[.ca] Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson (ISBN 0517362422)

What was Higginson Thinking?:
I would like to know what Higginson was thinking when he obliterated Emily's poetry. He actaully had the arrogance to think that he knew what she 'intended' to write. This is an absolute farce of a book. Compare the hacked and pieced poems in this 'book' to the ones you find in 'The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson' edited by Thomas H. Johnson. That is the book to get. Johnson was part of the team that maticulously read her hand-written versions and published a word for word, dash for dash version. If you want to read what the genious Emily originally wrote seek the REAL works, not this attrocious adaptation! The print speaks for itself.

Not the original versions!:
If you want to read Emily Dickinson's poetry in their original form and you want to discover the incredible vitality of this poet's intellect, imagination, and artistic skill, don't buy this book. The poems in this collection are "improved" versions of the original poems which can be found in other available editions. Moreover, the selections include most of ED's least interesting work. When ED died two people selected some of her poems and prepared them for publication by adding punctuation, altering words, and even omitting words, lines, and whole stanzas so that the polite readers of her day would find ED's poems more palatable and less offensive.

Emily Dickinson's Poetry is altered by the editor:
I am a big fan of Emily Dickinson, I love her poetry, but this edition is thoroughly rotten. It is not Emily Dickinson's poetry, but the edited version of her poetry, significantly changed by the same editor who rejected Dickinson's poems while she was alive. This edition is changed so much from the original poems that most of Dickinson's meaning is lost. If you want to read what Emily Dickinson really wrote, I reccomed the complete poetry of Emily Dickinson edited by Thomas H. Johnson, it is the complete and original poetry of Dickinson.

A prism which captures the white light of reality:
Just as a prism breaks up light into a band of colors - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet - and their infinite gradations, so do Emily Dickinson's poems become, as it were, a prism which captures the white light of reality, a reality which as it flows through the prism of her poem explodes into a multiplicity of meanings. It is the rich suggestiveness of her poems, a suggestiveness which generates an incredible range of meanings, that prevents us from ever being able to say (to continue the metaphor) that a given poem is 'about red' or 'about blue,' because her poems, as US critic Robert Weisbuch has observed, are in fact about _everything_. This is what makes her so unique, and this is why she appeals to every kind of reader (or certainly to open-minded ones) and even to children. Emily Dickinson's poetry is one of the wonders of the world.

A Crime Against Emily:
This collection of poems, tho representing a fine breadth of Dickenson's works, is in final assessment a crime against the poet's great talent. As is freely admitted in the introduction, the editor, Mr. Higginson, "worked on the mechanics of the poems by smoothing out the rhymes and meter, changing the line arrangements, and rewriting the dialect of the local area." This is a free admission of the book's guilt, having adulterated Dickenson's original poems in both content and form. Gone are the nuances and passions that make Dickenson one of the best American writers. Gone are the premeditated dashed and capitalizations that add depth and intensity to the poems' meanings. And, worst of all, gone or altered are many lines that contribute to the unique vision of the artist. As Thomas H. Johnson says in the Introduction to "The Complete Poems of Emily Dickenson," A representative mid-nineteenth century traditionalist was being asked to judge the work of a wholly new order of craftsman . . . which he was not equipped to estimate." Do yourself a favor and avoid this text. Instead, find one that is true to the original poems, one which preserves the intent and stylistic genius of the author, and one which will give you the full and lasting effect of Emily Dickenson.