The present book came as a revelation. How much more meaningful and exciting these 'letters' become when, instead of being treated as letters they are treated as poems. The range of effects generated by the simple procedure of respecting ED's autographs is amazing.

Editors Hart and Smith are to be congratulated. But one wonders why it has taken Dickinson scholars so long to start treating her drafts with the respect they deserve? One also wonders just how much poetry may be lurking unrecognized in the various editions of regularized letters we have been given? And finally one wonders when we are going to be given an unregularized Complete Poems? Would anyone, for example, seriously think of destroying William Carlos Williams' lineation and printing his work as straight prose or in conventional stanza form? Of course not. Then why should it be considered acceptable to distort the forms and rhythms of a vastly more important writer?

Dear Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith - You've shown us what can be done, have done it extremely well, and we love it! In fact, we thank you from the bottom of our hearts! So how about an unregularized COMPLETE POEMS? Please?

For anyone who is seriously interested in Emily Dickinson, this is a marvelous book that provides up-to-date information about her life and works, her letters and manuscripts, the cultural climate of her age, her reception and influence, and what is going on in current Dickinson scholarship.

The book's 22 essays have been distributed in eight sections : Introduction; Biography; Historical Context; The Manuscripts; The Letters; Dickinson's Poetics; Reception and Influence; New Directions in Dickinson Scholarship.

Although I've read many critical collections, several of which were devoted exclusively to Dickinson, I can't remember ever having been so impressed. Usually an anthology will hold one or two outstanding contributions, with the rest being humdrum and of little real interest, but here pretty well all of them are outstanding, and I found only one that struck me as being both pretentious and obscure.

I was especially impressed by Robert Weisbuch's brilliant 'Prisming Dickinson, or Gathering Paradise by Letting Go,' by Josef Raab's 'The Metapoetic Element in Dickinson,' by Martha Nell Smith's 'Dickinson's Manuscripts,' by Paul Crumbley's 'Dickinson's Dialogic Voice,' by Roland Hagenbuchle's 'Dickinson and Literary Theory,' and in fact by many others. So much so that this seems to me the single most valuable book on Dickinson that I've ever seen, and the one from which I've learned most and continue to learn. It really is that good.

The book is bound in a full strong cloth, stitched, beautifully printed on excellent strong smooth ivory-tinted paper, has clearly been designed to withstand the heavy use it will be getting, and is excellent value for money. No serious student of Emily Dickinson should be without it. Weisbuch's essay, serving as it does to provide one with a whole new way of understanding ED, is pretty well worth the price of the book itself.

So don't pass this one up! It's a gem!

Emily Dickinson was a great letter writer, in all senses of the word. In fact one gets the impression that she actually preferred writing to people, than meeting and conversing with them, and for her the arrival of a letter was a great event. A letter was something she looked forward to with keen anticipation, and which she savored to the full whenever one arrived.

The present selection of letters represents only a small proportion of the letters Emily Dickinson actually wrote. She was an inveterate letter-writer, had many correspondents, and wrote thousands of letters. And people in those days collected letters just as today.

Unfortunately it was the custom, whenever anyone died, to make a bonfire of all of their correspondence, probably because of its personal and confidential nature. In this way thousands of pages of Emily Dickinson's writings have been lost to posterity, and we would know much more aboute the details of her day-to-day life, and be able to date her poems more accurately, if it hadn't been for this tragic loss.

Just how great the loss is may be gaged by taking a look at the way Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith have treated her letters in 'Open Me Carefully : Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson' (1998). Whereas Thomas Johnson prints all of ED's letters as straight prose, which of course leads us to read them as straight prose, Hart-Smith give us their particular letters as they actually appear in the original draft - not as continous lines of prose but as very short lines with numerous line breaks - in other words, as poetry.

It would seem that at least some of ED's 'letters' are not so much letters as 'letter-poems,' and when read as poems produce a remarkable range of effects that are lost when all line breaks are removed and the 'letter' is regularized as straight prose. The loss of her letters now begins to look much more serious, for there seems to be a growing feeling among readers that her letters were every bit as great an artistic achievement as her poems.

Given this, the present book becomes something that should interest all serious students of ED, although before reading it they might (if they haven't already) take at look at the Hart-Smith, and keep it in mind while reading the Johnson. One wonders how much poetry may be lurking unrecognized in the regularized lines of 'Emily Dickinson's Selected Letters.'

If you are, like me, an Emily Dickinson's great admirer you will be genuinely drawn into this book. Emily Dickinson has bewitched and perplexed everyone with her extremely profound poetry disguised in apparent simplicity. However, in her book of letters we uncover the woman (and not the author) behind her work, whose main assets were acute sensitivity and lovingness. This collection, unlike other books of the genre, such as Elizabeth Bishop's One Art or Keats's book of letters, do not reveal much of her poetry, as her mental struggle with the work, her intentions, or choice of words. Even so, the reader is allowed into her family relationships, into her care and love for her few friends, and above all into her deep-set feeling of solitude. Besides, throughout her letters she discloses her main existential concerns, which are inevitably reflected in her poems. This book makes it possible to discover the books she read and the ones that offered her the greatest pleasure. As the collection includes from her juvenile writings to her latest letters when already living in social "exile," they form a most engrossing reading, with the characteristics of an autobiography, without the intention by the author to write one. In her very words, "my letter as a bee, goes laden."

"A Hedge Away" brings alive the people and institutions of one small, but vibrant New England community in a way that challenges our preconceptions about what Victorian American small towns were like.

Refreshingly free of heavy-handed political interpretation, Lombardo's text gives us enough detail to draw our own conclusions.

Though I live only a few miles away from the small town that is the subject of this book, until I read it, I had no idea of the richness of the characters who populated its streets a hundred years ago, or of the many tragedies and scandals they endured.

This book is a "must read" for anyone interested in 19th century New England!

What do we mean when we speak of "an Emily Dickinson poem" ? If you think about it, we could mean one of at least five different things. We may be referring :

(1) to her poems as they are found in her original manuscripts;

(2) to their photographic facsimiles as in the present edition;

(3) to the Variorum editions of Thomas H. Johnson or R. W. Franklin which attempt to get over into typographic form as much as they can of her highly idiosyncratic manuscript drafts - with all of their variants and their peculiarities of line breaks, spacing, punctuation, and of alternate words about which she never made up her mind but placed neatly alongside or beneath many of her poems;

(4) to the reader's editions of Johnson and Franklin which offer what these Dickinson scholars and expert editors feel is _one_ (of many possible) sensible and acceptable readings out of the mass of variants;

(5) or finally we may be referring to her poems as altered, revised, regularized, tidied-up and smoothed out so as to be made to look more 'normal' and acceptable to ordinary readers. At this fifth and furthest remove from ED's own drafts, we are given a text by a towering genius as modified by someone who was far less than a genius, and who has usually damaged the poem in various ways.

The present 2-volume set of 'The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson' brings us as close to the real thing as most of us will ever get. It gives us photographic facsimiles, with full scholarly apparatus, not of all of her poems but of those she bound into forty fascicles, tiny hand-stitched manuscript-books that she squirreled away in her room and that were not to be discovered until after her death many years later.

Here you can see how her strange handwriting changed radically over the years. Here you can see all of the peculiarities of her spelling. Here you can see all those little asterisks which she used to indicate an alternate word elsewhere on the page, usually at the foot. Here you can also see all of her line breaks and her idiosyncrasies of spacing, both of which are often highly significant. Here, in a word, you can see the hand of a genius at work.

Personally I think we are extremely fortunate to have these two volumes, and that all lovers of ED's amazing poems, poems that are one of the wonders of the world, should be grateful to R. W. Franklin for the arduous labors that must have gone into his impeccable edition, an edition with full scholarly apparatus that provides a wealth of fascinating information about the forty fascicles.

The two large, heavy and sturdy volumes are stitched, bound in half cloth, beautifully printed on a very strong, smooth, ivory tinted paper that we are told is the finest paper in the world and I can well believe it, and they come in a buckram-covered box.

It's clear that no pains have been spared to give us, not only accurate and annotated photographic facsimiles of every page of the Manuscript Books, but also to give them to us in sturdy and beautiful volumes that are a fitting vehicle for the works of the amazing woman we know as Emily Dickinson. How astounded and gratified she would have been to have seen this set, a set that would warm the heart of any bibliophile, and that belongs in the collection of all Dickinson enthusiasts.

"If you're a poet, it's easy to love poetry, which makes it difficult in the extreme to judge a contest like this one that has so many praiseworthy entries. But when I read a poem, the first question I ask myself is, do I want to read this poem again? (You can't do that with Moby-Dick or Macbeth, but you can re-read most poems right there on the spot; indeed, if the poems are any good, you have to.) Then I want to know, Is every part as good as the whole? After all, a great poem can be deflated by a flat ending or a wobbly middle or sometimes just a comma error. But then all art contains error, as the sages of the desert tell us, so finally I ask myself if the poem transcends its own frailties. In other words, I end up where I started: do I want to read this poem again?

The problem is that almost all the poems I read for this year's Emily Dickinson Award competition meet these criteria. Finally, though, I chose "Because We are Men." True, it's a manly poem, and I am a man. But his poem about warriors is, in a larger sense, about the victims of wars, and each of us is a victim of one conflict or another, from the domestic to the global (not to mention the most widespread fighting of all, the kind that takes place in our minds.) At the highest level, though, "Because We are Men" is about the oldest of literary themes, isolation, as well as isolation's opposite, connection. "Because We are Men is succinctly encyclopedic; it's just two pages long, but it covers the world. It has a sound as new as the terrifying events of September 11, yet its lines remind us that, as William Carlos Williams said, "It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there."

I also like "The Nuclear Family" because of the brainy, goofy way it combines family and geography in a way that makes both a lot more fun than they could ever be on their own. Finally, "Closing Time" is a poem that makes God more human and our fathers more hauntingly god-like; it's hard to imagine a topic more rewarding for either poem or reader.

As I say, all the poems are winners in one way or another. This year's poets honor me by allowing me to read them, and they honor poetry by continuing to pursue this most difficult, most rewarding craft."

This book is a fascinating psychoanalytic reading of ED's tortured life, by a professional psychiatrist who devoted seven years to it, and is unsparing of the falsifications indulged in by most of her biographers and critics. ED cultists, in particular, loathe the book (always a good sign) because it gives us a very human and very tormented Emily Dickinson, a woman starved for love who had serious psychological problems which retarded her emotional development, and who almost certainly suffered a nervous breakdown as a result.

Why any of this should disturb the open-minded I have no idea. The Dickinson household was certainly a very strange and abnormal place, and the Dickinson children had a far from normal upbringing. The aloofness of the father, his inability to show love or warmth and relate in a normal fashion to his children, would have a devastating effect on any child.

The arguments I have seen against Cody have been very weak, though proof of the rightness of his thesis is very strong. It runs all through the poems and has been analyzed in great detail by Camille Paglia in Chapter 24 of her _Sexual Personae_ 'Amherst's Madame de Sade : Emily Dickinson' (pp.623-74).

The poems Paglia quotes are authentic Dickinson poems. No matter how much worshippers at the shrine of their 'Saint Emily' would like to wish them away, they will not go away. Also, they have meaning.

My advice would be to read both Cody and Paglia. They're both fascinating writers, they both know what they're talking about, and I think that what they say helps us to understand aspects of both Dickinson and many of the poems she wrote.

Emily Dickinson was a very complex figure, and everyone tries to claim her for their camp - Cultists, Christians, Psychiatrists, Sadeians, etc., - but I guess the truth is that, although there's a certain amount of truth in all these positions, Emily Dickinson is just too big to be contained. She bursts free of all categories. Like her poems she explodes into a multiplicity of meanings, perhaps because, like them she wasn't about something, but about everything.

This was an excellent book, and I recommend it to everyone.

This is, of course, an abridged collection. As such, we are forced to rely on the opinion of another. Granted this is common enough with poetry collections, but that doesn't change the very nature of each person having differing interests. There is no way to know if the ones he leaves out are just as good or even better, from each individuals perspective, without going to more comprehensive texts.

Regardless, I do have one gripe with this book that is unrelated to the above pettiness. The method of dating each poem seems silly to me. The reason is that they are all claimed to be from one of several (if memory serves 3) years separated out over several decades. That and there are two listings of dates for each poem, which I don't recall off hand why they did that, and it may serve some purpose, but it's not useful information if when these poems were written can only be pinned down to plus or minus five-ten years. I can't blame Johnson for this as I imagine that is as close as is known, but, by the same token, the dates could have been left out so that it doesn't detract from the actual poetry.

All in all I would recomend this book, but I might suggest getting a more complete version instead (so long as it is unedited--Emily hated it when people wanted to edit her poems, and I think that we should respect that).

Her poems are so unusual, in terms of their diction, meters, grammar, and punctuation, that earlier editors felt obliged to replace her characteristic dashes with more conventional punctuation, and to regularize and smooth out her texts to make them more acceptable to readers of the time.

In fact, it was only when Thomas H. Johnson's editions appeared that readers were finally given an accurate version of the original texts, with Emily Dickinson's diction and punctuation restored.

Johnson has produced three different editions of the poems. The first, a 3-volume Variorum Edition (1955), includes all of her many variants, since Emily Dickinson often added alternate words to her drafts and in many cases seems never to have decided on a final reading. These variants, though extremely interesting to scholars, enthusiasts, and advanced students of ED, are not really necessary in an edition for the general reader.

What the general reader needs is an edition in which the editor, after closely examining the manuscripts and taking into account all relevant factors, gives what he feels is a sensible and acceptable reading, and this is what Johnson has given us in the two other editions he prepared, a Reader's edition of the Complete Poems (details of which are given below), and an abridgement of this which included only what he felt were her best poems.

In other words, readers can feel confident that in the present edition they have been given (insofar as it's possible to get her idiosyncratic manuscript drafts over into typography) at least one accurate reading of ED's original draft.

Those who would like to look at the variants can always consult Johnson's Variorum (1955), or the more recent Variorum of R. W. Franklin (1998). Better still, if they can, they might take a look at R. W. Franklin's sumptuous 2-volume 'The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson' (1981), which gives photographic facsimiles of many of her manuscripts.

Emily Dickinson is a very great poet. Personally I think that in some ways she is the greatest poet of all. In the present edition we have been given accurate texts of a selection of her poems, arranged so far as was possible in chronological order of composition. Johnson's is an edition which should serve the general reader well enough for most ordinary purposes.

Another excellent Reader's edition that can be recommended has been prepared by ED's most recent editor, R. W. Franklin (1999). Either of the Johnsons or the Franklin (which contains 14 additional poems) will give you access to a body of poems that are so far above the ordinary run of poems that we really ought to have another word for them.

Just as a prism breaks up light into a band of colors - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet - and their infinite gradations, so do Emily Dickinson's poems become, as it were, a prism which conducts the white light of reality, a reality which as it passes through the prism of her poem explodes into a multiplicity of meanings.

It is the rich suggestiveness of her poems, a suggestiveness which generates an incredible range of meanings, that prevents us from ever being able to say (to continue the metaphor) that a given poem is 'about red' or 'about blue,' because her poems, as US critic Robert Weisbuch has pointed out, are in fact about _everything_. This is what makes her so unique, and this is why she appeals to every kind of reader.

Emily Dickinson's poetry is one of the wonders of the world. Whether you select one of the Johnsons or the Franklin edition, it will become a book that you will cherish, a golden book and endless source of pleasure and inspiration that you will find yourself returning to again and again.

For those who may be interested, details of Johnson's reader's edition of the Complete Poems are as follows :

THE COMPLETE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON. Edited by Thomas H. Johnson. 784 pp. Boston : Little, Brown, 1960 and Reissued. ISBN: 0316184136 (pbk.)