Publisher Description

A selection of the remarkable letters of Emily Dickinson in an elegant Pocket Poet edition.

The same inimitable voice and dazzling insights that make Emily Dickinson's poems immortal can be found in the whimsical, humorous, and often deeply moving letters she wrote to her family and friends throughout her life. The selection of letters presented here provides a fuller picture of the eccentric recluse of legend, showing how immersed in life she was: we see her tending her garden; baking bread; marking the marriages, births, and deaths of those she loved; reaching out for intellectual companionship; and confessing her personal joys and sorrows. These letters, invaluable for the light they shed on their author, are, as well, a pure pleasure to read.

Author Biography

Emily Fragos is an award- winning poet and editor of the Pocket Poet anthologies The Great Cat, The Dance, and Music's Spell. She teaches at New York University and Columbia University and lives in New York City.

Excerpt from Book

From the Foreword by Emily Fragos Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, and she died there fifty-five years later on May 15, 1886, in her "father''s house," where she had spent almost all of her adult life in seclusion. The "weary life in the second story," as she called herself with typical Dickinsonian perspicacity, never forsook human relationships, however, daily participating in a busy household and sending herself out into the world through her passionate, witty, mournful, and celebratory letters. "My business," she told friends, "is to love" and Dickinson loved with a flame turned up to the white heat. She loved her parents and her sister and brother; her girlhood and adult friend; teachers and studies and books; the busy college town of Amherst; and the Springfield newspaper with its amusing local stories. She loved utterly Sue Gilbert, who would marry her brother Austin; and the mysterious "Master" of the famed "Master Letters" (who has never been identified but may have been Charles Wadsworth or Otis Lord or Samuel Bowles). She loved the rebirth of spring; her beautiful garden; the wild flowers of the fields; butterflies, toads, and bees; her huge brown Newfoundland, Carlo; the town''s children for whom she baked cookies; the Bront

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