EMILY DICKINSON (1830-1886) is still considered America’s foremost woman poet. Of her more than 1,700 extant poems, only a handful were published in her lifetime. She never married and she seldom left her family home in Amherst, Massachusetts, but she transcended all physical limitations in her extensive, artistic correspondence and, even more so, in her unflinchingly honest, psychologically penetrating and technically adventurous poems.
One hundred nine of her best and best-remembered works are reprinted here exactly1 as they appeared in the first three posthumous anthologies: the 1890 volume (Poems by Emily Dickinson / Edited by two of her friends / Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson, Roberts Brothers, Boston [the 16th edition, 1897, was the specific source]), the 1891 volume (same title as above, plus Second Series [the 5th edition, 1893, was the specific source]) and the 1896 volume (same title as for 1890, plus Third Series [1st edition was source]). The titles (such as “Escape” and “Compensation”) given to some of the poems by the early editors are retained here for completeness, but since they were not original with the poet, they have not been entered in any table of contents or index of titles. An index of first lines has been provided, however, at the end of this volume.
The best and handiest source of dates of original composition (usually only approximate) is The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, n.d. (ca. 1960; a simplified edition of that editor’s complete variorum edition of 1955). The following dates of the 109 selections in the Dover edition are based on Johnson’s research.
Ca. 1858: “It’s all I have to bring to-day” (Dover page 1).
Ca. 1859: “I never hear the word ‘escape’ ” (page 1) through “For each ecstatic instant” (page 2).
Ca. 1860: “The thought beneath so slight a film” and “I taste a liquor never brewed” (both page 2), as well as “I’ll tell you how the sun rose” (page 11).
1861 (or ca. 1861): “Safe in their alabaster chambers” (page 3) through “It’s like the light,—” (page 10), as well as “The nearest dream recedes, unrealized” (page 12).
1862 (or ca. 1862): “A long, long sleep, a famous sleep” (page 10) through “Of all the souls that stand create” (page 32), with the exception of “I’ll tell you how the sun rose” (page 11), “The nearest dream recedes, unrealized” (page 12) and “I years had been from home” (page 28).
Ca. 1863: “One need not be a chamber to be haunted” (page 32) through “Her final summer was it” (page 39).
Ca. 1864: “A light exists in spring” (page 39) through “A door just opened on a street—” (page 43).
Ca. 1865: “A narrow fellow in the grass” (page 44) through “I never saw a moor” (page 45).
Ca. 1866: “The sky is low, the clouds are mean” (page 45) through “The cricket sang” (page 46).
Ca. 1869: “After a hundred years” (page 46).
Ca. 1871: “Before you thought of spring” (page 47).
Ca. 1872: “I years had been from home” (page 28) and “The show is not the show” (page 47).
Ca. 1873: “There is no frigate like a book” and “So proud she was to die” (both page 48).
1878: “We like March, his shoes are purple” (page 48).
Ca. 1884: “The pedigree of honey” (page 49).
Undated: “My life closed twice before its close” (page 49).