Poetry
Complete Poems
Emily Dickinson · 1960
Synopsis
Nearly eighteen hundred poems, most of them brief, in hymn metre and with often imperfect rhymes, of which only ten appeared in the lifetime of their author. A fly buzzes in the room of a dying woman at the moment when something else was expected. Death stops for the one who had no time to stop, and the carriage rolls toward eternity. Hope is a thing with feathers that perches in the soul. The brain is wider than the sky. The dashes break the lines and the capital letters mark the important words.
Context
At her death, her sister Lavinia burned the correspondence, as agreed, but kept the poems. Mabel Loomis Todd and Higginson published three series of them, in 1890, 1891 and 1896, regularising the punctuation, retouching rhymes and adding titles. A quarrel between the Todds and the Dickinsons divided the manuscripts for more than half a century. Thomas H. Johnson's edition, in three volumes and then, in 1960, in a single volume under the title Complete Poems, restored the dashes and capitals; R. W. Franklin's, in 1998, contains 1,789 poems.
Who it is for
Very short poems, with singular punctuation, which are referred to by their first line or by a number. Complete translation by Françoise Delphy.
Prizes and reception
Regarded, with Walt Whitman, as one of the two great American poets of the nineteenth century.
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