Emily Dickinson, Poems

Margaret Freeman (Myrifield Institute for Cognition and the Arts)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.2: American (US) Writing and Culture: The Nineteenth Century, 1783-1900.
Vol. editors: Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1842 - 1886

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Poem collection

Resources

After Emily Dickinson’s death in 1886, her sister Lavinia found to her astonishment a remarkable hoard of manuscripts: forty booklets of poems (or “fascicles” as they are called) that Dickinson had entrusted to their maid, Maggie Maher, and many sheets and scraps of paper containing more poems and fragments, along with the correspondence that Lavinia had started burning to protect Dickinson’s privacy. Over 1770 different poems were eventually found, only ten of which are known to have been publicly printed in Dickinson’s lifetime.

The question of what constitutes a Dickinson poem is a thorny problem. Thomas H. Johnson, who published in 1955 the first complete edition of the poems, “including …

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

2751 words

Citation: Freeman, Margaret. "Poems". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 26 January 2005 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=16700, accessed 23 November 2024.]

Save this article