Description
Book SynopsisWhen the complete Letters appeared in 1958, Robert Kirsch wrote in the L.A. Times: The missives offer access to the mind and heart of one of America's most intriguing literary personalities. This selection provides crucial texts for the appreciation of America literature, women's experience in the 19th century, and literature in general.
Trade Review[These letters] present us with as inward a view of one of God’s rarer creatures as we are likely to be given… The letters themselves are as no others. The briefest line can be a mystery (and, when fathomed, a communion), the formal note a sign… If [these letters] are put alongside those of…Coleridge and Keats, they will present the most striking contrast in a poet’s reactions and sensibilities. But they will stand there unashamed. * The Times *
She was no solemn bookworm destined to grow into a crabbed recluse, but a lively original creature, fully participating in the joys and despairs of a busy circle of friends and relatives… Here was a woman capable of the most intense emotion who was forced, or forced herself, to crystallize her feelings into words and phrases. The letters and poems are all of a piece. The letters, in fact, read sometimes like the raw materials of the poems. * Listener *
Emily Dickinson’s letters are among the major treasures of American literature… [In] this one-volume selection…virtually everything of interest to the general reader or nonspecialist has been retained. * Library Journal *
Table of ContentsPublisher's Note Introduction PART I: 1842-1846 "...the Hens lay finely..." PART II: 1847-1848 "I am really at Mt Holyoke..." PART III: 1849-1850 "Amherst is alive with fun this winter..." PART IV: 1851-1854 "...we do not have much poetry, father having made up his mind that its pretty much all real life." PART V: 1855-1857 "To live, and die, and mount again in triumphant body... is no schoolboy's theme!" PART VI: 1858-1861 "Much has occurred...so much that I stagger as I write, in its sharp remembrance." PART VII: 1862-1865 "Perhaps you smile at me. I could not stop for that- My Business is Circumference." PART VIII: 1866-1869 "A Letter always feels to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend." PART IX: 1870-1874 "I find ecstasy in living the mere sense of living is joy enough." PART X: 1875-1879 "Nature is a Haunted House but Art - a House that tries to be haunted." PART XI: 1880-1883 "I hesitate which word to take, as I can take but few and each must be the chiefest..." PART XII: 1884-1886 "...a Letter is a joy of Earth it is denied the Gods." Appendix: Biographical Sketches of Recipients of Letters and of Persons Mentioned in Them Index
