Emily Dickinson

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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 »

Thomas Johnson, editor of Harvard’s variorum edition of The Poems of Emily Dickinson, brings to this volume an artist’s understanding, imagination and a completeness of information not available to previous writers. Here the complex pattern of emotional forces within the Dickinson family is revealed, and the constantly disturbing outer world reaches in to Emily Dickinson through the personalities of her chosen three—Colonel Higginson, the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, and Helen Hunt Jackson.

For this remarkable and moving book the author has been able to examine and assess all the information concerning Emily Dickinson that is known to exist, something that had not been possible until now. Emily Dickinson lives in these pages as she must have lived in Amherst, a product of the Connecticut Valley—part of it but always beyond it: an original spirit who constructed a universe out of materials infinitely small. As they emerge here from her life her poems speak for her and describe her as audacious, witty, passionate, deliberately elusive, and supremely courageous.