The Poems of Emily Dickinson Volume II
1890
- american poetry
- translations into spanish
- criticism and interpretation
- children's poetry, american
- translations into swedish
- translations into russian
- translations into frisian
- translations into italian
- poetry
- miniature books
The story
Emily Dickinson lived as a recluse in Amherst, Massachusetts, dedicating herself to writing a "letter to the world" - the 1,775 poems left unpublished at her death in 1886. Today Dickinson stands in the front rank of American poets. This Modern Library edition presents the more than four hundred poems that were published between Dickinson's death and 1900. They express her concepts of life and death, of love and nature, and of what Henry James called "the landscape of the soul.". "No one can read these poems...without perceiving that he is not so much reading as being spoken to," observed Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Archibald MacLeish. "There is a curious energy in the words and a tone like no other most of us have ever heard....I know no poems in which the double structure of words as sounds and words as meanings - that curious relationship of the logically unrelated - will be found, on right reading, to be more comprehensive than it is in the poems of Emily Dickinson."
What it’s like
Short, dense lines that sit on the page like small, unhurried rooms: slant rhymes, dashes that pause mid-thought, and capitalised nouns that catch the eye like candle flames. The voice is intimate and oblique, the tone of a reclusive woman writing to one reader at a time, with the cool clarity of a winter window and the sudden warmth of a single hard image. Read them in pale afternoon light, a few poems at a time, or slowly at a kitchen table with a cup going cold beside you. The mood is contemplative and quietly melancholy, shot through with wonder at nature, love, and mortality, rising now and then into a wry, startling joke. Pacing is uneven by design: a poem may open a door and close it in four lines, then linger on a single word for the length of a page. Emotional register stays hushed rather than tearful, and the poems move from the outward world of bees, birds and weather toward the inward landscape of the soul. Intensity is low: death and grief appear often, but as contemplation rather than horror, with no violence and no sexual content. Best for readers who want language that rewards rereading, who like poetry that feels spoken directly to them, and who enjoy austere, interior, lightly eerie beauty.
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