Rating: 
Summary: The best book, that was so hidden
Review: I was looking at the poetry section at my local library, because I love poetry, and I found this book, I never thought they had the complete collection of Emily Dickinson, It was really cool, by just reading the 2 poems, i fell in love with the 3rd one!! If you love poetry and Emily Dickinson, this is the book to get!
Rating:
Summary: Not What Your Femi-Nazi Profs Say It Is!
Review: I've spoken to any number of people lately who are totally turned off to Emily Dickinson by their feminist professors and vow never to open her again. I tell them that they are making a mistake. Dickinson appeals to me -- a wicked,unreconstructed, non-feminist, white male -- because she writes passionate, pithy, witty poems that are not restricted by the sort of asphyxiating mediocrity that binds Adrienne Rich et al. Even if Dickinson is imprisoned in a Women Writers course, she should not be confused with the company she thereby keeps. She's a wonderful poet, and like Jane Austen, doesn't need any special pleading to be placed among the greats.
Rating: 
Summary: She could have been a great poet ....
Review: if it werent for her punctuation. I am appalled and annoyed by the constant use of the 'long slash' (what else do you call it?) that breaks up almost every line of a good number of her poems. Example poem:I heard a fly buzz as i died ---
blahblahblah---
blahblah---
yaddayaddayadda---
etc--- Not only is it tedious, it completely breaks up the flow of reading the poems. Some of them are quite nice, and others are totally ruined by this over use of ---.
Rating:
Summary: It is the experience of a life time.
Review: It was so moving and it touch me to read the exciting and captivating book.If any one knows how to write poetry,then it is Emily.She could write the best of poems even in that attic.
Rating:
Summary: A prism which captures the white light of reality
Review: 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.
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Summary: Kathy, it's DEMUR, not DEMURE! No small difference...
Review: Much Madness is divinest Sense - To a discerning Eye - Much Sense - the starkest Madness - 'Tis the Majority In this, as All, prevail - Assent - and you are sane - Demur - you're straightway dangerous - And handled with a Chain -
Rating:
Summary: Zero at the Bone
Review: Nearly everyone who's had a brush with American lit knows the story of Emily Dickinson - her poetry unpublished in her lifetime, and then even after her death, her verses seeing the light of day only after having been "improved" on by an editor who found her rhymes imperfect and her meter "spasmodic." He even went so far as to make her metaphors "sensible." The fact is, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, to whom Dickinson had sent her poems, was a representative of the poetic establishment, and as with all artistic establishments then and now, was too rigid in his thinking and too impoverished in his imagination to comprehend a new voice of genius. As Editor Thomas H. Johnson writes in his terse but very instructive Introduction, "He was trying to measure a cube by the rules of plane geometry." Of course other women of literature suffered something similar during the nineteenth century. What I wonder is, who is being misread, ignored or denied today? Anyway, suffice it to say that this IS the definitive one-volume collection of the poetry of Emily Dickinson. It includes all the 1,775 poems that she wrote in her lifetime, and they are presented here just as she wrote them with only some minor corrections of obvious misspellings or misplaced apostrophes. Johnson has retained the sometimes "capricious" capitalization, and preserved the famous dashes. There is a subject index, which I found useful, and an index of first lines, which is invaluable. Dickinson can be playful... I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you - Nobody - too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise - you know! ...she can be sarcastic... "Faith" is a fine invention
When Gentlemen can see -
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency. [Alas, the Amazon.com editor does not support italics. The words "see" and "Microscopes" are italicized above, and it really does make a difference!] ...and grave... I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air -
Between the Heaves of Storm - ...and observant... I like a look of Agony,
Because I know it's true -
Men do not sham Convulsion,
Nor simulate, a Throe - ...and profound... Love reckons by itself - alone -
"As large as I" - relate the Sun
to One who never felt it blaze -
Itself is all the like it has - ..and desperate... "Hope" is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words - And never stops - at all - ...and self aware... I meant to have but modest needs -
Such as Content - and Heaven -
Within my income - these could lie
And Life and I - keep even - ...and even radical... Much Madness is divinest Sense -
To a discerning Eye -
Much Sense - the starkest Madness -
'Tis the Majority
In this, as All, prevail -
Assent - and you are sane -
Demur - you're straightway dangerous -
And handled with a Chain - ...and much more. She is a poet of strikingly apt and totally original phrases imbued with a deep resonance of thought and observation, especially on her favorite subjects, life, death and love. She can be cryptic and her references and allusions are sometimes too private for us to catch. She can also be amazingly terse. But the intensity of her experience and the "Zero at the Bone" emotion displayed in this, her "letter to the World/That never wrote to me -" are second to none in the world of letters. Unlike Shakespeare, who mastered the psychology of people in places high and low, Dickinson mastered only her own psychology, and yet through that we can see, as in a mirror, ourselves.
Rating: 
Summary: Good for its time, but...
Review: Now that the wonderful three volume Franklin edition Dickinson's poems exist, I don't see how this old Johnson edition could be taken seriously. Johnson's choices for a particular reading were not always the best -- many of Dickinson's poems don't have a sanctioned "final" form from the poet. Franklin's edition presents the poems with all the variations in words and phrases so that the reader could decide which of the variations works best when Dickinson herself was undecided. If you love Emily Dickinson, invest in the Franklin Variorum edition. It's worth every penny of it's rather high price.
Rating:
Summary: Don't Waste Your Money...
Review: On any other collection of Emily Dickinson's verse, because this is the one you're going to end up with, trust me. Beginners to Ms. Dickinson's poetry might be a little intimadated by this thick, thick book of untitled, sequentially numbered poems. But the thing about Dickinson's poems is that, while a lot aren't readily accessible, the ones that are (most of which invariably find their way into the smaller collections of her work) are so riveting that her readers inevitably end up wanting her complete collection on hand. Which is why they should just suck it up and buy this book in the first place. If you've never read Emily Dickinson, read some of her more famous work online or in the library first to see if you're interested. If so, buy this book immediately. If you already have another collection of her work and consider yourself a fan, sell whatever other collection you have and buy this one.
Rating:
Summary: Don't Waste Your Money...
Review: On any other collection of Emily Dickinson's verse, because this is the one you're going to end up with, trust me. Beginners to Ms. Dickinson's poetry might be a little intimadated by this thick, thick book of untitled, sequentially numbered poems. But the thing about Dickinson's poems is that, while a lot aren't readily accessible, the ones that are (most of which invariably find their way into the smaller collections of her work) are so riveting that her readers inevitably end up wanting her complete collection on hand. Which is why they should just suck it up and buy this book in the first place. If you've never read Emily Dickinson, read some of her more famous work online or in the library first to see if you're interested. If so, buy this book immediately. If you already have another collection of her work and consider yourself a fan, sell whatever other collection you have and buy this one.
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