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Concordance to the Poems of Emily Dickinson (The Cornell concordances)

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A CONCORDANCE TO THE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON. Edited by S. P. Rosenbaum. 899 pp. Ithaca and London : Cornell University Press, 1978 (1964) and Reprinted. ISBN 0-8014-0362-6 (hbk.)

The present book is a computer-generated Concordance, not to every word in Emily Dickinson's poems - common words such as "a," "at," "both," "they", "when," "which," etc., - have of course been omitted, but to every significant word.

As a computer generated book it suffers from certain weaknesses inherent in this type of project, but for most users these will probably be only of academic interest. In use this Concordance works very well indeed, and I have always been able to quickly locate whatever I was looking for.

Its most obvious use is to locate 'lost' poems, and with 1,775 poems to worry about, everyone must have had the experience of almost going nuts trying to locate the poem in which a remembered word or phrase or line occurred. But with the Rosenbaum you can kiss all such tortures Goodbye.

Its second use is of course as a research tool. How many times, for example, does Emily Dickinson use the word "fish"? The Christian camp are very eager to claim ED for their ranks, and we know that the fish is a very important Christian symbol, and that fish, fishing, and fishermen feature prominently in the New Testament. We also know that ED's contemporaries, and presumably ED herself, ate fish, and that fishing was and is considered a 'sport.'

This is the sort of question that can occur in the course of one's reading and thinking and writing about Dickinson, and is one that Rosenbaum can quickly answer. His answer amazed me, as it may you. His anwer is 1. According to him, the word "fish" occurs only once in ED's poems, in the phrase "my pantry has a fish" from poem 1749 "The waters chased him as..."

Mine are the simple pleasures of the enthusiast. Dickinson scholars will no doubt find other and more sophisticated uses for the Rosenbaum, and some may even have found things in it to quibble about. But so far as I'm concerned it's an invaluable tool, and one that any student of ED would enjoy using and find extremely useful.

My only complaint is that (in my copy) the print on many pages is very faint. Presumably somebody forgot to ink the rollers, and the result has been to make some pages difficult to read, or to scan easily, though others are black and clear enough.

The book is standard 8vo in size (6.25 by 9.5 inches), bound in full strong cloth, stitched, and not particularly well-printed on excellent strong paper, and has clearly been designed for the sort of heavy and long-term use it will probably get.

The kicker, of course, is the price. So if you weren't born with a silver spoon in your mouth, maybe you could add the Rosenbaum to your Wish List and keep your fingers crossed. Or else rob a bank. Because I know you'd love it.