Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson lived in seclusion most of her life. Her best known poems include "Because I Could Not Stop for Death," "A Bird, Came Down the Walk", and "I'm Nobody! Who are You?".
- Emily Dickinson: Poetry FoundationEmily Dickinson is one of America’s greatest and most original poets of all time. She took definition as her province and challenged the existing definitions of poetry and the poet’s work.
- Emily Dickinson: Poets.orgDickinson’s poetry was heavily influenced by the Metaphysical poets of seventeenth-century England, as well as her reading of the Book of Revelation and her upbringing in a Puritan New England town, which encouraged a Calvinist, orthodox, and conservative approach to Christianity.
- Emily Dickinson MuseumThe Emily Dickinson Museum comprises two historic houses in the center of Amherst, Massachusetts associated with the poet Emily Dickinson and members of her family during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Research & Reference
- Emily Dickinson: Credo ReferenceA Credo Reference landing page on Emily Dickinson. This page includes links to reference pages, journal articles, and a mind map.
- Emily Dickinson ArchiveEmily Dickinson Archive makes high-resolution images of Dickinson’s surviving manuscripts available in open access, and provides readers with a website through which they can view images of manuscripts held in multiple libraries and archives. This first phase of the EDA includes images for the corpus of poems identified in The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition, edited by R. W. Franklin (Cambridge: Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1998).
- The Emily Dickinson Collection: Harvard LibraryHoughton Library's Emily Dickinson Collection is home to over 1000 poems and letters in the poet’s hand, as well as personal effects from her life.
Streaming Media
- Emily DickinsonThe American poet Emily Dickinson decided against publishing her poems, and during her lifetime only seven of her works were ever published. During the Civil War she wrote over 800 poems. At her death she left behind over 2000 poems.
- Dickinson: The Life and Work of Emily DickinsonRecognized as one of the best American poets in history, Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) made great strides while living in an age of predominantly male poets. This film traces Dickinson’s life in 19th Century New England and her remarkable work during a time when any ideas contrary to the norm were not accepted by society.
Author's Works & Perspectives
Open Me Carefully
Emily Dickinson's uncensored and breathtaking letters, poems, and letter-poems to her sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Dickinson For the first time, selections from Emily Dickinson's thirty-six year correspondence with her childhood friend, neighbor, and sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Dickinson, are compiled in a single volume. Open Me Carefully invites a dramatic new understanding of Emily Dickinson's life and work, overcoming a century of censorship and misinterpretation. For the millions of readers who love Emily Dickinson's poetry, Open Me Carefully brings new light to the meaning of the poet's life and work. Gone is Emily as lonely spinster; here is Dickinson in her own words, passionate and fully alive. "With spare commentary, Smith ... and Hart ... let these letters speak for themselves. Most important, unlike previous editors who altered line breaks to fit their sense of what is poetry or prose, Hart and Smith offer faithful reproductions of the letters' genre-defying form as the words unravel spectacularly down the original page." Renee Tursi, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
Dickinson
Seamus Heaney, Denis Donoghue, William Pritchard, Marilyn Butler, Harold Bloom, and many others have praised Helen Vendler as one of the most attentive readers of poetry. Here, Vendler turns her illuminating skills as a critic to 150 selected poems of Emily Dickinson. As she did in "The Art of Shakespeare s Sonnets," she serves as an incomparable guide, considering both stylistic and imaginative features of the poems. In selecting these poems for commentary Vendler chooses to exhibit many aspects of Dickinson s work as a poet, from her first-person poems to the poems of grand abstraction, from her ecstatic verses to her unparalleled depictions of emotional numbness, from her comic anecdotes to her painful poems of aftermath. Included here are many expected favorites as well as more complex and less often anthologized poems. Taken together, Vendler s selection reveals Emily Dickinson s development as a poet, her astonishing range, and her revelation of what Wordsworth called the history and science of feeling. In accompanying commentaries Vendler offers a deeper acquaintance with Dickinson the writer, the inventive conceiver and linguistic shaper of her perennial themes. All of Dickinson s preoccupations death, religion, love, the natural world, the nature of thought are explored here in detail, but Vendler always takes care to emphasize the poet s startling imagination and the ingenuity of her linguistic invention. Whether exploring less familiar poems or favorites we thought we knew, Vendler reveals Dickinson as a master of a revolutionary verse-language of immediacy and power. Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries will be an indispensable reference work for students of Dickinson and readers of lyric poetry. "
Emily Dickinson
-- Brings together the best criticism on the most widely read poets, novelists, and playwrights -- Presents complex critical portraits of the most influential writers in the English-speaking world -- from the English medievalists to contemporary writers