The Emily Dickinson Handbook

Rating:
Summary: Do yourself a favor
Review: If you are new to Dickinson studies, or if you simply want to read the most current thinking about the poems, The Emily Dickinson Handbook is a must. It contains essays on subjects ranging from the historical context of the poems to the poet's metapoetic sensibility. This text is also a wonderful introduction to the writings of the finest Dickinson scholars extant. Richard Sewall, Paul Crumbley, Christanne Miller, Sharon Cameron, Martha Nell Smith, and many other great thinkers offer the reader a glimpse into the realm of magic and poetry. If you love Emily Dickinson, do yourself a favor -- read this book.

Rating:
Summary: Do yourself a favor
Review: If you are new to Dickinson studies, or if you simply want to read the most current thinking about the poems, The Emily Dickinson Handbook is a must. It contains essays on subjects ranging from the historical context of the poems to the poet's metapoetic sensibility. This text is also a wonderful introduction to the writings of the finest Dickinson scholars extant. Richard Sewall, Paul Crumbley, Christanne Miller, Sharon Cameron, Martha Nell Smith, and many other great thinkers offer the reader a glimpse into the realm of magic and poetry. If you love Emily Dickinson, do yourself a favor -- read this book.

Rating:
Summary: Don't pass this one up! It's a gem!
Review: THE EMILY DICKINSON HANDBOOK : Edited by Gudrun Grabher, Roland Hagenbuchle, and Cristanne Miller. 480 pp. Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, 1998. ISBN 1-55849-169-4 (hbk.)

For anyone who is seriously interested in Emily Dickinson, this is a marvelous book that provides up-to-date information about her life and works, her letters and manuscripts, the cultural climate of her age, her reception and influence, and what is going on in current Dickinson scholarship.

The book's 22 essays have been distributed in eight sections : Introduction; Biography; Historical Context; The Manuscripts; The Letters; Dickinson's Poetics; Reception and Influence; New Directions in Dickinson Scholarship.

Although I've read many critical collections, several of which were devoted exclusively to Dickinson, I can't remember ever having been so impressed. Usually an anthology will hold one or two outstanding contributions, with the rest being humdrum and of little real interest, but here pretty well all of them are outstanding, and I found only one that struck me as being both pretentious and obscure.

I was especially impressed by Robert Weisbuch's brilliant 'Prisming Dickinson, or Gathering Paradise by Letting Go,' by Josef Raab's 'The Metapoetic Element in Dickinson,' by Martha Nell Smith's 'Dickinson's Manuscripts,' by Paul Crumbley's 'Dickinson's Dialogic Voice,' by Roland Hagenbuchle's 'Dickinson and Literary Theory,' and in fact by many others. So much so that this seems to me the single most valuable book on Dickinson that I've ever seen, and the one from which I've learned most and continue to learn. It really is that good.

The book is bound in a full strong cloth, stitched, beautifully printed on excellent strong smooth ivory-tinted paper, has clearly been designed to withstand the heavy use it will be getting, and is excellent value for money. No serious student of Emily Dickinson should be without it. Weisbuch's essay, serving as it does to provide one with a whole new way of understanding ED, is pretty well worth the price of the book itself.

So don't pass this one up! It's a gem!