A Concordance To The Poems Of Emily Dickinson

A Concordance to the Poems of Emily Dickinson is the third volume in the distinguished series "Cornell Concordances." Like the others, it was programmed on an IBM 704 electronic computer and provides an alphabetical list of all significant words—each word given in context. In order to provide variants, it was based on Thomas H. Johnson's three-volume edition of all the known texts of Emily Dickinson's poems. Included are an analytical preface by the editor and an index of words in the order of frequency.

This valuable resource for Dickinson scholars is based on the Thomas H. Johnson three-volume edition of the letters (published in 1958 and 1965) as well as the 1998 one-volume paperback edition. The primary importance of the concordance pertains to the poetic quality of the letters themselves. As editor of both the poems and the letters, T.H. Johnson recognizes this link when he writes: "the letters both in style and rhythm begin to take on qualities that are so nearly the quality of her poems as on occasion to leave the reader in doubt where the letter leaves off and the poem begins." The similarities between the letters and the poems makes the typical concordance search for the poet's thematically significant words and biographical references particularly relevant. Tracing Dickinson's thoughts through her correspondence complements the ideas within her poetry and thus provides a more comprehensive insight into the poet's personal and artistic development. The concordance will facilitate an understanding of words or concepts that may be obscure in the poetry by itself. Research into Dickinson's problematic style, characterized by gaps, disjunctions, and ellipses, will be greatly enhanced. By listing Dickinson's words together with their contexts and frequencies, the concordance provides the scholar with the ability to answer confidently questions of a statistical or stylistic nature. Finally, one of the most important functions of this concordance is to provide scholar, student, and general reader alike with endless opportunities to make exciting and unexpected discoveries by way of browsing.

A new poetry book by Susan Howe is always an event

"Starts off as a manifesto but becomes richer and more suggestive as it develops."—The New York Sun For Wallace Stevens, "Poetry is the scholar's art." Susan Howe—taking the poet-scholar-critics Charles Olson, H.D., and William Carlos Williams (among others) as her guides—embodies that art in her 1985 My Emily Dickinson (winner of the Before Columbus Foundation Book Award). Howe shows ways in which earlier scholarship had shortened Dickinson's intellectual reach by ignoring the use to which she put her wide reading. Giving close attention to the well-known poem, "My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun," Home tracks Dickens, Browning, Emily Brontë, Shakespeare, and Spenser, as well as local Connecticut River Valley histories, Puritan sermons, captivity narratives, and the popular culture of the day. "Dickinson's life was language and a lexicon her landscape. Forcing, abbreviating, pushing, padding, subtracting, riddling, interrogating, re-writing, she pulled text from text...."

"The book gives detailed attention to the principal trends in Dickinson scholarship during the past half-century: rhetorical and stylistic analysis of the poems and letters; biographical studies informed by theories of gender, sexuality, and by medical history; feminist studies of the poet's life and work; textual studies of the bound and unbound fascicles and the so-called worksheet drafts (or "scraps"); new assessments of the poet's social and cultural milieu, including influences on her spiritual sensibility; and of her theories of poetry, including lyricism."--BOOK JACKET.

One of America's most celebrated women, Emily Dickinson was virtually unpublished in her own time and unknown to the public at large. Yet since the first publication of a limited selection of her poems in 1890, she has emerged as one of the most challenging and rewarding writers of all time. Born into a prosperous family in small town Amherst, Massachusetts, she had an above average education for a woman, attending a private high school and then Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, now Mount Holyoke College. Returning to Amherst to her loving family and her "feast" in the reading line, in the 1850s she became increasingly solitary and after the Civil War she spent her life indoors. Despite her cooking and gardening and extensive correspondence, Dickinson's life was strikingly narrow in its social compass. Not so her mind, and on her death in 1886 her sister discovered an astonishing cache of close to eighteen hundred poems. Bitter family quarrels delayed the full publication of Dickinson's "letter to the World," but today her poetry is commonly anthologized and widely praised for its precision, its intensity, its depth and beauty. Dickinson's life and work, however, remain in important ways mysterious. The essays presented here, all of them previously unpublished, provide an overview of Dickinson studies at the start of the twenty-first century. Written in an engaging and accessible style, this collection represents the best of contemporary scholarship and points the way toward exciting new directions for the future. The volume includes a biographical essay that covers some of the major turning points in the poet's life, especially those emphasized by her letters. Other essays discuss Dickinson's religious beliefs, her response to the Civil War, her class-based politics, her place in a tradition of American women's poetry, and the editing of her manuscripts. A Historical Guide to Emily Dickinson concludes with a rich bibliographical essay describing the controversial history of Dickinson's life in print, together with a substantial bibliography of relevant sources.