The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson is a collection published in 1924 by her niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Dickinson wrote nearly eighteen hundred poems but published only about ten in her lifetime. Her short lyrics, with their dashes, slant rhymes and startling images, changed American poetry.
A hidden work
Dickinson lived almost her whole life in her family's house in Amherst, Massachusetts, and rarely left it in her later years.
After her death in 1886, her sister Lavinia found hundreds of poems, many sewn into small handmade booklets now called fascicles.
A unique style
Her poems are short, often in hymn meter, with dashes, capital letters and rhymes that are only approximate.
They treat death, nature, faith, love and the mind with intense compression and wit.
The editions
Selections appeared from 1890, edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who smoothed her punctuation and rhymes.
The 1924 collection gathered many of these poems; a full scholarly edition restoring her own text came only in 1955.
Anecdotes
The white dress
In her later years Dickinson usually dressed in white and spoke to visitors from behind a door. One of her white dresses is kept at the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst.
Letters to a mentor
In 1862 she sent four poems to the critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson, asking whether her verse was alive. They corresponded for the rest of her life.
Frequently asked questions
How many poems did Dickinson write?
Nearly eighteen hundred.
How many were published in her lifetime?
About ten, mostly anonymously.
Who published the 1924 collection?
Her niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi.