Summary
The richest and most authoritative selected volume of Emily Dickinson's poems.
Here is the best of Emily Dickinson's poetry -- 576 poems that fully and fairly represent not only the complete range of Dickinson's poetic genius but also the complexity of her personality, the fluctuation of her mood, and the development of her style. Final Harvest is the first selected volume of Dickinson's work that draws from all 1,775 of her poems -- poems of such startling originality that they were doomed to obscurity in Dickinson's own lifetime.
"We have had to wait more than a century and a quarter for Final Harvest , the first truly selected poems of Emily Dickinson...In its own and special way, this book stands like a monument at the end of a very long road in literary history." -- Christian Science Monitor
Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts on December 10, 1830. Although one of America's most acclaimed poets, the bulk of her work was not published until well after her death on May 15, 1886. The few poems published in her lifetime were not received with any great fanfare. After her death, Dickinson's sister Lavinia found over 1,700 poems Emily had written and stashed away in a drawer -- the accumulation of a life's obsession with words. Critics have agreed that Dickinson's poetry was well ahead of its time. Today she is considered one of the best poets of the English language.
Except for a year spent at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, Dickinson spent her entire life in the family home in Amherst, Massachusetts. She never married and began to withdraw from society, eventually becoming a recluse.
Dickinson's poetry engages the reader and requires his or her participation. Full of highly charged metaphors, her free verse and choice of words are best understood when read aloud. Dickinson's punctuation and capitalization, not orthodox by Victorian standards and called "spasmodic" by her critics, give greater emphasis to her meanings.
(Bowker Author Biography)