One of America's most celebrated women, Emily Dickinson was virtually unpublished in her own time and unknown to the public at large. Yet since the first publication of a limited selection of her poems in 1890, she has emerged as one of the most challenging and rewarding writers of all time. Born into a prosperous family in small town Amherst, Massachusetts, she had an above average education for a woman, attending a private high school and then Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, now Mount Holyoke College. Returning to Amherst to her loving family and her "feast" in the reading line, in the 1850s she became increasingly solitary and after the Civil War she spent her life indoors. Despite her cooking and gardening and extensive correspondence, Dickinson's life was strikingly narrow in its social compass. Not so her mind, and on her death in 1886 her sister discovered an astonishing cache of close to eighteen hundred poems. Bitter family quarrels delayed the full publication of Dickinson's "letter to the World," but today her poetry is commonly anthologized and widely praised for its precision, its intensity, its depth and beauty. Dickinson's life and work, however, remain in important ways mysterious. The essays presented here, all of them previously unpublished, provide an overview of Dickinson studies at the start of the twenty-first century. Written in an engaging and accessible style, this collection represents the best of contemporary scholarship and points the way toward exciting new directions for the future. The volume includes a biographical essay that covers some of the major turning points in the poet's life, especially those emphasized by her letters. Other essays discuss Dickinson's religious beliefs, her response to the Civil War, her class-based politics, her place in a tradition of American women's poetry, and the editing of her manuscripts. A Historical Guide to Emily Dickinson concludes with a rich bibliographical essay describing the controversial history of Dickinson's life in print, together with a substantial bibliography of relevant sources.

Few authors are so well suited to historical study as Whitman, who is widely considered America's greatest poet. This Guide combines contemporary cultural studies and historical scholarship to illuminate Whitman's diverse contexts. The essays explore dimensions of Whitman's dynamic relationship to working-class politics, race and slavery, sexual mores, the visual arts, and the idea of democracy. The poet who emerges from this volume is no "solitary singer," distanced from his culture, but what he himself called "the age transfigured," fully enmeshed in his times and addressing issues that are still vital today.

An inspiring and kid-accessible biography of one of the world's most famous poets. Emily Dickinson, who famously wrote "Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul," is brought to life in this moving story. In a small New England town lives Emily Dickinson, a girl in love with small things—a flower petal, a bird, a ray of light, a word. In those small things, her brilliant imagination can see the wide world—and in her words, she takes wing. From celebrated children's author Jennifer Berne comes a lyrical and lovely account of the life of Emily Dickinson: her courage, her faith, and her gift to the world. With Dickinson's own inimitable poetry woven throughout, this lyrical biography is not just a tale of prodigious talent, but also of the power we have to transform ourselves and to reach one another when we speak from the soul. • Fantastic educational opportunity to share Emily Dickinson's story and poetry with young readers • An inspirational real-life story that will appeal to children and adults alike. • Jennifer Berne is the author of critically acclaimed children's biographies of Albert Einstein and Jacques Cousteau. Fans who enjoyed Emily Writes: Emily Dickinson and her Poetic Beginnings, Emily and Carlo, and Uncle Emily will love On Wings of Words. • Books for kids ages 5–8 • Poetry for children • Biographies for children Jennifer Berne is the award-winning author of the biographies Manfish: A Story of Jacques Cousteau and On a Beam of Light: A Story of Albert Einstein. She lives in Copake, New York. Becca Stadtlander is the illustrator of many children's and young adult publications, including Sleep Tight Farm. She was born and raised in Covington, Kentucky.

In a profound new analysis of Dickinson's life and work, Judith Farr explores the desire, suffering, exultation, spiritual rapture, and intense dedication to art that characterize Dickinson's poems, deciphering their many complex and witty references to texts and paintings of the day.

"Starts off as a manifesto but becomes richer and more suggestive as it develops."—The New York Sun For Wallace Stevens, "Poetry is the scholar's art." Susan Howe—taking the poet-scholar-critics Charles Olson, H.D., and William Carlos Williams (among others) as her guides—embodies that art in her 1985 My Emily Dickinson (winner of the Before Columbus Foundation Book Award). Howe shows ways in which earlier scholarship had shortened Dickinson's intellectual reach by ignoring the use to which she put her wide reading. Giving close attention to the well-known poem, "My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun," Howe tracks Dickens, Browning, Emily Brontë, Shakespeare, and Spenser, as well as local Connecticut River Valley histories, Puritan sermons, captivity narratives, and the popular culture of the day. "Dickinson's life was language and a lexicon her landscape. Forcing, abbreviating, pushing, padding, subtracting, riddling, interrogating, re-writing, she pulled text from text...."

An interdisciplinary examination of the poet, her milieu, and the ways she and her contemporaries freed their work from cultural limitations.

Paying special attention to her experience of faith, Lundin relates Dickinson's life -- as it can be charted through her poems and letters -- to nineteenth-century American political, social, religious, and intellectual history. --From publisher description.

A collection of the author's greatest poetry--from the wistful to the unsettling, the wonders of nature to the foibles of human nature--is an ideal introduction for first-time readers. Original.

HERE FOR THE first time, students of Emily Dickinson can find a single source of accurate, up-to-date information on the poet's life and works, her letters and manuscripts, the cultural climate of her times, her reception and influence, and the current state of Dickinson scholarship. Written by a distinguished group of contributors from the United States and abroad, the twenty-two essays in this volume reflect the many facets of the poet's oeuvre, as well as the principal trends in Dickinson studies. Topics include Richard Sewall on Dickinson's life, Agnieszka Salska on her letters, David Porter on themes (or the lack of them) in the poetry, Judith Farr on Dickinson and the visual arts, and Roland Hagenbuchle on the poet and literary theory. Contributions from newer scholars range from Kerstin Behnke on translation and Martha Ackmann on biography to Marietta Messmer on the poet's critical reception and Paul Crumbley on her dialogic voice. Each essay presents a historical overview of the subject under scrutiny and offers detailed discussion of the most relevant issues. The scholarship is original and exemplary, in some cases providing access to little studied areas (for example, Jonnie Guerra's essay on adaptations of the poems in the arts) and in others providing an overview of hotly debated areas of study (Suzanne Juhasz on new directions in Dickinson study, or Martha Nell Smith on editing the poems). Unlike encyclopedic entries, each essay also reflects the contributor's distinct and at times controversial point of view . As a result, the essays will prove useful not just to beginning students, but also to established scholars looking for a review of areas of Dickinson studieswith which they are less familiar.