Poems of Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson, poet of the interior life, imagined words/swords, hurling barbed syllables/piercing. Nothing about her adult appearance or habitation revealed such a militant soul. Only poems, written quietly in a room of her own, often hand-stitched in small volumes, then hidden in a drawer, revealed her true self.

She did not live in time but in universals-an acute, sensitive nature reaching out boldly from self-referral to a wider, imagined world. n n Dickinson died without fame; only a few poems were published in her lifetime. Her legacy was later rescued from her desk-an astonishing body of work, much of which has since appeared in piecemeal editions, sometimes with words altered by editors or publishers according to the fashion of the day.

n n Now Ralph Franklin, the foremost scholar of Dickinson's manuscripts, has prepared an authoritative one-volume edition of all extant poems by Emily Dickinson-1,789 poems in all, the largest number ever assembled. This reading edition derives from his three-volume work, The Poems of Emily

• Dickinson: Variorum Edition (1998), which contains approximately 2,500 sources for the poems. In this one-volume edition, Franklin offers a single reading of each poem-usually the latest version of the entire poem-rendered with Dickinson's spelling, punctuation, and capitalization intact. The Poems of Emily
• Dickinson: Reading Edition is a milestone in American literary scholarship and an indispensable addition to the personal library of poetry lovers everywhere. n