New Poems of Emily Dickinson (Paperback)

~ (Author), William H. Shurr (Editor), Anna Dunlap (Editor), Emily Grey Shurr (Editor)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Shurr ( The Marriage of Emily Dickinson ) carries one step further Thomas H. Johnson's practice of extracting poetic passages from the prose of Dickinson. Scrupulously reading her letters for passages that contain her familiar iambics, meter or punctuation, Shurr gathers nearly 500 such "excavations," which he has altered minimally to conform with Dickinson's "usual poetic lines." In addition, he isolates such categories as riddles and epigrams: "I thought your approbation Fame- / and it's withdrawal Infamy." The brevity and visual intensity of many short pieces show Dickinson as a precursor of the Imagists. But instead of letting the excerpts speak for themselves, Shurr fleshes them out with other poetic excerpts that require contextual explanation and "workshop" fragments that, he tells us, would have made excellent poems had they been further developed. A repetitive discussion of Dickinson's form and metric structure prefaces chapters as well as individual works. Such academic posturing interferes with the reader's casual enjoyment of much of the material here, which falls so naturally into poetry it's difficult to imagine it as anything else.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From School Library Journal

YA-Readers intrigued by Dickinson's poetry will welcome this unusual volume, which increases her body of work by 498 selections. Shurr has accomplished this by combing three volumes of the poet's letters and identifying epigrams, riddles, and various longer lyrical pieces within the prose. These will both challenge and delight serious readers, for wit, unusual rhythms, and musical rhymes predominate. The organization is easy to follow: the divisions include a discussion of epigrams, a new genre for Dickinson critics; many fully developed poems-within-letters; miscellaneous experimental forms; and a collection of the poet's juvenalia, instructive for its foreshadowing of technique and themes to come. Although some critics will object to Shurr's technique of labeling prose lines as poems, this volume expands students' notions of where poetry can be found. Writing teachers will mine this rich new resource as well.
Margaret Nolan, W.T. Woodson High School, Fairfax, VA
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 136 pages
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press; 1st ptg edition (September 24, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807844160
• ISBN-13: 978-0807844168
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 5.5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: No customer reviews yet. Be the first.
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,133,116 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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