Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries

“The best close reader of poems to be found on the literary pages.”
—Seamus Heaney

“[Vendler’s] succinct but astute readings of Emily Dickinson’s poetry are little kernels of insight into a wickedly keen poetic mind.”
—Hillary Kelly, New Republic

An interpretive introduction to Dickinson’s brilliant, enigmatic verse from the unrivaled doyenne of close reading.

Seamus Heaney, Denis Donoghue, William Pritchard, Marilyn Butler, Harold Bloom, and many others have praised Helen Vendler as one of the best readers of our time. Here, Vendler applies her critical powers to 150 selected poems of Emily Dickinson. As she did in The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, she serves as an incomparable guide, illuminating both stylistic and imaginative features of the poems.

Vendler’s selection highlights the astounding variety of Dickinson’s work, “from her first-person poems to the poems of grand abstraction, from her ecstatic verses to her unparalleled depictions of emotional numbness, from her comic anecdotes to her painful poems of aftermath.” In accompanying commentaries Vendler also acquaints us with Dickinson the writer, “the inventive conceiver and linguistic shaper of her perennial themes.” All of Dickinson’s preoccupations—death, religion, love, the natural world, the nature of thought—are explored here in detail, but Vendler always takes care to emphasize the poet’s startling imagination and the ingenuity of her linguistic invention.

Whether exploring less-familiar poems or favorites we thought we knew, Vendler offers a unique window into Dickinson’s oeuvre—her incredible range, her unique path of poetic development, and her mastery of what Wordsworth called “the history and science of feeling.” Lucid and accessible, this will long remain an indispensable reference for students of Dickinson and readers of lyric poetry.