Poems by Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson wrote close to eighteen hundred poems in a house in Amherst, Massachusetts, and published almost none of them. This volume gathers the three series that friends brought out after her death in 1886, the books that introduced her to the world. The poems are short, mostly in hymn meter, and they go straight at the things people usually approach sideways: dying, belief, doubt, bees, snow, the exact weight of grief on an ordinary afternoon. Her first editors tidied the punctuation and smoothed the slant rhymes to suit the taste of the 1890s, so these verses sit easier on the eye than her manuscripts do, though the mind behind them still cuts. Free to read in PDF and EPUB.