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    New Poems of Emily Dickinson
    New Poems of Emily Dickinson
    New Poems of Emily Dickinson
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    New Poems of Emily Dickinson

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    For most of her life Emily Dickinson regularly embedded poems, disguised as prose, in her lively and thoughtful letters. Although many critics have commented on the poetic quality of Dickinson's letters, William Shurr is the first to draw fully developed poems from them. In this remarkable volume, he presents nearly 500 new poems that he and his associates excavated from her correspondence, thereby expanding the canon of Dickinson's known poems by almost one-third and making a remarkable addition to the study of American literature. Here are new riddles and epigrams, as well as longer lyrics that have never been seen as poems before. While Shurr has reformatted passages from the letters as poetry, a practice Dickinson herself occasionally followed, no words, punctuation, or spellings have been changed. Shurr points out that these new verses have much in common with Dickinson's well-known poems: they have her typical punctuation (especially the characteristic dashes and capitalizations); they use her preferred hymn or ballad meters; and they continue her search for new and unusual rhymes. Most of all, these poems continue Dickinson's remarkable experiments in extending the boundaries of poetry and human sensibility.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe University of North Carolina Press
    Release dateJan 1, 2015
    ISBN9781469621531
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    Reviews for New Poems of Emily Dickinson

    3.5/5

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    • 5/5
      My own copy of this is the original hardcover brought out by Little Brown in the early 1970's. The Thomas Johnson edition is the only one to have; others, earlier, tidied up the remarkable poems of this writer. This edition contains them all, from the sweet nature poems that made me hate her when I was 11 and memorizing poetry, to the unflinching and often erotic poetry that came in such a rush in the 1860's to her pen. (and were then written and faircopied and tucked away in little booklets). Her work is a jolt to the heart at its best. (and at its worst, trivial and coy. But, my god, nearly 2000 poems?).
    • 4/5
      Please do not mistake my relatively low rating (3.5 stars) as a judgment on Dickinson's achievements. My rating is soley based on the edition on my bookshelf, edited by Thomas Johnson way back in 1960. I'll quote Chrisopher Benfey in the New York Review of Books: "There were problems with the Johnson edition, and they increased over time. Forced to work from photostats of many of the poems, Johnson made errors of transcription. Manuscripts unknown to him, generally variants of already familiar poems, continued to surface. And scholarly debates about the dating and the arrangement of poems on the page proliferated. For some time it has been evident that a new edition of Dickinson's poems was needed." And a new edition has appeared -- 10 years ago! I need to get off my duff and go out and do the right thing, "because I could not shop for death."
    • 5/5
      I once decided to read through this list of 100 Significant books--there were only 3 women on that list: Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Emily Dickinson. Many would name her as the greatest women poet, and there are few rivals for the title of best American poet. She's definitely a personal favorite of mine. I have more than one edition of Emily Dickinson's poetry: A collection of selected poetry in hardcover, much loved, and a recently acquired ebook of the complete poems. I do recommend this edition--but with a caution. This is perhaps not the first exposure you should have to Dickinson--or to poetry. I think poetry, like classical music, improves enormously upon repetition. I remember once not much liking classic music. But a music appreciation class was required to graduate from my college, so I took it. And you know, I found that say, Bach, was a composer I appreciated much more upon repetition. Dickinson, I found to my surprise in the complete edition, isn't as familiar as I thought. She's much, much more prolific than I thought. There are, 1,775 poems in this complete edition. That's right--over a thousand. Nor are all her poems as deeply steeped into the culture as say Keats--or even Frost. Dickinson was ahead of her time and her works only trickled down slowly. She published only a handful of poetry in her life time. A few years after her death in 1886 an edition of little more than a hundred of her poems was published--and heavily edited to suit the tastes of the time. There are poems here that weren't published until 1961!They're all short--often just a few lines, half a page--the longest isn't very long--just a few pages. This means this book will defeat you if you try to read it cover to cover. Mind you, I did fine doing that with Keats and Frost--but somehow I found Dickinson harder, more enigmatic than I expected. And since the poems are in chronological order... well, her earliest poem is, would you believe it? A not very good Valentine's poem. Not the best introduction to her. I'm still giving this book five stars--because what I loved, I loved. And I suspect what I didn't love, I may love yet. I really can't just pick out favorites here--the list would just go on and on. Although I have a soft spot for "Why Have They Shut Me Out of Heaven" since it was introduced to me at the Julliard recital of a young coworker--to Aaron Copland's setting. I do recommend you get his cycle of 12 Dickinson poems if you like classical music at all. There is a gorgeous recording with Leontyne Price of an orchestral rendition of 8 of them. And if you're not a big fan of poetry but want to get a taste of it, perhaps an edition of only selected poetry would be the best place to start. It's just I so quickly got glutted. There's so much here. Here's a short one I found striking I'm still mulling over:177Ah, Necromancy Sweet!Ah, Wizard erudite!Teach me the skill,That I instil the painSurgeons assuage in vain,Nor Herb of all the plainCan Heal!(Published 1929)Uh... did Dickinson just wish she could practice black magic on an enemy? I didn't just read that, did I? I don't see any references to the history and politics of the day, and little that can be gleaned of her personal life. But there are riches here to be discovered no slim little volume can offer.
    • 5/5
      My grandfather gave me this book for my birthday or Christmas or something when I was about 10 or 11.It's brilliant. I used to read one poem every night before going to bed.
    • 5/5
      One of the great works of modern editorship, an Emily Dickinson who can breathe, pause, look, dance, commune. Read with Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson, it's like plunging into blue morning.
    • 4/5
      Gorgeous and melancholy. Some pieces were of course more beautiful than others, but I cannot fathom anyone not loving at least ONE of her poems.
    • 5/5
      How does one review Emily? One of a kind.
    • 5/5
      The Soul...softer than snow, faster than light.
    • 5/5
      If I were shipwrecked on a desert island, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson is definitely one of the books I would swim back to the scuttled ship to bring back with me to the shore. I would look for the Complete Works of Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson's poems, and of course, a book on how to survive on a desert island.
    • 5/5
      There's an Emily Dickinson poem for every kind of day, and every life event.Indispensable.
    • 5/5
      This book contains the best of Emily Dickenson. It is one of my favorites; because I love her simple and solitary poems.
    • 4/5
      A wonderful revelation: This is NOT the Emily Dickinson that you remember from your tenth-grade English class. Be prepared to pay attention . . .
    • 5/5
      Dickinson is arguably the greatest poet in the history of the language; her 1776 poems, give or take a few, are so concentrated they require the same time commitment for reading as, say, Shakespeare's collected plays. She made out of the humble ballad form (or hymnody's "common measure") an entirely new vehicle, so that it is hard to write ballad form uninfluenced by Dickinson, just as it is nigh impossible to write iambic pentameter uninfluenced by Shakespeare. Like Jane Austen in size--and in both writing at tiny desks, for tiny women--she like Austen revolutionized her chosen literary form. I read her, three or four poems a day, for a year. A very fine teacher of mine (a well-known critic and reviewer) read all her poems in a couple months--and all her critics. He was not as impressed as I was, I think because he did not commit the necessary time--and ear. Her poems on specific natural phenomena--natural creatures, the weather, the dawn--are unsurpassed. One of her greatest poem evokes the Blue Jay, a mean bird: "No Brigadier throughout the Year / So civic as the Jay..." After describing him as a good neighbor, buddy of snow and winter's severity, Dickinson spells out her theological position, why she never attended the Congregational Church her brother Austin built diagonally across the street. For the Jay: "His character--a Tonic--/ His future, a Dispute--/Unfair an Immortality / That leaves this Neighbor out." Talk about universalism. ED includes even the unkindly, but neighborly Jay among the Saved.
    • 5/5
      My life closed twice before its close; It yet remains to seeIf Immortality unveil A third event to me,So huge, so hopeless to conceive, As these that twice befell.Parting is all we know of heaven, And all we need of hell.I've never before read a work by an author that so completely encapsulated everything that I was feeling and wanted to say but didn't have the poetic verve to express. Emily Dickinson's words are like lyrics in a song. Instantly expressive and vibrant they are cloaked with hidden meaning comprehensible only by those who understand the subject upon which she is writing. There is virtually no human experience that escapes the reach of her pen.You either love her poems or hate them but I fail to believe there is a middle ground.
    • 5/5
      “I taste a liquor never brewed” by Emily DickinsonI taste a liquor never brewed –From Tankards scooped in Pearl –Not all the Vats upon the RhineYield such an Alcohol!Inebriate of air – am I –And Debauchee of Dew –Reeling – thro' endless summer days –From inns of molten Blue –When "Landlords" turn the drunken BeeOut of the Foxglove's door –When Butterflies – renounce their "drams" –I shall but drink the more!Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats –And Saints – to windows run –To see the little TipplerLeaning against the – Sun!Inebriated by poetry"I taste a liquor never brewed" a poem by E. DickinsonFor me, this is an hymn to poetry and what is sacred about the act of writing. I read line after line as an invocation to beauty in all its natural forms until I got drunk with it, until I, the reader, was able to reach the heavens and join its inhabitants, Seraphs and Saints, along with Emily, who is writing from there.In this sense, I guess that we, the readers who are able to share beauty through words, are rewarded with the admittance in Dickinson's house of possibility and poetry.The poem read also as an hymn for me because of its musicality and rhyme which I became aware of when I first read the poem out loud. The way the words sang by themselves came as a surprise, and the lack of punctuation, only the dashes and the capital letters to emphasise some words, made the poem more open and infinite.Analysing stanza by stanza, the poem starts with a reference to a certain liquor, which is a strange one, because it was never brewed and because its vastness wouldn't fit into such a huge river as the Rhine. There's also the reference to the ancient age of this liquor, because the Rhine, along with the Danube, appeared as important rivers in historical texts during the Roman Empire.So, going forward, this strange alcohol, makes the " I " in this poem inebriated. I understand this " I " as the writer, in this case, Emily. She speaks of herself being drunk with this strange liquor, a liquor which comes from dew, air and summer days melted in endless blue skies. As I see it, in this second stanza, Emily is describing the beauty of the natural world as overwhelming, she is dizzy, intoxicated with it, and she drinks it in the inns of Nature.And in the third stanza she stresses out this last idea even more, because the more the inhabitants of this natural world, the bee, the foxglove, the butterfly, are denied by foreign "Landlords", emphasised by quotation marks, the more she drinks of this natural liquor, the more inebriated she becomes.As for the interpretation of these Landlords, I take it as if they were the real world, the rationality, Emily's house of prose. The ones who call the imagination back to earth and out of this world of poetry and possibility.The last stanza is for me, the most difficult to analyse. Emily is intoxicated by the beauty of nature and ultimately, of poetry, but she keeps drinking and drinking in it, until the whole act of writing becomes sacred. I understand that she reaches heaven in the Biblical sense, and salvation if I dare say. I'll risk it by saying that this "Tippler" might be Jesus, leaning against this sun, this shinning light, waiting for her to reach out for her destiny, her fate, her mission in life, which is to write, to become a poet.And just another conclusion after rereading the whole thing again.I also think, that the metaphor of liquor and inebriation is not a casual one. If you think of men drinking in inns and socialising in the XIXth century, you might wonder how a reclusive person as Emily might view this kind of activity. Surely she might have disapproved of someone getting drunk, and this poem might also be a criticism to such behaviour and at the same time, she elevates something she finds ugly or negative to an utterly magnificent and celestial act, the act of writing, proving its capacity to transform the dull world of reality into a beautiful fan of possibilities.
    • 5/5
      It was wasted on me in High School... Now I would willingly sit down and read a few poems. The poems of Emily Dickinson, not much else needs to be said.
    • 5/5
      My divine emily dickinson who deems more understanding even today!

    Book preview

    New Poems of Emily Dickinson - William H. Shurr

    New Poems of Emily Dickinson

    New Poems of Emily Dickinson

    Edited by William H. Shurr

    with Anna Dunlap & Emily Grey Shurr

    The University of North Carolina Press

    Chapel Hill & London

    © 1993 The University of North Carolina Press.

    All rights reserved.

    Manufactured in the United States of America.

    The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

    Selected poems are reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H.Johnson, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

    Excerpts from selected letters are reprinted by permission of the publishers from The Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, copyright © 1958, 1986 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is found on the last page of this book.

    Revised edition

    97      5 4 3 2

    THIS BOOK WAS DIGITALLY PRINTED.

              G  G  H  S

    Contents

    Preface

    1 Introduction: The Metrics of the Letters

    2 The Epigrams

    3 New Poems

    4 Tetrameters, Trimeters, Riddles, and Such

    5 Workshop Materials

    6 Juvenilia, Sources, and the Growth of the Poet

    7 Bibliographical Essay

    Bibliography

    Index of Subjects

    Index of First Lines

    Preface

    I wish to express my gratitude to the National Endowment for the Humanities, which awarded me funds for a project called New Methods of Editing the Letters of Emily Dickinson. The John C. Hodges Fund of the University of Tennessee English Department has also provided help for the development of this project.

    Thanks also to my two assistants. We have all studied the letters, and each of us has found poems that the others missed. All of us have participated in the research, the editorial decisions, and the many other chores that go into the making of a book. Thanks to my friends Suzanne Juhasz, Emory Elliott, and Everett Emerson for their support and encouragement of this work. Caroline Maun has also provided a careful reading and many good suggestions. And thanks finally to Carol Rigsby, who aided greatly in preparing the final version of the manuscript.

    All of the new poems printed in this book are taken from Thomas H.Johnson’s three-volume work, The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1955).

    Each poem deemed to be a permanent addition to the Dickinson canon is given its own number on the far left. These numbers are for identification only and do not indicate chronological order. The source of each poem is noted in the text or in parentheses at the end by the Johnson number of the letter from which it was taken; this number will enable the reader to establish the chronological position of the work in the Dickinson canon and also to search out the context. Throughout, I have followed Johnson’s rendition of Dickinson’s spelling and punctuation.

    Chapter One: Introduction: The Metrics of the Letters

    A Letter is a joy of Earth—

    It is denied the Gods—

        Letter 960

    As readers of Emily Dickinson probably know, there are presently 1,775 poems in her canon. No additions have been made since the 1955 publication of Thomas H. Johnson’s three-volume variorum edition of the poems. This fact is surprising, because the expectation when Johnson’s work appeared was that the edition would generate a new and wider interest in Dickinson and that such publicity would bring new materials to light. But though more than thirty-five years have now passed, only an early letter and a new copy of a well-known poem have thus far been discovered.

    When Richard B. Sewall finished his biography of 1974, he listed at the end a census of all known Dickinson correspondence that had not yet been found. Not even this second stimulus has produced new materials, nor have the continuing research efforts of Dickinson scholars who produce dozens of new books and essays each year. Yet we continue to hope that there are stores of Dickinson material still to be discovered, works to feed the appetite of those who would like to have more of her poems.

    In the meantime—until some barn or attic yields its treasures—a source of new Dickinson poems does exist that has not yet been mined, though it has lain close at hand for many decades. I refer to Dickinson’s letters and the prose-formatted poems she included in them. A careful excavation of these letters reveals many new poems and fragments of poems, poems which should be added to the canon and studied in their rightful place there.

    As her readers know, Dickinson’s letters are highly charged. Passages are nervous, intelligent, rhythmic, allusive, musical—as are the poems. She herself wrote out some passages as poetry; others echo with her typical and favored poetic devices. The present work is a study and presentation of these poetic materials in the three volumes of her letters.

    The study has yielded nearly five hundred new poems which can be categorized into five types: first, Dickinson’s epigrams, to be prized as a new genre never before identified; second, what I shall call prose-formatted poems, passages from her letters which, when the format is altered, look very much like the Dickinson poems we are already familiar with; third, a group of miscellaneous poetic forms, including riddles; fourth, what seem to be rough drafts or workshop materials that appear in her letters as fragmentary poems; and fifth, a collection of juvenilia from her early letters which gives some unexpected glimpses into the sources of her style. These categories determine the five major chapters of this book. Each category will be discussed at greater length in the appropriate chapter.

    The poems in this collection were mostly written out as prose in Dickinson’s letters, except for the very few clearly indicated citations of previously established poems included by Johnson in the Complete Poems and introduced here for comparison.

    In preparing his edition of Dickinson’s poems, Johnson carefully studied the manuscript drafts of her letters, searching for those poems that look like poems on the written page, with each line indented from the left. He included most of them in The Poems of Emily Dickinson (3 vols., 1955) and The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (1960). But this methodology left behind many Dickinson poems disguised in the letters as prose. Numerous passages in the letters fall into Dickinson’s easily recognized fourteeners, a line of iambic tetrameter followed by a line of iambic trimeter. This is the ballad meter or hymn meter (also called common measure in the hymnbooks) which was Dickinson’s line of choice. When she thought writing, she frequently thought fourteeners. During many years of listening to Emily Dickinson’s poetry, I have come to think of this formation as a part of her poetic signature. Other elements of her signature—the use of a dash for a pause, the use of initial capitals to emphasize words, and her idiosyncratic use of it’s as a possessive (her lifelong campaign to legitimize this usage never prevailed)—have also aided in the search for the proper poems to excavate. All of these devices have frequently signaled a poem hidden in the prose text.

    Some readers may object that these methods for editing Dickinson have no precedent, that changing her prose lines to poetry is too radical an editorial tactic. This is not true. I have not done anything that Thomas H.Johnson or, more important, that Dickinson herself did not do.

    Johnson, for example, isolated an obviously prose-formatted poem and published it as one of Dickinson’s earliest works of poetry. The poem appears in its original prose format in letter 58. Johnson published it thus as number 2 of the Complete Poems:

    There is another sky,

    Ever serene and fair,

    And there is another sunshine,

    Though it be darkness there;

    Never mind faded forests, Austin,

    Never mind silent fields—

    Here is a little forest,

    Whose leaf is ever green;

    Here is a brighter garden,

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