The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (2 page)

 

If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain. (page 8)

 

Pain has an element of blank;
It cannot recollect
When it began, or if there were
A day when it was not. (page 16)

 

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all. (page 22)

 

For each ecstatic instant
We must an anguish pay
In keen and quivering ratio
To the ecstasy. (page 25)

 

Surgeons must be very careful
When they take the knife!
Underneath their fine incisions
Stirs the culprit,—Life! (page 28)

 

Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell. (page 56)

We never know how high we are
Till we are called to rise;
And then, if we are true to plan,
Our statures touch the skies. (page 56)

 

It sounded as if the streets were running,
And then the streets stood still.
Eclipse was all we could see at the window,
And awe was all we could feel. (pages 102-103)

 

I’ll tell you how the sun rose,—
A ribbon at a time. (page 127)

 

If certain, when this life was out,
That yours and mine should be,
I’d toss it yonder like a rind,
And taste eternity. (pages 154-155)

 

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality. (page 200)

 

They say that “time assuages”,—
Time never did assuage;
An actual suffering strengthens,
As sinews do, with age. (page 233)

 

Death is the common right
Of toads and men. (pages 257-258)

 

To be alive is power,
Existence in itself. (page 266)

 

That Love is all there is,
Is all we know of Love. (page 312)

Published by Barnes & Noble Books
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Emily Dickinson’s poems were first published between 1890 and 1891 in three
volumes, edited by Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel L. Todd.
The Single Hound
was edited by Dickinson’s niece Martha
Dickinson Bianchi, and published in 1914.

 

Published in 2003 by Barnes & Noble Classics with new Introduction,
Notes, Biography, Chronology, Inspired By, Comments & Questions,
and For Further Reading.

 

Introduction, Notes, and For Further Reading
Copyright © 2003 by Rachel Wetzsteon.

 

Note on Emily Dickinson, The World of Emily Dickinson and Her Poetry,
Inspired by Emily Dickinson’s Poetry, and Comments & Questions

Copyright © 2003 by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

 

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and
retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

 

ISBN-13: 978-1-59308-050-1
ISBN-10: 1-59308-050-6

eISBN : 978-1-411-43193-5

LC Control Number 2003106733

 

Produced and published in conjunction with:
Fine Creative Media, Inc.
322 Eighth Avenue
New York, NY 10001

 

Michael J. Fine, President and Publisher

 

Printed in the United States of America
QM
5 7 9 10 8 6 4

EMILY DICKINSON

Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts, the second child of Emily Norcross and Edward Dickinson. Emily’s family was prosperous and well established in Amherst society: Her grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson, was the founder of the prestigious Amherst Academy and a cofounder of Amherst College; her father, Edward, a lawyer and politician, was treasurer of Amherst College. The family lived in Amherst’s first brick building, the Homestead, built by Emily’s grandfather in 1813. Dickinson grew up in a strict religious household governed mainly by her father, who often censored her reading choices.

She attended Amherst Academy until she was seventeen, and then spent a year at the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College). She studied a diversity of subjects, including botany and horticulture, which would become lifelong interests. Among writers she studied, she was particularly inspired by the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the novelist George Eliot. It was during her year at Mount Holyoke that she began to question, and even to voice dissension from, her father’s strict religious views.

In 1848, when she was eighteen years old, Dickinson left college and returned to the Homestead, where she lived for the rest of her life. She left home for only a few brief trips to Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Boston. It was during a trip to Philadelphia that she met her lifelong friend the Reverend Charles Wadsworth. In 1856 her brother, Austin, married Susan Huntington Gilbert, who would become one of Dickinson’s closest friends. The couple moved next door to the Homestead into a house built by Dickinson’s father, the Evergreens. At the Evergreens, Dickinson met and began a correspondence with Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield
Republican.

Dickinson wrote the bulk of her nearly 1,800 poems during her years at the Homestead. Five of her poems were printed in the Springfield
Republican,
but Dickinson herself made only one serious attempt at further publication, sending four poems in 1862 to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, poetry editor of the
Atlantic Monthly.
Higginson advised her against publication, saying that the style of her poetry—its unusual rhythm and rhyming—was not commercial. The two continued to correspond, however, and became close friends.

Following the death of her father in 1874, Dickinson became increasingly reclusive, corresponding with friends mainly through letters. She continued writing poetry, and she and her sister, Lavinia, nursed their bedridden mother. Over the next ten years, many of her close friends and family died, including Samuel Bowles, Charles Wadsworth, her mother, and her nephew. In 1884 Dickinson was diagnosed with Bright’s disease, a serious kidney disorder. She died from complications of the disease on May 15, 1886.

After Dickinson’s death, Lavinia discovered her sister’s poems, arranged into little packets bundled with string. She gave them to Higginson and her friend Mabel Loomis Todd for editing. The first of three volumes, titled
Poems,
came out in 1890. A revival of interest in Dickinson’s life and poetry occurred in the late 1950s, when Thomas H. Johnson published the first complete edition of Dickinson’s poems that was faithful in wording and punctuation to her original manuscripts.

THE WORLD OF EMILY DICKINSON AND HER POETRY