MacKenzie's concordance provides an invaluable new resource to scholars and serious readers of Emily Dickinson. The reference covers all of the over 1000 surviving letters of the poet from the Johnson 3-volume edition.

Not since the Rosenbaum concordance to the poems which appeared in 1964 has a resource been made available that will garner such prolonged interest and use from scholars. With each entry, MacKenzie provides the year (Johnson's dating when the original letter is undated), the frequency of use, the Johnson volume and letter number, page, and line number. In addition, each entry has a brief context from the original sentence in which it appears.

For a poet about whom so little is known and for whom words were so few and so well chosen, a concordance provides surprising and enlightening insights. With the increased attention paid to the letters in recent scholarship, this reference could not be produced and made available too soon for those involved in Dickinson studies.

An extraordinary achievement, this is a reference with a long shelf life that belongs in any university library collection and in private libraries of those who enjoy the richness of Dickinson's words.

When I was a freshman in high school, I was asked to recite a poem in front of my class. I hadn't ever read poetry before and wandered the rows of poetry in my school's library aimlessly. I came upon a tiny book titled I Became Alone and picked it up. Its title immediately caught my attention. I saw it was a collection of 5 women poets I hadn't ever heard of. I chose it, following my instincts. That evening, I sat down and read the entire book. It was so good and full of excellent poems. Now, five years later, I have finally found it again here at amazon.com. I cannot wait to read it again; hopefully, they can find it for me. I highly recommend purchasing this book. You will never own a more satisfying work of poetry.

Inflections of the Pen, although a scholarly work, makes fascinating reading even for those of us not particularly schooled in the mystical work of Emily Dickinson. Crumbley combines masterfully poetic detective work with his own elegance of language to create a piece of work that both honors its subject and offers a first-ever look inside the mind of an ever-elusive writer. Even those untrained in the academics of poetry will find entrancement here. Additionally, I found it inspired me to look at other poets' work with a refreshed and inquiring eye. Thank you,Dr. Crumbley, for this remarkable tome.

This is a serious and personal literary study of Dickinson's work by a scholar and fellow poet who appreciates both the art and the attitude of one of her American literary forebears.

Howe points out how Dickinson's poetry has been overlooked in light of her character and biography. It seems that in the 19th century, it was remarkable for a woman to be a poet at all, let alone write original, rebellious, and quite modern poetry. Hence, the work itself, though enjoyed by schoolchildren all over America, has been little understood.

Delving into Dickinson's reading lists, her notes and letters, and analyzing a few poems, Howe explores the workings of an intricate mind. She uncovers connections between Dickinson and the Brownings, the Brontes, and James Fenimore Cooper, and she shows how seemingly submissive, soft spoken poetic lines are actually rebellious and even at times angry. What Howe does not do is confuse the image of "The Belle of Amhearst" with the vital workings of the mind of this remarkable woman.

This book is an enjoyable read filled with Howe's admiration for her artistic predecessor and written in straightforward language, not literary jargon--a tribute from one poet to another. For anyone who enjoys Emily Dickinson's poetry, it is not to be missed.

Thirty years ago, I read ED in school, a few poems chosen for high school students, scrubbed by the sensibilities of that time and rural place. My remembered impression was of a strange recluse who wrote of flowers and death. On word of friends, I came to remake her acquaintance, and found passion, unconventional explorations, and wide knowledge of her moment. That a woman so contained in space should flow out through time touches and pauses me. I should like to have known her, to have had her as my friend (by email, or chat?), and been informed of her wider, richer world distilled ever smaller until its circumference reduced me, too; a term between eternity and immortality (ED, you amaze).

Judith Farr has wrought a miracle in bringing ED to me so compellingly (thank you, Judith).

For those Dickinson fans looking for a fascinating glimpse into her life, this book is a rare gift! Meticulously researched and beautifully written! Would recommend highly!

I am delighted to have the honor of being the first reviewer of this wonderful book for Amazon. I find it absolutely delicious reading and perfect for being totally immersed. I am going to be lost when I finish the book and longing for more. I cannot stop reading at night and the chapters are such a nice length that it is easy to play the game of "just one more" for a long while. The author really did her homework and the book is accurate historically. I will probably become interested in Emily Dickinson's poetry as a result. There is no doubt that this book will be long remembered.

I have come to believe that Emily Dickinson is the greatest writer America has produced. Unfortunately, the poet remained in anonymity and so went without constructive criticism. Her poems, while splendid, were not of the depth of Whitman nor the pleasure of Longfellow. They did not "live" like Poe's. But they lived; only heavier in breath. So it is not her poetry that we look at to find America's greatest writer, it is these wonderful letters. At thirteen her imagery is as complicated as Mailer or Morrison might ever be. And in our age of television, no genius will surpass these imaginings. To read Emily is to fall in love with her. Certainly misunderstood. Unapreciated. My copy of this books is weathered like a Baptist preachers Bible. It is my favorite book of all time. Emily is my favorite writer. Not everyone I recomend this book too enjoys it as much as I, but please try. You may find something special.

As a few have stated already, a lot of Emily Dickinson's poems appear simple on the surface. Don't let the simplicity or brevity fool you, boiling underneath the metaphors of Dickinson's poems are some of the most beautiful visions I've ever read. Intelligent, thoughtful..haunting are all words I'd use to describe her poems. She has quickly vaulted to the top of the list of my favorite poets along with William Blake and Edgar Allan Poe.

And speaking of her poems, there are plenty. All of them in fact, in chronological order allowing the reader to see the progession in her poems. This is a great book at a great price to be able to own all she has written.

Since her poems have no titles, there are two invaluable features included at the back to help aid the search for the desired poem. One is an alphabetical subject index, with words and lines linked to poems with which they belong. The other index includes the first lines of all 1775 poems.

An excellent all around souce for all your Emily Dickinson needs. Enjoy.

This is the standard and authoritative collected edition of Emily Dickinson's poems. It is a book that will stay with you for the rest of your life. I can think of no finer writer of poetry in English who manages to invest so short and simple a construction - no more than a couple of lines in some cases - with such emotional force. I say 'simple', but her poems are simple only in a deceptive sense. An unfinished poem like "A letter is a joy of earth/ It is denied the gods -" (that's the whole poem) says more about the joy of constructing prose than any number of effusive efforts from the Romantics.

Miss Dickinson has suffered from having been appropriated by the rather dreary crowd of 'cultural critics' who cannot grasp that a work of art tells us primarily not about the social mores of the time it was written in but about the human spirit. She is especially vulnerable to this sort of irrelevant sophistry, having lived as a recluse for much of her life and thus being ripe for 'interpretation' that is nothing more than a recitation of modern political sensibilities. That's a shame, and it certainly shouldn't put you off reading her. So far as I'm concerned, there is no one - not even Shakespeare, not even Jane Austen or Dickens - whom I read more frequently, and with greater pleasure and benefit.

Nearly everyone who's had a brush with American lit knows the story of Emily Dickinson - her poetry unpublished in her lifetime, and then even after her death, her verses seeing the light of day only after having been "improved" on by an editor who found her rhymes imperfect and her meter "spasmodic." He even went so far as to make her metaphors "sensible." The fact is, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, to whom Dickinson had sent her poems, was a representative of the poetic establishment, and as with all artistic establishments then and now, was too rigid in his thinking and too impoverished in his imagination to comprehend a new voice of genius. As Editor Thomas H. Johnson writes in his terse but very instructive Introduction, "He was trying to measure a cube by the rules of plane geometry."

Of course other women of literature suffered something similar during the nineteenth century. What I wonder is, who is being misread, ignored or denied today?

Anyway, suffice it to say that this IS the definitive one-volume collection of the poetry of Emily Dickinson. It includes all the 1,775 poems that she wrote in her lifetime, and they are presented here just as she wrote them with only some minor corrections of obvious misspellings or misplaced apostrophes. Johnson has retained the sometimes "capricious" capitalization, and preserved the famous dashes.

There is a subject index, which I found useful, and an index of first lines, which is invaluable.

Dickinson can be playful...

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you - Nobody - too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise - you know!

...she can be sarcastic...

"Faith" is a fine invention
When Gentlemen can see -
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency.

[Alas, the Amazon.com editor does not support italics. The words "see" and "Microscopes" are italicized above, and it really does make a difference!]

...and grave...

I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air -
Between the Heaves of Storm -

...and observant...

I like a look of Agony,
Because I know it's true -
Men do not sham Convulsion,
Nor simulate, a Throe -

...and profound...

Love reckons by itself - alone -
"As large as I" - relate the Sun
to One who never felt it blaze -
Itself is all the like it has -

..and desperate...

"Hope" is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all -

...and self aware...

I meant to have but modest needs -
Such as Content - and Heaven -
Within my income - these could lie
And Life and I - keep even -

...and even radical...

Much Madness is divinest Sense -
To a discerning Eye -
Much Sense - the starkest Madness -
'Tis the Majority
In this, as All, prevail -
Assent - and you are sane -
Demur - you're straightway dangerous -
And handled with a Chain -

...and much more.

She is a poet of strikingly apt and totally original phrases imbued with a deep resonance of thought and observation, especially on her favorite subjects, life, death and love. She can be cryptic and her references and allusions are sometimes too private for us to catch. She can also be amazingly terse. But the intensity of her experience and the "Zero at the Bone" emotion displayed in this, her "letter to the World/That never wrote to me -" are second to none in the world of letters. Unlike Shakespeare, who mastered the psychology of people in places high and low, Dickinson mastered only her own psychology, and yet through that we can see, as in a mirror, ourselves.

Imagine some monstrous 600-page addenda to *The Birth of Tragedy*, deploying the Apollo vs. Dionysus doublet ad vertiginem, putting the proleptic insights of Pater, Jung, and Frazer to work in new and frightful ways, invoking a faux-Gorgonic eye to peer into the heart of culture High and Low, from empyrean edifice to paganized Pop void, and you'll have a distant impression of this cocky, gumptious, explosive treatise, a book that takes so many risks its grating weaknesses never quite catch up to its prodigal greatness. You just gotta read this.

*Sexual Personae* starts out strong. Its promises are manifold. By the time Paglia is done ravishing us with her visionary Egyptology and impudent synoptic judgements on the failures of feminism to give us an authentic sexual politics, the reader feels primed and whetted for the perilous night journey ahead. For the next 550 pages, however, our expectations are both whippingly indulged and (sigh) left flaccid, limp, and befuddled. Mistress Camille begins to flounder beneath the weight of her gushing, declamatory syntax, pounding and thrashing us with repetition and overemphasis, the voice of an S/M dominatrix sliding mushily into self-parody.

As John Updike soberly put it, "It feels less a survey than a curiously ornate harangue. Her percussive style -- one short declarative sentence after another -- eventually wearies the reader; her diction functions not so much to elicit the secrets of books as to hammer them into submission.... The weary reader longs for the mercy of a qualification, a doubt, a hesitation; there is little sense, in her uncompanionable prose, of exploration occuring before our eyes, of tentative motions of thought reflected in a complex syntax." Paglia throws around the word "chthonic" like Heidegger pimping "Dasein." The Nietzschean parabolic of Apollo vs. Dionysus is often stretched thinner than Calista Flockhart fed through a saltwater taffy dispenser. But when Paglia is good, she's good. When fiery intellectual hubris finds its phantom gemini in the anguished erotic gravity of high art and literature (even when this gravity seems a willful projection of the critic's own manic preconceptions), the book simply rocks.

Paglia's energy and brilliance open up fresh horizons of speculation, at times verging on the ridiculous (why, even crankish) but always delivered in a high operatic style, with a strident sense of humor. Even so, her formulations can seem oddly reductive, everything draining out into the proverbial "chthonic swamp" of (all together now) Sex and Death. "One author after another is made to confess to sexual crossover, androgyny, and sadomasochism" (Updike, 607). For better or worse, her Nietzschean cold-water brutality keeps things grounded in the Freudian mother-earth we thought we'd deconstructed into oblivion, returning us to a dark, punishing realm of synoptic deities who tear men's lives to shreds without batting an eyelash, sending the phallic ego on greased skids to Hell while maintaining their crystalline serenity. Like the dark heart of a jewel, the gods refract all light as we transients of the flesh go down to feed the worm.

Some of Paglia's paragraphs are (more or less) "chthonic" mush, an attempt to forcefeed her pet metaphors of sexual neurosis down the throats of younger readers eager for snappy punchlines and all the deferential sloganizing of feckless guru-worship. But just as often her quicksilver intellect hits us pleasurably below the belt, leaving the reader shaken and transfigured by a powerful, exotic cinema of the spirit, forcing us to rethink our whole battery of preconceptions on every artist and work under discussion. A powerful disciple of both Walter Pater and Harold Bloom (her Yale mentor), Paglia's sass and impertinence takes "critical personality" to new, er...depths? But while Bloom prefers the logocentric Bible to cinematic Homer, Paglia's prose is an awakening to the image-hungry pagan energies of the Graeco-daemonic visionaire, putting her in some strange middle ground between coquettish-but-cruel Art History professor and savvy-if-overconfident culture critic determined to put Euripides and Edmund Spenser in the same conceptual schema as Keith Richards and Madonna.

*Sexual Personae* churns and rumbles with this sort of audacity, shifting breakneck from meticulous, careful scholarship to wild conjecture and enthralling hearsay (often in the same paragraph) without so much as a by-your-leave, transfused with a fluid comedic irony that kept this reader chuckling softly to himself throughout. Paglia takes no prisoners. Her egotism is as caustic as it is unrepentant, as bludgeoning as it is cranky, as penetrating as it is monomanical. She polarizes her audience. At her strongest and most original, you either love her or hate her. I won't even try to compete with the wonderful media caricatures that have fulminated in the wake of her celebrity. This philosophic maneater knows all too well the sexual persona she has created for herself, the lesbian-vampire renegade academic deploying pungent barbs of wit from her sniper's nest at the University of Arts in Philadelphia. And when she hits her mark, that goon squad of poseurs, bureaucrats, pomo fiends, and power-obsessed Foucauldian politickers that saturate Academe seem to wilt into irrelevance when propped toe-to-toe against her loud, dismissive, polemical swath.

Despite its many hokey allegations, its fatuous overreadings, its easy-to-parody voice, its argumentative forcefeeding, and its jarring repetitions and overblown pretentions, *Sexual Personae* is a book I recommend to virtually everyone I meet. Just to see their reaction. To provoke a new, headier form of dialogue, a post-Freudian genital vernacular sashaying its way past crotchety feminist tightwads who cheerfully ignore human biology by trying to eunuchize that hoary "patriarchal" beast of art-producing obsessiveness. And, hopefully, a good cathartic guffaw every few pages or so. Not of condescension, but rather pure sensual joy of steamy, immoderate, intellectual conversation. For beneath it all, Paglia is a fork-tongued raconteur and comedienne of the Oscar Wilde school for tarts, an irresistable stud-leather vixen bringing the bullwhip of her sass down on our goosepimpled backsides.

So don't be a prig. Go get some.

A book this outstanding is rare, as I can see from the customer reviews many have perceived. Paglia's book, which I read when I was 17, crystallized my thoughts on art, sexuality, and human nature: like her I was a freakish female fan of Oscar Wilde, the gay male sensibility, and decadence. I had truly been searching for this book since I was 13 years old and got my first adult public library card, and thereby discovered the endlessly fascinating world of literature and art--the existence of which I'd never suspected. I'll never forget sitting down with this book during Grade 12 Spring Break; my mother and little sisters were away visiting relatives, so I had the house to myself during the day and I sat in the dining room from the time my step-father left for work at about 7 am to the time he returned about 5 pm, reading. It was by far the longest and most difficult book I had ever read, and I took time over it because as other customer reviewers have pointed out, Paglia addresses such profound, disturbing ideas in such original, provocative ways that I did no less than go over my whole life in my head from my earliest memories to test Paglia's ideas. Needless to say, Paglia won more often than not: the myth of original sin is a better explanation of art and human nature than the myth of social constructionism.

If you are truly open to ideas and you love art, don't read this book unless you want your life completely changed for better or worse. Almost ten years later I find myself completely intellectually alienated from both peers and most professors in my university English program because I continue to fight UNCOMPROMISINGLY for art and independent thought (not to mention intellectual rigour and standards and good prose!), thanks to Paglia's inspiration. But it makes it worthwhile when I come on amazon.com and see that others have felt the same way I do. For you others, if you're looking for other *special* works of criticism (neither the run-of-the-mill merely accurate kind nor postmodern drivel), I recommend George Toles's A House Made of Light: Essays in the Art of Film and Stanley Cavell's Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. If you read them after Paglia you'll have some balance, too, since Toles and Cavell emphasize the link between art and morality, while treating the subject with the complexity it deserves.

I read this book almost by accident back in 91 or 92 - and once I got past the first chapter or so - where Paglia has to set up the whole male/female light/dark thing - I was hypnotized by the words and intelligence and clarity of a writer that I now consider among the most erudite humans in the English-speaking world!

Paglia is a magnificent writer, with an almost inexhaustible supply of references and history and personal anecdotes and a brilliant way to make the boring:interesting.

WOW! Anyone who can turn medieval English poetry into a saucy chapter is not only a skilled writer but a brilliant one! Paglia married the old with the new and shows us the true power of women - and by the way - the reason that many femNazis hate Paglia is because Camille employs her sexuality like a weapon!

Want to know what sex and power really mean? - Read this book!