The Folio Society Publishes Emily Dickinson’s Selected Poems

Emily Dickinson (1830-86) is considered one of the great visionary poets of nineteenth-century America, but she published just a handful of poems in her lifetime, her first collection appearing posthumously.

Dickinson wrote over 1,800 poems. Exploring themes of love, loss, faith and death, she delivers emotional insights with a precision and candour remarkable even by modern standards. Her radical style led her early editors to make substantial alterations to her verse, diminishing the power of her work. This edition from The Folio Society, featuring more than 170 poems, follows the text edited by Thomas H. Johnson, which restores their original form.

Throughout her life, and even more so since her death in 1886, Emily Dickinson was shrouded in mystery. She rarely left her father’s home in Amherst, Massachusetts, becoming known locally as ‘the Myth’. This reclusion seems at odds with her verse - so expansive in range and passionately engaged with the pains and joys of life.

The introduction is by the celebrated poet Lavinia Greenlaw; the integrated wood engravings are by Jane Lydbury. A translucent dust jacket superimposes Dickinson’s figure on a wild, rural landscape, reflecting at once her removal from and deep connectedness to the world outside her home.

It is easy to imagine that Ralph Waldo Emerson, who knew Dickinson’s brother, Austin, had her poems in mind when he declared: ‘For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.’

Product information

Bound in cloth, printed with a design by the artist. Set in Bembo Book. 160 pages with 12 integrated wood engravings. Printed endpapers. 83??4 ? x 51??2 ?. This edition has a translucent dust jacket in place of a slipcase.
UK £19.95 US $29.95 Can $39.95 Aus $39.95