The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Book Review) (Revised)

The Poems of Emily Dickinson, 1999 reading edition, edited by R.W. Franklin. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachussetts.

Emily Dickinson started to write poetry early in her life. She started writing around 1844 when she was 14 years old, and she would continue to write poems for the rest of her life. When she passed away in 1886, she left a legacy of 1,789 poems, all of them expressing her candid and pure spirit. Her poems were mostly inspired by nature, and her observations of life have inspired thousands of people since they were published. In the 1999 edition, Ralph W. Franklin presents the poems in numerical and chronological order.

Dickinson did not put titles to her poems. Her style reflects a purity of mind and soul within the context of nineteenth-century English. Dickinson used a variety of forms in her poems: some are short ones, some are longer ones, some of them rhyme, others do not, but all of them reflect an innocent, profound, but simple spirit.

The Lady Of The Bee.

Dickinson saw in the elements of nature more than the rest of mortals. In several poems, she mentions the bee and implies what a bee might represent. For me, the most bold and basic poem that exalts the bee is Poem 23:


In the name of the Bee-
And of the Butterfly –
And of the Breeze. Amen!

The poem is so simple and paraphrases the end of a baptismal prayer: "In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit." I found the analogy amusing and irreverent at first sight, but after pondering what each of the elements (the breeze) may represent, I found the poem honest and profound. Since the Bee is an intelligent creature that works hard, it is a good symbol of God the Father. The Butterfly is the most beautiful insect, in the same way that the Son of God is the most beautiful present from God to mankind. Finally, the Breeze, invisible and vital, is a force that moves things, and it symbolizes the Holy Ghost very well.

In Poem 1788 she wrote:

Fame is a Bee.
It has a song-
It has a sting-
Ah, too, it has a wing.

Most of the time, Dickinson writes the word "bee" with the capital letter B, suggesting perhaps that the Bee meant a lot to her. In the previous example is remarkable the way she compares the bee with fame describing that fame is temporary when she writes "it has a wing".

Some other elements besides the Bee that are found many times in Dickinson’s poems are the butterfly, the robin, the rose, the flowers, the trees, the mountains, the sea, and so forth.
I find Dickinson’s poems to be a continuous celebration of nature, human life and its relation to God.

Going to another theme in Dickinson's poetry, Poem 34 struck me especially in the line that says:


Met by the Gods with banners –


Since she wrote the word gods with "G" instead of "g", did she really know that God the Father and his Son were two Gods? I would like to ask her but it is not possible. Another poem that expresses profound values is Poem 980 that says:


Love – is anterior to Life –
Posterior – to Death –
Initial of Creation, and
The Exponent of Earth –


A very short poem, but it does not need more, striking, concise and beautiful. All of these are strengths in Dickinson’s poems. I find most of them to be inspiring and profound ones.

As a writer I can say that I learned many things from those poems. First, a person could write over seventeen hundred poems during a lifetime, meaning that human mind is only limited by time and physical conditions. Second, that inspiration may be like a continuous river flowing words over the years. Third, that inspiration may be based on observations of the simplest elements of nature and human life, absorbed, processed in the mind and soul of the writer and then given back as powerful and inspirational words from the writer’s pen.

As a writer, the Poems of Emily Dickinson have inspired me and given me the encouragement to pursue improvement of my writings, not only about the quality but also about the quantity. It has showed me again that it is worth to write and write again and to commit time for writing exercises either in the commonplace book or in my personal journal, practice that I had left for some years.

Why did I choose The Poems of Emily Dickinson? Simple, I thought I needed it. Since I love good poetry and after learning that Dickinson was a very important person maybe the most important composer in the American poetry I had to give myself the chance to read her. But there are other considerations as well. I just wrote "I needed it" and I want to say more about it. Since I was in elementary and high school and later in college I always studied science courses, depriving myself of reading good books of literary works, during those years there was a voice in in my mind telling me that I was missing something very important, that is why in the last years I have turned myself over to study humanities and English classes and to read the good books that I always postponed for "another time", and after all of these last years of learning I found a writer inside of me. I guess I always knew he was there, but never paid attention to him and never let him grow. The Poems of Emily Dickinson have reconfirmed me that there is not only beauty in writing but a way to walk.

I think that the reading of The Poems of Emily Dickinson is a must for any aspiring writer of either prose or verse. I strongly recommend it for several reasons: because it shows that clean poems can be written in a very successful way, that there is no need of bad words or profanity to impress an audience. That aesthetic can be obtained in written exercises that come from the soul and that almost any time of our lifespan is a right time to express our minds by poetry. There is only one recommendation before starting to read The Poems of Emily Dickinson, since the poems were written over 150 years ago some words may be not familiar in our modern English, therefore, get yourself a good dictionary and also be consistent in using the Emily Dickinson Lexicon website where it can be found the meanings of such words.