Essential Dickinson (Essential Poets) [Paperback]

Emily Dickinson (Author)

Book Description

Series: Essential Poets | Publication Date: February 1, 1998

From the introduction by Joyce Carol Oates:

Between them, our great visionary poets of the American nineteenth century, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, have come to represent the extreme, idiosyncratic poles of the American psyche....

Dickinson never shied away from the great subjects of human suffering, loss, death, even madness, but her perspective was intensely private; like Rainer Maria Rilke and Gerard Manley Hopkins, she is the great poet of inwardness, of the indefinable region of the soul in which we are, in a sense, all alone.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

In the person of Joyce Carol Oates, the Ecco Press has found the perfect voice to reveal Emily Dickinson's dazzling mind and thin psychic boundaries. When Oates writes in her bird-alert, penetrating introduction that "The writer is forever in motion, calculating and breathless at once, casting out demons, joys, gems, profundity in skeins of language, then moving restlessly on," she could as well be describing herself. Oates discusses the idiosyncratic dashes and capitalizations, charged syntax, elusive slant rhymes, the inimitable voice "discovered in adolescence" that is "at once self-effacing and self-declaring," so instantly recognizable in its obsessions and hungers. "Hunger--literal? Sexual? A hunger for the manly attributes of freedom and power?" Oates has selected masterpieces and lesser known poems to illustrate her many concerns: the poet's bold imagery, energy, wit, mimicry of child's speech, dream babble, quicksilver moments "recorded in the very instant of manifestation." This is Dickinson "at the white heat" of ecstasy and its sister, despair, and she continues to hold us in awe. --Emily Fragos
Copyright © 1996, Boston Review. All rights reserved. -- From The Boston Review

About the Author

Known as “The Myth of Amherst” for her withdrawal from society while still a young women, Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) had an inner life that was deeply emotional and intense. She know rapture and despair, pondered the wonder of God and the meaning of death. She broke tradition and was criticized for her seminal experiments with unorthodox phrasing, rhyme and broken meter, within concise verse forms, thus becoming an innovator and forerunner of modern poets.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 112 pages
• Publisher: Ecco (February 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0880015209
• ISBN-13: 978-0880015202
• Product Dimensions: 6.5 x 4.6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,123,686 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A little light/ a slant concealed/ Emily D's/ soul revealed, March 30, 2007

By 

Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Essential Dickinson (Essential Poets) (Paperback)

Emily Dickison is one of the world's most memorable poets. This selection of her writing introduces us into her epigrammatic visionary verse-. There could not be a more appropriate person to introduce Emily, than another haunted inhabit of the deep literary imagination- Joyce Carol Oates.
Dickinson's verse stings and remains seared in the mind . It touches earth and tries Heaven in oblique inferences which shatter us out of our mental slumber.In subtle perceptions of metaphor it addresses the fundamental longings and distinctions of the human soul. It defines and redefines our feeling , in contracted language which expands the meaning we give to our own everyday lines.

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

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lovely Verse, Passionately Performed, November 23, 2009

By 

J. Pour - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Essential Dickinson CD (Audio CD)

I'm not, generally speaking, a poetry kind of guy, but this is by a poetess personality with whom I am in sympathy. Her self-imposed, mostly secluded adult existance away from humankind has always made me wonder and appreciate her. I once worked with an old and very experienced female newspaper reporter who once said to me in disgust: "You know, people are just no damned good." I also remember a quote from somewhere, by Charles Bukowski I think, that said: "I like people, but I seem to feel better when they're not around." There seems to be a peace and stillness not to be found elsewhere in living mostly apart from others and not participating in their frantic money gathering, incessant and/or nonsensical babbling, their grand propensity for violence in it's many forms, self-idolizations and their hippocracies. She died for beauty, but from her writing I perceive she found much in nature, but didn't find so much in humankind. Just a sprinkling here and there, and maybe that's enough. Her comments about religion and church-going make me smile. She seems to have been an insightful genius. The recording is just fine.

4.0 out of 5 stars Poems are great, reading is great, but, July 31, 2011

By 

D_Spider (Klamath Falls, Oregon) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Essential Dickinson CD (Audio CD)

the producers could have, should have, included more. Julie Harris' reading is excellent, and of course the poems are excellent, but there's empty space on the disk and there's an ad on the disk for audio-disk recordings that is not what I paid for and not what belongs with Dickinson's poetry. And, as long as I'm being picky, "essential" Dickinson does not include the significant proportion of letters on this disk at the expense of quite a few better-known poems. So it gets only 4 stars from me. "Publication is the Auction / Of the Mind" for sure.