the poems of emily dickinson thomas h johnson

Fourteen appendices of tables and lists give additional information, including poems attributed to Emily Dickinson. Each entry identifies Franklin’s editorial emendations and records the publication history, including variants. Franklin gives Dickinson’s alternative readings for the poems, her revisions, and the line and page, or column, divisions in the source.

The text of each manuscript is rendered individually, including, within the capacity of standard type, Dickinson’s spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. The poems, arranged chronologically, based on new dating, are drawn from a range of archives, most frequently from holographs, but also from various secondary sources representing lost manuscripts. This three-volume work contains 1,789 poems, the largest number ever assembled. Franklin, the foremost scholar of Dickinson’s manuscripts, a new comprehensive edition is available. Now, after many years of preparation by Ralph W. Johnson for the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Her family sought publication of Dickinson’s poetry over the years, selecting verses, often altering her words or her punctuation, until, in 1955, the first important attempt was made to collect and publish Dickinson’s work, edited by Thomas H. Her great legacy was later rescued from her desk drawer-an astonishing body of work revealing her acute, sensitive nature reaching out boldly from self-referral to a wider, imagined world. As she knowingly put it: “There is one thing to be grateful for-that one is one’s self and not somebody else.”ĭickinson lived and died without fame: she saw only a few poems published.

She did not live in time, as did that other great poet of the day, Walt Whitman, but in universals. Only poems, written quietly in a room of her own, often hand-stitched in small volumes, then hidden in a desk drawer, revealed her true self. Nothing about her adult appearance or habitation revealed such a militant soul. Visit EDA »Įmily Dickinson, poet of the interior life, imagined words/swords, hurling barbed syllables/piercing. The Emily Dickinson Archive makes manuscripts of Dickinson’s poetry, along with transcriptions and annotations from scholarly editions, available in open access-inspiring new scholarship and discourse on this literary icon.

The poems of emily dickinson thomas h johnson