The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson
"The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson" is a comprehensive collection of the poetry of Emily Dickinson, an influential American poet known for her unique style and introspective themes. The collection was posthumously compiled, with the first significant publication of her work occurring in 1890, when her sister Lavinia and editor Thomas Wentworth took on the task of transcribing and revising Dickinson’s original manuscripts. Over the years, additional poems were published, including a definitive edition in 1960 that restored Dickinson's original punctuation, capitalization, and unconventional use of dashes.
Dickinson's poetry often explores themes of life, death, and nature, using vivid imagery and innovative language. She is celebrated for her deep connection to the natural world, which she personifies as a nurturing force. Her work also reflects a critique of societal norms, particularly around gender and the constraints of conventional writing. Dickinson's exploration of solitude, identity, and the complexity of the human experience invites readers to engage with the multifaceted nature of existence. With its rich thematic depth and innovative style, "The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson" remains a significant contribution to American literature and continues to resonate with readers seeking insight into the human condition.
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson
First published: 1960
Type of work: Poetry
The Work
After Emily Dickinson’s death in 1886, her sister Lavinia found forty-nine fascicles, or packets, of poems that Dickinson had sewn together during the late 1850s and early 1860s. Lavinia enlisted the help of Mabel Loomis Todd, the wife of an Amherst professor, to transcribe them. With the assistance of the literary editor Thomas Wentworth, they altered the rhyme scheme, regularized the meter, and revised unconventional metaphors for the 115 poems they published in 1890. These were well received and led to the publication in 1891 of 161 additional poems and, in 1896, of 168 more.
In 1914, Dickinson’s niece and literary heir, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, compiled other poems. She kept alterations of the verse to a minimum, as was also the case with additional volumes in 1929 and 1935. Millicent Todd Bingham in 1945 published the remaining 688 poems and fragments. When Dickinson’s literary estate was transferred to Harvard University in 1950, Thomas H. Johnson began to arrange the unreconstructed and comprehensive body of Dickinson’s poetry chronologically. The Poems of Emily Dickinson appeared in 1955, and The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson appeared in 1960. Aside from correcting misspellings and misplaced apostrophes, Johnson let Dickinson’s original punctuation and capitalization stand. To the previously editorialized publications, Johnson restored the original dashes and other nonconformist usage, listing for each poem both the approximate date of the earliest known manuscript and the date of first publication. There is also a helpful “Index of First Lines” (Dickinson did not title her poems) and a fairly comprehensive subject index based on key words or images in the poems, the three most prominent being life, death, and love.
Of those poems that celebrate life, a substantial number are about nature, the inhabitants of which Dickinson frequently praises. Dickinson describes her mission to reveal nature in #441: “This is my letter to the World/ That never wrote to me—/ The simple News that Nature told—/ With tender majesty.” In #111, “The Bee is not afraid of me,” butterflies, brooks, and breezes are among her dearest friends. She often pays tribute to these friends, nature’s creatures, as in “A fuzzy fellow, without feet” (#173), which catalogs the glorious transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly, or “A narrow Fellow in the Grass” (#986), a multisensory description of a sleek but frightening snake. In “An awful Tempest mashed the air” (#198), nature is personified. In #214, nature is a “liquor never brewed” that inebriates the speaker with joy. The sunset is a “Housewife” who has swept the west with color in “She sweeps with many-colored Brooms” (#219). Nature assumes the role of “Gentlest Mother” in #790, bestowing “infinite Affection—/ And infiniter Care” on all the world. Likewise the “Juggler of Day,” the sun, blazes in gold and quenches in purple (#228). In “These are the days when Birds come back” (#130), Dickinson uses sacred—Sacrament, Last Communion—diction to welcome the holy return of spring. In “An altered look about the hill” (#140), she likens the return of spring to the resurrection with a biblical allusion to Nicodemus.
Nature is the focus of Dickinson’s spiritual life as well. Her play with custom is seen in her subverting of religious ceremonies. In “The Gentian weaves her fringes” (#18), Dickinson reveres nature, which pools her resources to memorialize “departing blossoms.” She joins with Bobolink and Bee, Gentian and Maple in this commemoration service, which she closes with a sacrilegious play on the Trinity: “In the name of the Bee—/ And of the Butterfly—/ And of the Breeze—Amen!” Refreshingly, these are the entities with which Dickinson is most comfortable: In #19, the Bee and the Breeze enable her transformation into a Rose; and in #111, the reader learns that her reverence of them is not based in fear, nor is it founded upon not knowing the Other. Rather, they share a mutual knowledge and comfortable relationship:
The Bee is not afraid of me.
Her communion with nature is a voluntary ritual, a genuine connection that makes her misty-eyed. Equally significant, she implies that it is a reciprocally nurturing relationship.
Dickinson resents the dominance of nature by predominantly male scientists and is “mad” about its co-optation, as she writes in #70:
“Arcturus” is his other name—
She has contempt for the scientists, whom she mocks for thinking they can objectively know nature through detached analysis. She fears that such objectification of an entity that she reverences will destroy or endanger its spiritual aspect, "What once was 'Heaven'." Poems #97, #108, and #185 are among others that indict science’s “advances” and its preoccupation with subduing nature, suppressing its playfulness, and interfering with its course.
Dickinson likewise makes a farce of militarism and its threat to life and the world; in #73 she criticizes the hypocrisy of militarism, first camouflaging her satire with the interrogative form, then affirming her disgusted sarcasm with exclamation points.
Who never lost, are unprepared
She concludes that what makes “sense” to society is “Madness” (#435), whereas what society, with its undiscerning eye, would deem “mad” makes the most sense:
Much Madness is divinest Sense—
Dickinson knows the cost of being labeled mad yet risks it, for she can discern the value of her genius and—in a society of one—it matters not whether anyone else can discern that value. The poet understands the price exacted for nonconformity or originality, but nature allows her to balance the risk with her sense of hope, “the thing with feathers—/ That perches in the soul—” (#254). The creator in “He fumbles at your Soul” (#315) stuns “by degrees” until he “Deals-One-imperial-thunderbolt—/ That scalps your naked Soul—.” Dickinson reveals her pantheism in “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church” (#324), wherein the speaker stays at home “With a Bobolink for a Chorister—/ And an Orchard, for a Dome—.” Here, a choir of sextons makes for a heavenly service. Heaven is as accessible as our “Capacity” to imagine, according to poem #370, one of 366 poems written during Dickinson’s marathon poetry year of 1862. This seems quite understandable if one agrees with #383 that “Exhilaration—is within—” and is among the divine feelings “the Soul achieves—Herself—.”
Two other soul poems, #303 and #306, are thematically linked: “The Soul selects her own Society,” which embodies willful solitude and seclusion, and “The Soul’s Superior instants.” One of her best-known “soul” poems is #512, which delineates the soul’s varied dimensions, such as “Bandaged moments” when healing from a blow; “moments of Escape” when it “dances like a Bomb, abroad,” testing the limits of its liberty, and “retaken moments” of caution. The soul is also “an imperial friend” to itself (#683), a theme Dickinson resumes in “There is a solitude of space” (#1695), wherein the soul enjoys a “polar privacy” and, with itself, experiences the paradox of “Finite infinity.” In “A Thought went up my mind today,” the soul even facilitates so-called déjà-vu experiences. The integral connection between the soul and Dickinson’s poetry is encapsulated in “There is no Frigate like a Book” (#1263), wherein “a Page/ Of prancing Poetry—” can bear the soul “Lands away.”
This transport may be necessary when grieving the loss of loved ones to death, another of Dickinson’s subjects. One of the most prominent of these poems is “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” (#280) wherein the mourners pace and the service drones on to the point that “My Mind was going numb—.” Along similar lines, in “After great pain, a formal feeling comes” (#341), grief reduces the narrator to disorientation and mechanical, routine functioning. Also mournful in tone is #258, “There’s a certain Slant of light,” in which “Winter Afternoons,” like “Cathedral tunes,” are oppressive. Even “the Landscape listens” to what is like “the Distance/ On the look of Death—.”
Similarly, in #389, the House wherein “There’s been a Death” has a “numb look” as it prepares for the “Dark Parade” of mourners. It is in just such a house that the speaker of “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—” (#465) met her death. The tenuous “Stillness” that pervades the atmosphere of anticipated death is broken only by the “Blue—uncertain stumbling Buzz—” of a carrion insect, oblivious to the exhausted tears of loving relations. This deceased speaker, in turn, could inhabit “I died for Beauty” (#449) wherein she converses with a kindred “One who died for Truth,” “until the Moss had reached our lips.” Or, she could become one of those who are “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” (#216), awaiting the Resurrection, unable to experience the light of day before that moment. The undercurrent of finality also surfaces in “’Twas warm—at first—like Us” (#519), a graphic and sobering delineation of the stages of rigor mortis and burial, and in “All but Death, can be Adjusted” (#749), a brief poem about death’s irrevocability and incapacity for change.
Personification enables another view of death in one of Dickinson’s most famous poems, “Because I could not stop for Death” (#712). In one of several lyrical poems that correspond to the rhythm and meter of the hymn “Amazing Grace,” Death stops for the speaker in a carriage wherein they pass a figurative panorama of her life and her gravesite on the way to “Eternity.” The redemptive quality of death also surfaces in “A Death blow is a Life blow to Some” (#816), a one-stanza paradox wherein death is described as a wake-up call, as a prerequisite to “Vitality.” In #501, life on earth is merely a way station to what scholars and the faithful can only conjecture. Death, therefore, is to be welcomed rather than feared. Beyond riddle and bordering conundrum are Dickinson’s poems about pain, in which Dickinson undercuts dualities by conflating opposites. Perhaps most poignant among these is #125:
For each ecstatic instant
Even in her earliest poems, Dickinson demonstrates the fun she has with experimental language, particularly with wordplay that reverses meaning, as in #33:
If recollecting were forgetting,
In #67, those who can define or know a thing such as successor victory are those most removed from it: “Success is counted sweetest/ By those who ne’er succeed.” Here, Dickinson again explores notions of identification through opposites and explores the duality of language as found, for example, in the oxymoron saved for the final line of #1695:
There is a solitude of space
In society, people experience the loneliness of death and of vastness; true solitude is that found by the soul that admits only itself but, strangely, has limitless potential—infinity—within the finite bounds it sets itself. Interestingly, in #303, the soul—significantly gendered as feminine—“selects her own Society—.” She “Then—shuts the Door—/ To her divine Majority—/ Present no more—.” In her society of “One” (which she chooses, as readers learn in the third stanza), the poet is free to exercise any choice and free to play with the language of religion, custom, or ceremony. To demonstrate the former, Dickinson in #172 realizes that concepts and words are just that: They have no power beyond themselves. As she says in stanza two,
Life is but Life! And Death, but Death!
Even defeat and death lose their force. The only threat lies in what can be imagined, not in what simply is. Demonstrative of her play with language’s dictates, too, is her use of the exclamation points in this poem and others. Having discovered the limits of language, the poet can not only claim revelatory andrevolutionary discoveries but also sustain whatever degree of emphasis she wishes.
In #165 (“A WoundedDeer—leaps highest”), Dickinson combines these techniques to address the subject of disguising pain by suggesting the unexpected or something seemingly disparate. In another poem referring specifically to female deer (#754), Dickinson dissociates herself from those, especially women, who would defer to powerful forces. Instead, she defines her life as a “Loaded Gun” in search of the doe. Every time she speaks, “The Mountains straight reply—,” thus satisfying her desires both to be heard (for she incurs an echo) and to have, like a bullet, an impact. Only then can she experience pleasure, as the reader learns in stanza three:
And do I smile, such cordial light
Dickinson’s persona in this poem is both madly at play and enjoying the pleasures of play.
As these poems illustrate, Dickinson’s language is highly compressed and disjunctive. The compression accounts for the multiplicity of meaning and the often anomalous, riddling quality of her poems, though it is not clear whether her intention is to speak subversively, to disguise her power or pain, or to express through form her personal ethic of renunciation. Disjunction in punctuation, syntax, action, and tone disrupts the expected patterns of style and meaning. Disjunctive poetry disallows a single “correct” interpretation. Dickinson’s surface features of often inexplicable punctuation, inverted and elliptical syntax, occasional metrical irregularity, off-rhyme, and ungrammaticality rest on the acceptance of an underlying regularity of meter, rhyme, and stanza forms. A similar interplay is found in the juxtaposition of singular nouns with plural verbs and vice versa, as well as in singular versions of plural reflexive pronouns (as in “ourself”). While Dickinson primarily uses the lyric present tense, the subjunctive mood often connotes conditionality or universality. In similar fashion, her figurative language reinforces the nonconventional.
Dickinson believed that language’s potential for meaning exceeds the individual’s control of it. She manipulates punctuation to reflect the resulting flux. Her use of the dash, for example, represents a resistance to definiteness, definition, or closure, as does her irregular vocabulary. Her use of exclamation points and question marks expresses emotional urgency and self-doubt. She also draws on an ironic tone, negation, qualification, and challenges to authority.
Dickinson was reluctant to publicize her rich, nontraditional work, and she was adamant about not selling out. “Publication—is the Auction/ Of the Mind of Man—” she contends in #709, wherein she reluctantly concedes that only poverty could justify “so foul a thing.” She cautions readers not to reduce their souls “To Disgrace of Price—.” Not surprisingly—as in “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” (#288)—she prefers the privacy and dignity that come from being unknown, to the dreariness of being “Somebody!/ How public—like a Frog—” a simile that captures her disdain for those who crave fame and recognition. This poem, like countless others about the subject of poetry (#1212, #1261, #754, #657), demonstrates the integrity of her philosophy and the quiet genius of her poetics, shaped as it is by her age.
As a female literary genius born into a male writing and publishing world in a region where late Calvinist and Puritan theology manifested itself in ideal conventional feminine behavior, Dickinson had few options. Her art expresses an attempt to transcend the patriarchally imposed limits on prose (#613), heaven (#947), and her own sexual identity (#908), limits that she felt deprived her of purpose or place. As she wrote early in her career, in the poem #613 of approximately 1862:
They shut me up in Prose—
The negative images of the first line suggest that Dickinson does not regard prose highly. In a letter, Dickinson wrote,“We please ourselves with the fancy that we’re the only poets, everyone else is prose.” Stating that she had the madness of a poet who would not stay shut up in convention, Dickinson breaks out of this outer-imposed prison to reveal the true singer. The very fact that this inhibition is outer-imposed rather than chosen leaves the persona speechless (that is, “shut up”). Only by creating her own self-initiated and self-chosen style can she abolish her captivity, similar to the “Patriarch’s bird” as female explorer in poem #48. The captive’s dream of freedom found in #613 and #48 also surfaces in #661, when the bee escapes the authoritative chase of police and exclaims: “What Liberty! So Captives deem/ Who tight in Dungeons are.” In another poem, #657, poetry and possibility provide more freedom than prose: “I dwell in Possibility—/ A fairer house than Prose—.”
Prose, specifically as it was conventionally practiced at the time, was not a form of expression conducive to Dickinson’s art, for most of its forms would have required a plot—typically a romance plot whose end restricts female characters either to marriage or death, and in any case a linear progression of events. Dickinson is aware that her mind does not follow such a path and that it is, instead, cyclic, circular, and concentric. In pursuing the nonlinear nature of her thinking and writing, Dickinson created her new aesthetic. She may also have found the prose with which she was familiar to be static, final, and lacking in affect. Its syntax and grammar represent the rational structures she wished to undercut.
The imagination can enact simultaneously both needed sequestration and escape. Dickinson hoped through words to assert autonomy and independence. She mocked social efforts to control and negate her adult liberating self-expression. Through laughter, Dickinson overcame confinement and transformed into success the futility she felt in poems such as #77:
I never hear the word “escape”
This poem, written in 1859, during a year of self-initiated and symbolic changes that Dickinson made in her life—she began, for example, to wear white—indicates her conscious affirmation of her own emancipatory poetry and her decision to ignore external pressures and follow on her own artistic independence and convictions, as she writes in so many subsequent poems.
Dickinson became a stylistic innovator and modern experimentalist so as to voice her sense of autonomy. At the same time, she recognized the tension this innovation would necessarily entail. She discovers, for example, the inevitable discontinuity of her thought in #937:
I felt a Cleaving in my Mind—
Perhaps the split is a result of the agonistic relation between her poetic aesthetic and conventional writing. Even though sequential thought decomposes and ruptures cognition, incoherence attests Dickinson’s use of paradoxes to explode binarism and enable multiplicity and disunity.
If, therefore, Dickinson is to tell the truth, she must tell it “slant,” “in circuit” (#1129):
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—
Dickinson reveals truth gradually, so as not to blind its recipients with its dazzling light. Dazzled by her own discoveries, she experiences a splitting that leads to loneliness and possibly even insanity, as indicated by the final two stanzas of #410:
My Brain—begun to laugh—
Again laughter accompanies this splitting and multiplicity, as it liberates the speaker to the space of madness in which to create and to exercise poetic license. In her attempts to dissociate self, mind, and world, Dickinson in her multiplicitous project tries to speak for those who do not have the language, to see for those who are less conscious, and to create a poetry of extreme states that allows others to go further into their awareness and consciousness.
Dickinson’s poetry focuses meaning even as it scatters, disperses, undoes, and disrupts it. Dancing, spinning, and weaving, even of webs, serve as metaphors for her poesis: She is the performing artist and craftswoman in a sharply defined world. The poet artistically adopts several roles but settles for none. Dickinson believed that the female, like the male, poet would be able to dance freely and fiercely, like the lilies and daisies liberated from toil into ecstasy. Her poetry offers readers the same opportunities.
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