New Poems of Emily Dickinson

Review Scrupulously reading her letters for passages that contain her familiar iambics, meter or punctuation, Shurr gathers nearly 500 . . . 'excavations,' which he has altered minimally to conform with Dickinson's 'usual poetic lines.' . . . The brevity and visual intensity of many short pieces show Dickinson as a precursor of the Imagists.--Publishers Weekly, starred reviewThose with an open mind will find pleasures here as one of America's great poets plays with pushing the boundaries of poetry and human sensibility. The book is more than a literary curiosity.--Houston PostTrue lovers of poetry will welcome these rediscovered treasures and take pleasure in their quiet intensity, wisdom, and grace.--Booklist (starred review)An exciting, innovative, and important advance in Dickinson studies. While certain to cause controversy and debate, it is a major advance in our knowledge of Dickinson as poet and person. Shurr has revealed a secret treasure of her poetry that was waiting to be discovered.--Emory Elliott, University of California, RiversideWilliam Shurr, the most insightful critical biographer of Emily Dickinson, is at it again, reading Dickinson with the acute eye of a Kepler or a Galileo, offering us our American Sappho unfragmented. His careful readings offer us an even richer mother of American poetry than any of us ever knew to exist.--Diane Wakoski, Michigan State University Product Description For most of her life Emily Dickinson regularly embedded poems, disguised as prose, in her lively and thoughtful letters. Although many critics have commented on the poetic quality of Dickinson's letters, William Shurr is the first to draw fully developed poems from them. In this remarkable volume, he presents nearly 500 new poems that he and his associates excavated from her correspondence, thereby expanding the canon of Dickinson's known poems by almost one-third and making a remarkable addition to the study of American literature. Here are new riddles and epigrams, as well as longer lyrics that have never been seen as poems before. While Shurr has reformatted passages from the letters as poetry, a practice Dickinson herself occasionally followed, no words, punctuation, or spellings have been changed. Shurr points out that these new verses have much in common with Dickinson's well-known poems: they have her typical punctuation (especially the characteristic dashes and capitalizations); they use her preferred hymn or ballad meters; and they continue her search for new and unusual rhymes. Most of all, these poems continue Dickinson's remarkable experiments in extending the boundaries of poetry and human sensibility. From Publishers Weekly Shurr ( The Marriage of Emily Dickinson ) carries one step further Thomas H. Johnson's practice of extracting poetic passages from the prose of Dickinson. Scrupulously reading her letters for passages that contain her familiar iambics, meter or punctuation, Shurr gathers nearly 500 such "excavations," which he has altered minimally to conform with Dickinson's "usual poetic lines." In addition, he isolates such categories as riddles and epigrams: "I thought your approbation Fame- / and it's withdrawal Infamy." The brevity and visual intensity of many short pieces show Dickinson as a precursor of the Imagists. But instead of letting the excerpts speak for themselves, Shurr fleshes them out with other poetic excerpts that require contextual explanation and "workshop" fragments that, he tells us, would have made excellent poems had they been further developed. A repetitive discussion of Dickinson's form and metric structure prefaces chapters as well as individual works. Such academic posturing interferes with the reader's casual enjoyment of much of the material here, which falls so naturally into poetry it's difficult to imagine it as anything else. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. About the Author William H. Shurr, professor of English at the Uni