn't think many people would know what the word "heft" meant, so he (without Dickinson's posthumous permission) simply replaced it. Get a volume of Dickinson's poems, certainly! But not this one.

A Terrible Edition
I ordered this text directly from the publisher for my students. Never once did the Dover Thrift folks ever mention that this is the "cleaned up" version of the poetry, that Dickinson's own syntax and punctuation had been altered by later editors. Though these edited versions were common years ago, today nobody really reads these versions of the poems except to discuss the stultifying effect that such gender and publication politics had on her work. Please note that there are many wonderful versions of Dickinson's work in print, and that these poems are NOT Dickinson's, not as rich or complex as hers, and NOT even worth a dollar. Find her poems for free online, or go ahead and buy a more worthwhile edition. SKIP THIS ONE.