Originally published: 2010. Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents:
In the name of the Bee --The morns are meeker than they were -- An altered look about the hills -- These are the days when birds come back -- Sade in their alabaster chambers -- Our lives are Swiss -- Did the harebell loose her girdle -- To fight aloud, is very brave -- I have never seen "volcanoes" -- A wounded deer leaps highest -- Through the straight pass of suffering -- Title divine, is mine -- I'll tell you how the sun rose -- An awful tempest mashed the air -- He forgot and I remembered -- Some keep the Sabbath going to church -- How many times these low feet staggered -- Bound a trouble and lives will bear it -- That after horror that 'twas us -- The robin's my criterion for tune -- A clock stopped -- Wild nights wild nights! -- Civilization spurns the leopard! -- Of all the souls that stand create -- The zeros taught us phosphorus -- My first well day since many ill -- It sifts from leaden sieves -- A weight with needles on the pounds -- a shady friend for torrid days -- I can wade grief -- "Hope" is the thing with feathers -- Of bronze and blaze -- There's a certain slant of light -- There came a day at summer's full -- He put the belt around my life -- Of nearness to her sundered things -- I felt a funeral in my brain -- 'Tis so appalling it exhilarates -- I would not paint a picture -- She sights a bird she chuckles -- It was not death for I stood up -- A bird, came down he walk -- The soul has bandaged moments -- I know that he exists -- After great pain a formal feeling comes -- This world is not conclusion -- I like to see it lap the miles -- Dare you see a souls at the "white heat"? -- One need not be a chamber to be haunted -- The soul selects her own society -- There are two ripenings -- The first day's night had come -- 'Twas like a maelstrom, with a notch -- A charm invests a face -- I had been hungry all the years -- It would have starved a gnat -- This was a poet -- I died for beauty but was scarce -- The outer from the inner -- I dwell in possibility -- Because I could not stop for death -- There is a pain so utter -- A still volcano life -- This is my letter to the world -- It feels a shame to be alive -- 'Tis not that dying hurts us so -- I reckon when I count at all -- I measure every grief I meet -- A visitor in Marl -- The angle of a landscape -- We dream it is good we are dreaming -- The heart asks pleasure first -- I heard a fly buzz when I died -- God is a distant stately lover -- Much madness is divinest sense -- I saw no way the heavens were stitched -- To fill a gap -- Rehearsal to ourselves -- What soft cherubic creatures -- It makes no difference abroad -- The tint I cannot take is best -- The way I read a letter's this -- I cannot live with you -- They put us far apart -- The props assist the house -- On a columnar self -- It's easy to invent a life -- Pain has an element of blank -- My life had stood a loaded gun -- Essential oils are wrung -- Four trees upon a solitary acre -- Renunciation is a piercing virtue -- Publication is the auction -- Growth of man like growth of nature -- The wind begun to rock the grass. I never saw a moor -- The admirations and contempts of time -- Color caste denomination -- She rose to his requirement dropt -- They say that "time assuages" -- I felt a cleaving in my mind -- Further in summer than the birds -- Split the lark and you'll find the music -- I stepped from plank to plank -- The poets light but lamps -- As imperceptibly as grief -- A light exists in spring -- Bee! I'm expecting you! -- He scanned it staggered -- Crumbling is not an instant's act -- Bloom is result to meet a flower -- As the starved maelstrom laps the navies -- A narrow fellow in the grass -- Ashes denote that fire was -- The last night that she lived -- The sky is low the clouds are mean -- The murmuring of bees has ceased -- These are the nights that beetles love -- A spider sewed at night -- The bone that has no marrow -- Shall I take thee, the poet said -- Tell all the truth but tell it slant -- A word dropped careless on a page -- Now I knew I lost her -- The things we thought that we should do -- Art thou the thing I wanted? -- I never hear that one is dead -- Abraham to kill him -- Wonder is not precisely knowing -- The rat is the concisest tenant -- Those cattle smaller than a bee -- Long years apart can make no -- The bat is dun, with wrinkled wings -- Lay this laurel on the one -- The road was lit with moon and star -- A route of evanescence -- The fascinating chill that music leaves -- 'Tis whiter than an Indian Pipe -- Mine enemy is growing old -- The Bible is an antique volume -- Those dying then -- He ate and drank the precious words -- There came a wind like a bugle -- Apparently with no surprise -- A word made flesh is seldom -- In winter in my room -- The waters chased him as he fled -- 'Twas here my summer paused -- My life closed twice before its close; -- To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee.
Summary:
Seamus Heaney, Denis Donoghue, William Pritchard, Marilyn Butler, Harold Bloom, and many others have praised Helen Vendler as one of the most attentive readers of poetry. Here, Vendler turns her illuminating skills as a critic to 150 selected poems of Emily Dickinson. As she did in "The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets", she serves as an incomparable guide, considering both stylistic and imaginative features of the poems. In selecting these poems for commentary Vendler chooses to exhibit many aspects of Dickinson's work as a poet, "from her first-person poems to the poems of grand abstraction, from her ecstatic verses to her unparalleled depictions of emotional numbness, from her comic anecdotes to her painful poems of aftermath". Included here are many expected favorites as well as more complex and less often anthologized poems. Taken together, Vendler's selection reveals Emily Dickinson's development as a poet, her astonishing range, and her revelation of what Wordsworth called "the history and science of feeling". In accompanying commentaries Vendler offers a deeper acquaintance with Dickinson the writer, "the inventive conceiver and linguistic shaper of her perennial themes." All of Dickinson's preoccupations - death, religion, love, the natural world, the nature of thought - are explored here in detail, but Vendler always takes care to emphasize the poet's startling imagination and the ingenuity of her linguistic invention. Whether exploring less familiar poems or favorites we thought we knew, Vendler reveals Dickinson as "a master" of a revolutionary verse - language of immediacy and power. "Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries" will be an indispensable reference work for students of "Dickinson" and readers of lyric poetry.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.