Customer Reviews

Emily Dickinson: Selected Poems

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I love poetry but had not read many if any of emily dickinson so I picked this up to read in my spare time. At first glance the book and poems seemed so simple and easy to read. I thought it would be a small little delight to read her short poems while waiting in the car, or at the bank, in line at the grocier, but as I embarked on a stolen moment with the poems of emily dickinson you discover her poems are hardly simple.

Every poem seems has more than one meaning. You can truely see how complicated this simple woman must have been even in her observations.

I have been delighted by her insight and each poem makes me wonder of the woman who wrote them. A lovely read.

Just as a prism breaks up light into a band of colors - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet - and their infinite gradations, so do Emily Dickinson's poems become, as it were, a prism which captures the white light of reality, a reality which as it flows through the prism of her poem explodes into a multiplicity of meanings.

It is the rich suggestiveness of her poems, a suggestiveness which generates an incredible range of meanings, that prevents us from ever being able to say (to continue the metaphor) that a given poem is 'about red' or 'about blue,' because her poems, as US critic Robert Weisbuch has observed, are in fact about _everything_. This is what makes her so unique, and this is why she appeals to every kind of reader (or certainly to open-minded ones) and even to children.

Emily Dickinson's poetry is one of the wonders of the world.

If you like poetry that makes you stop and think, or really hits home for you, I'd recommend this book. The book jacket was sort of creepy because it had a picture of her. Anyway, I know I'll be reading this book again and again! :)

One of the true originals. One of the great poets who seem to invent a language, a world of metaphor of her own. A delight in her difficulty and a deep pleasure in her sombre tunes.

"Exultation is the going of an inland soul to sea/ Past the headlands , past the houses / into deep Eternity. "