Envelope Poems

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The great thing about [The Gorgeous Nothings] is, of course, that it gives us all of this, complete. The first and immediate shocks are in the words, with other, lingering, aftershocks following in the visual details of their settings. Their transcriptions allow us to read the texts, while the facsimiles let us see exactly what Dickinson wrote (the variant words, crossings-out, dashes, directional fields, spaces, columns, and overlapping planes). Lyndall Gordon, a recent biographer, argued that Dickinson was epileptic and feared suffering one of her seizures in public.

Although a very prolific poet—and arguably America’s greatest—Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) published fewer than a dozen of her eighteen hundred poems. A second group, of more than three hundred poems sent in letters, belonged to Susan Gilbert Dickinson, the wife of Emily’s brother, Austin.

The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. The poems often detail their own state of evanescence: in “A 316,” Dickinson addresses the “sumptuous moment” and entreats it to “Slower go / That I may gloat on thee. Her dashes stand for all the nonessential and time-taking aspects of syntax: she is a process poet even in her finished drafts, preserving the urgency of composition. It does feel almost invasive, reading the passing thoughts and ideas of Emily Dickinson she never likely envisioned being published in a book for me to read. You can find support for any of these theories, and many others, in the poems; their quirks, though evened out by her early editors, nevertheless lend credence to the idea that she was a familiar New England stereotype, the flighty, eccentric, proto-spinster daughter.

The cover is beautiful, the pages feel luxurious, the photographs feel so special, and it's all put together with incredible care. e é possível que a combinação de todos estes elementos sustente a delicadeza que encontro neste maravilhoso livro. I did find some gems and dogeared some pages I'll go back to in the future, but I read through most of these thinking "I have no clue what' going on. The discovery of a new Dickinson treasure in the course of an attic cleanout or a basement purge is a perennial, if distant, possibility.The Dickinson scholar Domhnall Mitchell and others have suggested that “the layout of a Dickinson autograph is deliberate or motivated” in potentially every regard, from the capital letters of various sizes, to the spaces between letters and words and lines, to the marginalia, which are often crammed with variant choices of word or phrase. In the 1850 national census, Dickinson listed her occupation as “keeping house”; the scraps might have kept her as she did so.