San Antonio College Library

Emily Dickinson's fascicles, the forty booklets comprising more than 800 of her poems that she gathered and bound together with string, had long been cast into disarray until R.W. Franklin restored them to their original state, then made them available to readers in his 1981 Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson. Many Dickinson readers believe their ordering to be random, while others have proposed that one or more of the fascicles appear to center...

"How tame and manageable are the emotions of our bards, how placid and literary their allusions!" complained essayist T.W. Higginson in the Atlantic Monthly in 1870. "The American poet of passion is yet to come." He was, of course, unaware of the great erotic love poems such as "Wild Nights--Wild Nights!" and "Struck was I, nor yet by Lightning" being privately written by his reclusive friend Emily Dickinson. In a profound new analysis of Dickinson's...

Emily Dickinson wrote a "letter to the world" and left it lying in her drawer more than a century ago. This widely admired epistle was her poems, which were never conventionally published in book form during her lifetime. Since the posthumous discovery of her work, general readers and literary scholars alike have puzzled over this paradox of wanting to communicate widely and yet apparently refusing to publish. In this pathbreaking study, Martha Nell...

A biographical study of the poet.

Study and analysis of Emily Dickinson's poetry with a sensitive discussion of its sexual imagery.

"Aliki Barnstone challenges the common assumption that Emily Dickinson's poetry did not change and evolve over the course of her career as a poet. She argues that this notion of her lack of development, while it contributes to the established myth of the isolated and timeless Dickinson, has tended to diminish our appreciation of her as a poet and thinker whose work is both an innovative artistic achievement and a cultural commentary. Throughout the...