The Essential Emily Dickinson

by Emily Dickinson

Book Overview

The essential poems of Emily Dickinson selected and introduced by Joyce Carol Oates

"Between them, our great visionary poets of the American nineteenth century, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, have come to represent the extreme, idiosyncratic poles of the American psyche. . . .

Dickinson never shied away from the great subjects of human suffering, loss, death, even madness, but her perspective was intensely private;...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0062668870
• ISBN13: 9780062668875
• Release Date: November 2016
• Publisher: Ecco Press
• Length: 112 Pages
• Weight: 0.21 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 4.3" x 6.9"

Customer Reviews

Lovely Verse, Passionately Performed

I'm not, generally speaking, a poetry kind of guy, but this is by a poetess personality with whom I am in sympathy. Her self-imposed, mostly secluded adult existance away from humankind has always made me wonder and appreciate her. I once worked with an old and very experienced female newspaper reporter who once said to me in disgust: "You know, people are just no damned good." I also remember a quote from somewhere, by Charles Bukowski I think, that said: "I like people, but I seem to feel better when they're not around." There seems to be a peace and stillness not to be found elsewhere in living mostly apart from others and not participating in their frantic money gathering, incessant and/or nonsensical babbling, their grand propensity for violence in it's many forms, self-idolizations and their hippocracies. She died for beauty, but from her writing I perceive she found much in nature, but didn't find so much in humankind. Just a sprinkling here and there, and maybe that's enough. Her comments about religion and church-going make me smile. She seems to have been an insightful genius. The recording is just fine.