The Poems of Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was an American poet who wrote an astonishing amount of poems. She was a solitary and extremely private poet, who saw only a few of her poems published during her life. After discovering a trove of manuscripts left in a wooden box, Dickinson’s sister Lavinia, fortunately, chose to violate Emily’s wishes for her work to be burned after death. With the help of Amherst professors, Lavinia brought her sister’s gifted verse into print.
This brings together the first three series of her posthumous publications which debuted respectively in 1890, 1891, and 1896. It is here in this collection that we witness her poetic depth and range of style. These poems examine love, death, and nature with an effortless yet complex tone and voice. Dickinson’s idiom is as varied as her meter, and her unconventional use of punctuation, metaphor, and image make her an innovator of the lyric akin to many of the early modernists.