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Title: Emily Dickinson: Selected Letters by Emily Dickinson, Thomas Johnson ISBN: 0674250702 Publisher: Belknap Pr Pub. Date: October, 1985 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $20.50 |
Average Customer Rating: 5
Rating: 5
Summary: Precious surviving fragments of a great oeuvre.
Comment: EMILY DICKINSON SELECTED LETTERS. Edited by Thomas H. Johnson. 364 pp. Cambridge, Massachusetts : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971. SBN674-25060-5 (hbk).
Emily Dickinson was a great letter writer, in all senses of the word. In fact one gets the impression that she actually preferred writing to people, than meeting and conversing with them, and for her the arrival of a letter was a great event. A letter was something she looked forward to with keen anticipation, and which she savored to the full whenever one arrived.
The present selection of letters represents only a small proportion of the letters Emily Dickinson actually wrote. She was an inveterate letter-writer, had many correspondents, and wrote thousands of letters. And people in those days collected letters just as today.
Unfortunately it was the custom, whenever anyone died, to make a bonfire of all of their correspondence, probably because of its personal and confidential nature. In this way thousands of pages of Emily Dickinson's writings have been lost to posterity, and we would know much more aboute the details of her day-to-day life, and be able to date her poems more accurately, if it hadn't been for this tragic loss.
Just how great the loss is may be gaged by taking a look at the way Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith have treated her letters in 'Open Me Carefully : Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson' (1998). Whereas Thomas Johnson prints all of ED's letters as straight prose, which of course leads us to read them as straight prose, Hart-Smith give us their particular letters as they actually appear in the original draft - not as continous lines of prose but as very short lines with numerous line breaks - in other words, as poetry.
It would seem that at least some of ED's 'letters' are not so much letters as 'letter-poems,' and when read as poems produce a remarkable range of effects that are lost when all line breaks are removed and the 'letter' is regularized as straight prose. The loss of her letters now begins to look much more serious, for there seems to be a growing feeling among readers that her letters were every bit as great an artistic achievement as her poems.
Given this, the present book becomes something that should interest all serious students of ED, although before reading it they might (if they haven't already) take at look at the Hart-Smith, and keep it in mind while reading the Johnson. One wonders how much poetry may be lurking unrecognized in the regularized lines of 'Emily Dickinson's Selected Letters.'
Rating: 5
Summary: A letter like immortality
Comment: ...
If you are, like me, an Emily Dickinson's great admirer you will be genuinely drawn into this book. Emily Dickinson has bewitched and perplexed everyone with her extremely profound poetry disguised in apparent simplicity. However, in her book of letters we uncover the woman (and not the author) behind her work, whose main assets were acute sensitivity and lovingness. This collection, unlike other books of the genre, such as Elizabeth Bishop's One Art or Keats's book of letters, do not reveal much of her poetry, as her mental struggle with the work, her intentions, or choice of words. Even so, the reader is allowed into her family relationships, into her care and love for her few friends, and above all into her deep-set feeling of solitude. Besides, throughout her letters she discloses her main existential concerns, which are inevitably reflected in her poems. This book makes it possible to discover the books she read and the ones that offered her the greatest pleasure. As the collection includes from her juvenile writings to her latest letters when already living in social "exile," they form a most engrossing reading, with the characteristics of an autobiography, without the intention by the author to write one. In her very words, "my letter as a bee, goes laden."
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Title: The Life of Emily Dickinson by Richard Benson Sewall ISBN: 0674530802 Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: September, 1994 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Belknap) by R.W. Franklin, Emily Dickinson ISBN: 0674676246 Publisher: Belknap Pr Pub. Date: September, 1999 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson by Emily Dickinson, Ellen Louise Hart, Martha Nell Smith ISBN: 0963818368 Publisher: Paris Pr Pub. Date: November, 1998 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson ISBN: 0316184136 Publisher: Little Brown & Co (Pap) Pub. Date: January, 1976 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson by Alfred Habegger ISBN: 0679449868 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 16 October, 2001 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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