The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
SynopsisPlot
Only eleven of Emily Dickinson's poems were published prior to her death in 1886; the startling originality of her work doomed it to obscurity in her lifetime. Early posthumous published collections — some of them featuring liberally "edited" versions of the poems — did not fully and accurately represent Dickinson's bold experiments in prosody, her tragic vision, and the range of her intellectual and emotional explorations. Not until the 1955 publication of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, a three-volume critical edition compiled by Thomas H. Johnson, were readers able for the first time to assess, understand, and appreciate the whole of Dickinson's extraordinary poetic genius.
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About this book
Emily Dickinson wrote nearly 1,775 poems during her lifetime, yet only eleven appeared in print before she died in 1886. She lived most of her adult life in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she composed her work in relative seclusion. Her poems were often short, compressed, and built around irregular rhythms and unexpected punctuation. These qualities, which later generations would recognize as distinctive strengths, made her writing difficult to place within the literary conventions of her era.
After her death, several published collections attempted to bring her poetry to a wider audience, but editors frequently altered her lines, smoothing out her unconventional dashes, slant rhymes, and broken meter to fit more traditional expectations. These changes obscured the deliberate choices Dickinson had made in her manuscripts. It was not until 1955, when Thomas H. Johnson compiled a three-volume critical edition, that all of her known poems became available in versions faithful to her original manuscripts.
This single-volume edition draws on Johnson's editorial work to present the full body of Dickinson's poetry in one place. The collection spans her observations on nature, mortality, consciousness, faith, and solitude, subjects she returned to throughout her writing life with a precision that remains unusual in American poetry.
