The Emily Dickinson Collection

Description

The Emily Dickinson Collection (2021) compiles some of the best-known works of an icon of American poetry. Out of nearly two-thousand poems discovered after her death, less than a dozen appeared in print during Dickinson's lifetime. Drawn from such influential posthumous volumes as Poems (1902) and The Single Hound (1914), The Emily Dickinson Collection captures the spiritual depths, celebratory heights, and impenetrable mystery of Dickinson's poetic gift. "Fame is a fickle food / Upon a shifting plate, / Whose table once a Guest, but not / The second time, is set." Deeply aware of the fleeting nature of fame, Dickinson-whose reputation in life was as a lonely eccentric who rarely, if ever, left home-seems to provide some clarity as to why publication so often eluded her. Having published just ten poems in her lifetime, Dickinson continued to write in solitude until her final years. Her final word on fame is a warning, perhaps, for poets whose fate would differ from her own: "Men eat of it and die." Despite her admonishing tone, she found space elsewhere to muse on the nature of literary achievement, recognizing that obscurity could incidentally produce the conditions for a poet to produce their most vital work: "Success is counted sweetest / By those who ne'er succeed. / To comprehend a nectar / Requires sorest need." Throughout her life, Emily Dickinson showed a profound respect for the mysteries of worldly existence. In her poems, this creates an atmosphere of prayer and contemplation, a search for something beyond the simple answers: "Some things that fly there be, - / Birds, hours, the bumble-bee: / Of these no elegy." Amid such fleeting things, she catches a glimpse of eternity. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of The Emily Dickinson Collection is a classic of American poetry reimagined for modern readers.

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was an American poet. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, Dickinson was raised in a prominent family of lawyers and politicians alongside two siblings. For seven years, she studied at Amherst Academy, excelling in English, classics, and the sciences. Dickinson suffered from melancholy and poor health from a young age, taking several breaks from school to stay with family in Boston. After graduation, Dickinson enrolled at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, withdrawing ten months later to return home to Amherst. Through her friend Benjamin Franklin Newton, she was introduced to the poetry of William Wordsworth and Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose influence would prove profound as she embarked on a literary life of her own. Despite her status as one of the greatest American poets of the nineteenth century, Dickinson published only ten poems and one letter during her lifetime, only a sampling of nearly two thousand poems discovered after her death. Cast as an eccentric by contemporaries and later critics alike, Dickinson was an enigmatic figure whose experimental forms and extensive use of symbols have inspired generations of readers and poets. By the 1870s, following the death of her father, Dickinson had largely withdrawn from public life. Spending much of her time caring for her ailing mother, she still managed to write poems and send letters to friends and family. In 1886, following her death, Dickinson's younger sister Lavinia discovered her collection of poems and began the long and arduous process of bringing them to print.