Emily Dickinson, the poet of inner life, imagined words/swords, casting ballistic syllables/pierces. Nothing about her adult appearance or residence revealed such a combative soul. Only the poems, written quietly in a room of her own, often stitched into small volumes, revealed her true identity. She did not live in time, like the other great poet of the era, Walt Whitman, but in universal concepts. As she stated: “There is one thing to be grateful for: that we are ourselves and not someone else.”

Dickinson lived and died without fame: she saw only a few poems published. Her great legacy was later salvaged from her drawer — a remarkable body of work that reveals her acute and sensitive nature, boldly stretching from self-reference to a broader, imaginary world. Her family tried to publish Dickinson's poetry over the years, selecting verses, often changing her words or punctuation, until 1955, when the first major attempt was made to collect and publish her work, edited by Thomas H. Johnson for the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Now, after many years of preparation by Ralph W. Franklin, the foremost scholar of Dickinson's manuscripts, a new comprehensive edition is available. This three-volume work contains 1,789 poems, the largest number ever gathered. The poems, arranged chronologically and based on new datings, come from a variety of archives, mainly from manuscript originals but also from various secondary sources representing lost manuscripts. The text of each manuscript is rendered separately, including, to the extent of typographic standards, Dickinson’s spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. Franklin provides Dickinson's alternative readings for the poems, her corrections, and the separating lines and pages or columns in the source.

Each entry specifies Franklin's editorial corrections and records the publication history, including variations. Fourteen appendices of tables and lists provide additional information, including poems attributed to Emily Dickinson. The poems are indexed by number from the Johnson edition as well as by their opening lines. Franklin has provided an introduction that serves as a guide to this edition and discusses the history of editing Dickinson's poems. The narrative of how Dickinson conducted her workshop is a reconstruction of a remarkable poetic life.

Pages: 1680, Year of Publication: 1015, Dimensions: 15.6x15.6cm