The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition / Edition 1

by Emily Dickinson, R. W. Franklin

Overview

Emily Dickinson, poet of the interior life, imagined words/swords, hurling barbed syllables/piercing. Nothing about her adult appearance or habitation revealed such a militant soul. Only poems, written quietly in a room of her own, often hand-stitched in small volumes, then hidden in a drawer, revealed her true self. She did not live in time but in universals—an acute, sensitive nature reaching out boldly from self-referral to a wider, imagined world.

Dickinson died without fame; only a few poems were published in her lifetime. Her legacy was later rescued from her desk—an astonishing body of work, much of which has since appeared in piecemeal editions, sometimes with words altered by editors or publishers according to the fashion of the day.

Now Ralph Franklin, the foremost scholar of Dickinson's manuscripts, has prepared an authoritative one-volume edition of all extant poems by Emily Dickinson—1,789 poems in all, the largest number ever assembled. This reading edition derives from his three-volume work, The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition (1998), which contains approximately 2,500 sources for the poems. In this one-volume edition, Franklin offers a single reading of each poem—usually the latest version of the entire poem—rendered with Dickinson's spelling, punctuation, and capitalization intact. The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition is a milestone in American literary scholarship and an indispensable addition to the personal library of poetry lovers everywhere.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674018242
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	10/28/2005
Pages:	696
Sales rank:	62,874
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.70(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

R. W. Franklin was Director of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University. He received the Emily Dickinson International Society’s Award for Outstanding Contribution.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Poems 1-1789

Appendixes

1. Distribution by Year

2. Editorial Notes

Index of First Lines

Editorial Reviews

Not only is it the 'authoritative' and 'definitive' edition of her complete poems, it is a gorgeous volume printed by the Belknap Press, complete with a crimson ribbon bookmark...For those who like Emily Dickinson and who want all the poems as she wrote them, unmolested by well-meaning editors and thoughtless publishers, this is the book. In one volume you can hold the closest thing to the real Dickinson that anyone will ever get.

bn.com

This is now the definitive text of Dickinson, a poet one can open at random and find something exhilarating.

The Guardian

Mr. Franklin is the recognized authority on Emily Dickinson's poetry and gives us 1,789 poems, the largest and most accurate collection of her verse...For all those who love Emily Dickinson's unique verse this is a treasure trove from which to choose. This is a publishing coup of the first order.

Contemporary Review

...Franklin...now offers us a new text — one that builds on [Thomas H.]Johnson's project while accommodating some of the criticisms of the intervening years....thanks to Franklin, our speculations about the real Emily Dickinson will be grounded in more finely calibrated texts. I will, however, miss the simplicity of an earlier time, when a more biographically accessible Dickinson spoke to me...
—Women's Review of Books

Vivian Pollak

...Franklin...now offers us a new text -- one that builds on [Thomas H.]Johnson's project while accommodating some of the criticisms of the intervening years....thanks to Franklin, our speculations about the real Emily Dickinson will be grounded in more finely calibrated texts. I will, however, miss the simplicity of an earlier time, when a more biographically accessible Dickinson spoke to me... -- The Women's Review of Books

Vivian Pollak