Dickinson : selected poems and commentaries
(Book)

Includes bibliographical references (page 527) and index.

In selecting these poems for commentary the author chooses to exhibit many aspects of Dickinson's work as a poet, from her first person poems to the poems of grand abstraction, from her ecstatic verses to her unparalleled depictions of emotional numbness, from her comic anecdotes to her painful poems of aftermath. Included here are many expected favorites as well as more complex and less often anthologized poems. Taken together, this selection reveals Emily Dickinson's development as a poet, her astonishing range, and her revelation of what Wordsworth called the history and science of feeling. In accompanying commentaries the author offers a deeper acquaintance with Dickinson the writer, the inventive conceiver and linguistic shaper of her perennial themes. All of Dickinson's preoccupations, death, religion, love, the natural world, the nature of thought, are explored here in detail, but the author always takes care to emphasize the poet's startling imagination and the ingenuity of her linguistic invention. Whether exploring less familiar poems or favorites we thought we knew, the author reveals Dickinson as a master of a revolutionary verse language of immediacy and power. Here, the author turns her skills as a critic to 150 selected poems of Emily Dickinson. She serves as a guide, considering both stylistic and imaginative feature of the poems.