Selected Poems

Emily Dickinson lived as a recluse in Amherst, Massachusetts, dedicating herself to writing a "letter to the world" - the 1,775 poems left unpublished at her death in 1886. Today Dickinson stands in the front rank of American poets. This Modern Library edition presents the more than four hundred poems that were published between Dickinson's death and 1900. They express her concepts of life and death, of love and nature, and of what Henry James called "the landscape of the soul.".

"No one can read these poems...without perceiving that he is not so much reading as being spoken to," observed Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Archibald MacLeish. "There is a curious energy in the words and a tone like no other most of us have ever heard....I know no poems in which the double structure of words as sounds and words as meanings - that curious relationship of the logically unrelated - will be found, on right reading, to be more comprehensive than it is in the poems of Emily Dickinson."