The Poems of Emily Dickinson

The Emily Dickinson Archive makes manuscripts of Dickinson’s poetry, along with transcriptions and annotations from scholarly editions, available in open access—inspiring new scholarship and discourse on this literary icon. Visit EDA »

Interest in Emily Dickinson has grown throughout the years until, now, in this three-volume edition, Thomas Johnson presents the entire body of poems she is known to have written, 1,775 in all. Here are the familiar “I never saw a Moor” and “Because I could not stop for Death,” along with other less well-known poems, including forty-three never before published. Casual notes to friends and relatives which frequently accompany scraps of verse help to reveal the poet’s enigmatic character. After keen analysis of the manuscripts, Johnson has arranged the poems in what is believed to be their chronological order, with variations and rejected versions of each poem following.

In his introduction, the editor discusses the stylistic and historical development of the poetic art of Emily Dickinson, and he considers the manuscripts and the history of the editing of the poems. A careful study of the poet’s handwriting is illustrated with several facsimiles. The appendix contains valuable material on the recipients of the poems as well as a subject index and an index of first lines.