Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson

No "selected poems" can do justice to the complexity of Emily Dickinson's love-long labor of writing poetry. This edition has the advantages of convenience and completeness. Its historical importance is that it stopped condescending reactions to her quirky language and off-beat sensbility in their tracks.

Emily Dickinson lived her life in a solitary room; a place where she found amazing insight writing letters an poems. She marks her verses with simple phrases that show the reader a vision and not its personal interpretation. In some cases she puts into words what most of us attempt to capture with our thoughts. This extraordinary skill is a mark of only the best poets, but not all can write consistently as Emily can. Despite the mellow tone of the majority of her work, Emily still captures the flavor of life without compromising its tranquility. Emily never suffers from redundant confusion and her poems reflect a love for solitary beauty.

This selection of Dickinson's work provides a good pathway into her complex poetic imagination. She is too often thought of as a light poet of birds and bees and flowers and,yet imcompatibly, her greatest subject is Death. She perplexes us with her compressed language that seems to hint at so much meaning --meaning which tantalizes and expands our own thoughts and experiences. She teaches us a lesson in knowing when to accept that something is difficult and beautiful and not completely explainable. Well, then,what is it that keeps drawing us to her over a hundred years later? Reading the 450 poems in this book (of the 1775 she wrote) will give you an idea. But you have to have a tolerance for mystery and language that asks you to decipher it. Think of her poems as tightly-packed as a walnut, with the delicious parts inside well- worth cracking the shell for. She has been called by some America's greatest poet. So, perhaps you ought to spend some time with these poems, but be prepared to have the "top of your head" lifted off!(ED's personal test of what a true poem should do to its reader.)

Poems can express feelings that you normally can't. In this book Emily expresses Love, Life, Nature, and Time and Eternity. One of my favorite poems, in this book, is: I'm nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody too? Then there is a pair of us -- don't tell They'd banish us you know. How dreary to be somebody! How public, like a frog To tell your name the livelong day To an admiring bog. In this poem I think Emily is trying to say she is nobody. I mean, she is nobody important and if you think she is important she would like her privacy. If you think poetry is not for you, please give this book a try.