Here for the first time is the poetry of Emily Dickinson as she herself “published” it in the privacy of her upstairs room in the house in Amherst.

She invented her own form of bookmaking. Her first drafts, jotted on odd scraps of paper, were discarded when transcribed. Completed poems were neatly copied in ink on sheets of folded stationery which she arranged in groups, usually of sixteen to twenty-four pages, and sewed together into packets or fascicles. These manuscript books were her private mode of publication, a substitute perhaps for the public mode that, for reasons unexplained, she denied herself. In recent years there has been increasing interest in the fascicles as artistic gathering, intrarelated by theme, imagery, or emotional movement. But no edition in the past, not even the variorum, or has arranged the poems in the sequence in which they appear in the manuscript books.

Emily Dickinson’s poems, more than those of any other poet, resist translation into the medium of print. Since she never saw a manuscript through the press, we cannot tell how she would have adapted for print her unusual capitalization, punctuation, line and stanza divisions, and alternate readings. The feather-light punctuation, in particular, is misrepresented when converted to conventional stop or even to dashes.

This elegant edition presents all of Emily Dickinson’s manuscript books and unsewn fascicle sheets—1,148 poems on 1,250 pages—restored insofar as possible to their original order, as they were when her sister found them after her death. The manuscripts are reproduced with startling fidelity in 300-line screen. Every detail is preserved: the bosses on the stationery, the sewing holes and tears, and poet’s alternate reading and penciled revisions, ink spots and other stains offset onto adjacent leaves, and later markings by Susan Dickinson, Mabel Todd, and others. The experience of reading these facsimile pages is virtually the same as reading the manuscripts themselves. Supplementary information is provided in introductions, notes, and appendices.

Emily Dickinson, poet of the interior life, imagined words/swords, hurling barbed syllables/piercing. Nothing about her adult appearance or habitation revealed such a militant soul. Only poems, written quietly in a room of her own, often hand-stitched in small volumes, then hidden in a drawer, revealed her true self. She did not live in time but in universals—an acute, sensitive nature reaching out boldly from self-referral to a wider, imagined world.

Dickinson died without fame; only a few poems were published in her lifetime. Her legacy was later rescued from her desk—an astonishing body of work, much of which has since appeared in piecemeal editions, sometimes with words altered by editors or publishers according to the fashion of the day.

Now Ralph Franklin, the foremost scholar of Dickinson's manuscripts, has prepared an authoritative one-volume edition of all extant poems by Emily Dickinson—1,789 poems in all, the largest number ever assembled. This reading edition derives from his three-volume work, The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition (1998), which contains approximately 2,500 sources for the poems. In this one-volume edition, Franklin offers a single reading of each poem—usually the latest version of the entire poem—rendered with Dickinson's spelling, punctuation, and capitalization intact. The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition is a milestone in American literary scholarship and an indispensable addition to the personal library of poetry lovers everywhere.

Emily Dickinson, poet of the interior life, imagined words/swords, hurling barbed syllables/piercing. Nothing about her adult appearance or habitation revealed such a militant soul. Only poems, written quietly in a room of her own, often hand-stitched in small volumes, then hidden in a desk drawer, revealed her true self. She did not live in time, as did that other great poet of the day, Walt Whitman, but in universals. As she knowingly put it: “There is one thing to be grateful for—that one is one’s self and not somebody else.”

Dickinson lived and died without fame: she saw only a few poems published. Her great legacy was later rescued from her desk drawer—an astonishing body of work revealing her acute, sensitive nature reaching out boldly from self-referral to a wider, imagined world. Her family sought publication of Dickinson’s poetry over the years, selecting verses, often altering her words or her punctuation, until, in 1955, the first important attempt was made to collect and publish Dickinson’s work, edited by Thomas H. Johnson for the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Now, after many years of preparation by Ralph W. Franklin, the foremost scholar of Dickinson’s manuscripts, a new comprehensive edition is available. This three-volume work contains 1,789 poems, the largest number ever assembled. The poems, arranged chronologically, based on new dating, are drawn from a range of archives, most frequently from holographs, but also from various secondary sources representing lost manuscripts. The text of each manuscript is rendered individually, including, within the capacity of standard type, Dickinson’s spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. Franklin gives Dickinson’s alternative readings for the poems, her revisions, and the line and page, or column, divisions in the source. Each entry identifies Franklin’s editorial emendations and records the publication history, including variants. Fourteen appendices of tables and lists give additional information, including poems attributed to Emily Dickinson. The poems are indexed by numbers from the Johnson edition, as well as by first lines.

Franklin has provided an introduction that serves as a guide to this edition and surveys the history of the editing of Dickinson’s poems. His account of how Dickinson conducted her workshop is a reconstruction of a remarkable poetic life.