Essential Dickinson

by Joyce Carol Oates; Emily Dickinson

Joyce Carol Oates's personal favorites among Emily Dickinson's poems, including both the much-anthologized and the more obscure. In her introduction, Oates states, "Dickinson is one of very few poets whose work repays countless readings, through a lifetime."

Editions of Essential Dickinson

ISBN 9780060887919	Binding/Format Paperback	Publisher Harpercollins	Date 2006	Price $5.19	New
ISBN 9780061124211	Binding/Format Compact Disc	Publisher Harperaudio	Date 2006	Price $16.61	New
ISBN 9780880014946	Binding/Format Hardcover	Publisher Harpercollins	Date 1996	Price $10.19	Used - Acceptable

Publisher Notes

Emily Dickinson saw fewer than twenty of her 1,775 poems published during her lifetime: when she died in 1886, her obscurity as a poet was nearly total. Now widely recognized as one of the great American poets of the nineteenth century, she is one of a handful from any period whose enduring stature in the world of letters is matched by the loyal affection of generation after generation of readers. In this distinguished addition to The Essential Poets series, Joyce Carol Oates presents a "personal - yet not private" collection of Dickinson favorites, selecting from relatively obscure works as well as better-known poems to illuminate Dickinson's often unacknowledged range. Oates takes care to introduce us to the poet's subversive playfulness; to her rebellious nature and radical aesthetic; to her gender-bending personae and surprisingly wicked humor. At the heart of this collection, of course, stands the work that made Dickinson's reputation as one of America's great visionary poets: an artist who has written with stoic control and astonishing lucidity about the soul's darkest, most terrifying hours.

Media Reviews

"Dickinson looks out intensely from her special need not to approach too close to other people, to experience itself. She expresses an uncertainty principle of the heart, an indeterminacy principle of the human psyche. For her the soul is a domain as resistant to observation and exact measurement as an electron hidden in the atom."

Review this book!