This book is a must for anyone interested in the 3 title poets. Wendy Martin does an excellent job in her analysis of these great female poets. She provides necessary backgound information along with correlative interpretation and history of the authors' works. This book is not only a informative and helpful tool, but it is an interesting read.

ANCESTOR'S BROCADES : The Literary Debut of Emily Dickinson. By Millicent Todd Bingham. 464 pp. New York and London : Harper and Brothers. Originally published 1945.

This book is the fascinating story of the circumstances attending the first appearance of Emily Dickinson's poetry : the arrival in Amherst in 1881 of the young astronomer David Peck Todd and his sophisticated and beautiful wife, Mabel Loomis Todd; their taking up residence near the two Dickinson households; that of the gentle recluse-poetess Emily and her bleak and arrogant sister Lavinia; and that of their brother Austin and his wife and children; the death of Emily five years later; the discovery by Lavinia of dozens of tiny manuscript-books, and of hundreds of scraps of paper on which lines and poems of varying degrees of legibility were written, many barely decipherable; Lavinia's eager desire to see this material published; her incompetence for the task; her request for help from Mabel Loomis Todd; Mabel's long labor of editing the manuscripts in consultation with her husband and Colonel Higginson; the appearance of the first three volumes as causing a transatlantic furor at their unconventionality; the feud that was simmering in Amherst; its climax, etc., etc.

This is without doubt one of the most interesting books I've read in my studies of Dickinson. Millicent Bingham Todd has an amazing knack of bringing these long-dead people before our eyes and making them live again. Her portrayal, in particular, of her mother, Mabel Loomis Todd, is very compelling. She comes across as a remarkably sane, kind, and intelligent woman, and one sympathizes with her in her feud with the horrible Lavinia. And the story of the difficulties of editing ED's manuscripts, and of getting them published in the teeth of public opinion, the triumph of finally succeeding, the slow but steady growth of ED's popularity, all this was fascinating stuff.

Don't believe what the cultists and ED groupies tell you about Mabel Loomis Todd. She was a truly wonderful and very impressive woman. And it becomes perfectly clear that if it hadn't been for her devotion to the task of editing ED's manuscripts, and her fortitude through many trials and hardships and frustrations, it's entirely possible that ED's poems might never have seen the light of day, and her amazing poems have been lost to the world. ED Cultists can go fly a kite. I think we all owe Mabel Loomis Todd an enormous debt of gratitude.

Emily Dickinson is often a religious poet, and more often than many think, an erotic one. She is famous for her mysteries and contradictions and elusiveness. She died and left more than l700 poems, many almost indecipherable, and a number of them "uncertainly finished." Her sister Vinnie wanted the works to see print, but could not persuade her brother Austin's wife Sue to get the job done, so she turned to Austin's mistress, Mabel, who was also married. This is the lovers' story, told through 13 years of self-justifying letters and diary entries. More importantly, it is the story of how Mabel took on the job of copying and editing the poems to please her lover, and perhaps to irritate her enemy, Sue. Emily became famous about five years after she died due to Mabel's efforts. Polly Longsworth did a fine job condensing love letters and diary entries to give us a picture of these tormented souls, whose relationships all ended badly. The actual love letters between Austin and Mabel clearly show that neither had Emily's literary talent, but both had her passion. Where Emily apparently suppressed carnality, her brother and his "other woman" reveled in it. If you are as fascinated by Emily's life as you are by her poetry, this part of the tale, while largely occurring after she died, is essential to know. A very worthwhile addition to the saga of Emily Dickinson.

A CONCORDANCE TO THE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON. Edited by S. P. Rosenbaum. 899 pp. Ithaca and London : Cornell University Press, 1978 (1964) and Reprinted. ISBN 0-8014-0362-6 (hbk.)

The present book is a computer-generated Concordance, not to every word in Emily Dickinson's poems - common words such as "a," "at," "both," "they", "when," "which," etc., - have of course been omitted, but to every significant word.

As a computer generated book it suffers from certain weaknesses inherent in this type of project, but for most users these will probably be only of academic interest. In use this Concordance works very well indeed, and I have always been able to quickly locate whatever I was looking for.

Its most obvious use is to locate 'lost' poems, and with 1,775 poems to worry about, everyone must have had the experience of almost going nuts trying to locate the poem in which a remembered word or phrase or line occurred. But with the Rosenbaum you can kiss all such tortures Goodbye.

Its second use is of course as a research tool. How many times, for example, does Emily Dickinson use the word "fish"? The Christian camp are very eager to claim ED for their ranks, and we know that the fish is a very important Christian symbol, and that fish, fishing, and fishermen feature prominently in the New Testament. We also know that ED's contemporaries, and presumably ED herself, ate fish, and that fishing was and is considered a 'sport.'

This is the sort of question that can occur in the course of one's reading and thinking and writing about Dickinson, and is one that Rosenbaum can quickly answer. His answer amazed me, as it may you. His anwer is 1. According to him, the word "fish" occurs only once in ED's poems, in the phrase "my pantry has a fish" from poem 1749 "The waters chased him as..."

Mine are the simple pleasures of the enthusiast. Dickinson scholars will no doubt find other and more sophisticated uses for the Rosenbaum, and some may even have found things in it to quibble about. But so far as I'm concerned it's an invaluable tool, and one that any student of ED would enjoy using and find extremely useful.

My only complaint is that (in my copy) the print on many pages is very faint. Presumably somebody forgot to ink the rollers, and the result has been to make some pages difficult to read, or to scan easily, though others are black and clear enough.

The book is standard 8vo in size (6.25 by 9.5 inches), bound in full strong cloth, stitched, and not particularly well-printed on excellent strong paper, and has clearly been designed for the sort of heavy and long-term use it will probably get.

The kicker, of course, is the price. So if you weren't born with a silver spoon in your mouth, maybe you could add the Rosenbaum to your Wish List and keep your fingers crossed. Or else rob a bank. Because I know you'd love it.

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 captures the white light of reality, a reality which as it flows 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 observed, are in fact about everything. This is what makes her so unique, and this is why she appeals to every kind of reader, and even to children.

The present book, which has been edited by Brenda Hillman, gives us accurate texts of the poems in a 150-page selection taken from the authoritative variorum edition of Thomas H. Johnson, the well-known Dickinson scholar who worked many years to establish the correct texts.

The book is beautifully printed in two-colors on excellent paper, and in a tiny format which is perfect for the pocket. It would in fact make a very nice gift. You'd be making a gift of poetry which is one of the wonders of the world.

Though I was disappointed to find that some of my interpretations of her poems had not been quite on the mark, I still enjoyed this book quite a bit. It helps the reader understand Dickinson's background, her unusual usage of words, and her poems themselves. I think that any lover of Dickinson's poems will find something interesting in this book.

My husband and I have been Dickinson fans for most of our lives, so we've read many biographies. This one, by far, is a favorite because of the intimacy and humanity it brings out. Emily Dickinson is somewhat of an enigma, but we get the feeling from this version of her life of the woman she was, in the time that she lived. A particular passage dealt with the death of her beloved nephew, Gilbert. She wrote of his "sweet velocity", and broke our hearts. This is a book that I first borrowed from a library, but which I later searched out through book dealers, to possess it for my own. I value it over all others on the subject.

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 captures the white light of reality, a reality which as it flows 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 observed, are in fact about _everything_. This is what makes her so unique, and this is why she appeals to every kind of reader (or certainly to open-minded ones) and even to children.

Emily Dickinson's poetry is one of the wonders of the world.

"Emily Dickinson: American Poet," with text by Carol Greene and illustrations by Steven Dobson, is a biography of the great 19th century American poet. Directed towards younger readers, this book tells Emily's story with simple language and plentiful visual aids.

Steven Dobson's evocative full-color illustrations are complemented by black-and-white reproductions of photographs, paintings, and other visual records from Emily's era. We get to see Emily at various stages of her life, and we also see her family, her friends, and the home she lived in. Greene's text takes us from Emily's childhood to the end of her life. Greene pays particular attention to Emily's personal relationships, and includes lines from some of her best-known poems.

This book is a fine introduction to Emily Dickinson's world and to her art. If your child enjoys this book, be sure to share some of Emily's poems with him or her.

This is the most profound and challenging interpretation of Dickinson I have ever encountered. It certainly should be on the required reading list of any serious scholar attempting to understand the true spirit of Dickinson. The book does a wonderful job of demonstrating Dickinson's place within her time and society. It forces the reader to reconsider conventional views on the "why" of Dickinson's poetry. Beth Maclay Doriani has done a superb job. I look forward to Doriani's next work.