Selected Bibliography: Books

| Top | Primary Works

Acts of light, Emily Dickinson: poems by Emily Dickinson; paintings by Nancy Ekholm Burkert; appreciation by Jane Langton. Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1980. PS1541 .A62

Copland, Aaron. Twelve poems of Emily Dickinson, set to music. Voice and piano. NY: Boosey & Hawkes, 1951. M1621.4 .C784 D5

Franklin, R. W. ed. The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson. 2 vols. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1981.

- - -. The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition. 3 vols. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998. PS1541 .A1

- - -. The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999.

Hart, Ellen L. and Martha N. Smith. eds. Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson. Paris P, 1998. ISBN: 0963818368

Johnson, Thomas H. ed. The Poems of Emily Dickinson, including Variant Readings Critically Compared with All Known Manuscripts. 3 vols. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1955.

- - -. ed. Complete Poems. Boston: Little, Brown, 1960. PS1541 .A1

- - -. ed. Selected Letters. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1971. PS 1541.Z5 A32

- - -, and Theodora Ward. eds. The Letters of Emily Dickinson. 3 vols. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1979. PS1541 Z5 A3

Miller, Ruth. The poetry of Emily Dickinson. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan UP, 1968. PS1541 .Z5 M5

Rosenbaum, S. P. ed. A Concordance to the Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1978. PS1541 .Z49 R6

Todd, Mabel Loomis, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. eds. Poems by Emily Dickinson. Boston: Robert Brothers, 1890. (115 poems altered by Higginson)

- - -. Poems, Second Series. Boston: Robert Brothers, 1891. (166 poems altered by Higginson)

Todd, Mabel Loomis. ed. Letters of Emily Dickinson. Cleveland, World Pub. Co., 1951. PS1541.Z5 A3 (first published in 1894 includes 102 new, complete or parts, poems)

- - -. ed. Poems, Third Series. Boston: Robert Brothers, 1896. (168 poems)

"Emily Dickinson." Voices & visions [videorecording]; a presentation of the South Carolina Educational Television Network ; produced by New York Center for Visual History. Santa Barbara, CA: Intellimation, 1988. Video Cassette No. 3. PS305 .V65x

| Top |Biographical

Barth, Edna. I'm Nobody! Who Are You? The Story of Emily Dickinson. NY: Houghton Mifflin, 1971.

Bianchi, Martha Dickinson. The life and letters of Emily Dickinson, by her niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924. PS1541 .Z5 A32

Bingham, Millicent Todd. Ancestor's brocade; the literary debut of Emily Dickinson. NY: Harper & Brothers, 1945. PS1541.Z5 B53

- - -. Emily Dickinson, a revelation. NY: Harper, 1954. PS1541.Z5 B54

- - -. Emily Dickinson's home; letters of Edward Dickinson and his family. With documentation and comment by Millicent Todd Bingham. NY: Harper, 1955. PS1541.Z5 B543

Capps, Jack L. Emily Dickinson's reading, 1836-1886. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1966. PS1541.Z5

Cody, John. After Great Pain: The Inner Life of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1971. PS1541.Z5

Dickenson, Donna. Emily Dickinson. Dover, NH: Berg, 1985. PS1541 .Z5 D48

Farr, Judith. The Passion of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992. PS1541 .Z5 F27

Ferlazzo, Paul J. Emily Dickinson. Boston: Twayne, 1976. PS1541 .Z5

Garbowski, M. M. The House Without a Door: A Study of Emily Dickinson and the Illness of Agoraphobia. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1989.

Habegger, Alfred. My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson. NY: Random House, 2001 (paperback: NY: Modern Library, 2002).

Higgins, David. Portrait of Emily Dickinson; the poet and her prose. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers UP, 1967. PS1541.Z5 H5

| Top | Johnson, Thomas H. Emily Dickinson: An Interpretive Biography. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1955.

Knapp, Bettina L. Emily Dickinson. NY: Continuum, 1989. PS1541 .Z5 K6

Lease, Benjamin. Emily Dickinson's Readings of Men and Books: Sacred Soundings. NY: St. Martin's P, 1990. In Processing

Leyda, Jay. The years and hours of Emily Dickinson. 2 vols. New Haven: Yale UP, 1960. PS1541 Z5 L4

McNeil, Helen. Emily Dickinson. NY: Pantheon Books, 1986. PS1541 .Z5 M25

Mossberg, Barbara A. Emily Dickinson: When a Writer is a Daughter. 1982. PS1541 .Z5 M67

Patterson, Rebecca. The riddle of Emily Dickinson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951. PS1541 .Z5 P3

Pollak, Vivian R. A Historical Guide to Emily Dickinson. NY: Oxford UP, 2003.

Sewall, Richard B. The Life of Emily Dickinson. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974. PS1541 .Z5 S42; paperback edition, 1997.

- - -. The Lyman letters; new light on Emily Dickinson and her family. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1965. PS1541.Z5 S43

Taggard, Genevieve. The life and mind of Emily Dickinson. NY: Cooper Square Publishers, 1967. PS1541.Z5 T3

Ward, Theodora. The capsule of the mind; chapters in the life of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1961. PS1541.Z5 W3

Whicher, George F. This Was a Poet: A Critical Biography of Emily Dickinson. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1957. PS1541 .Z5 W5

Wolff, Cynthia G. Emily Dickinson. NY: Knopf, 1986.

Wylder, Edith. The last face; Emily Dickinson's manuscripts. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1971. PS1541 Z5 W9 

| Top | Critical

Anderson, Charles R. Emily Dickinson's Poetry: Stairway of Surprise. NY: Anchor Books, 1966. PS1541 .Z5 A63

Barker, Wendy. Lunacy of Light: Emily Dickinson and the Experience of Metaphor. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987.

Benfey, Christopher. E. D. and the Problem of Others. Amherst: U. of Massachusetts P, 1984.

Blake, Caesar R. and Carlton F. Wells, eds. The Recognition of Emily Dickinson: Selected Criticism Since 1890. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1968. PS1541 .Z5

Boswell, Jeanetta. Emily Dickinson: A Bibliography of Secondary Sources, with Selective Annotations, 1890-1987. Jefferson, NC: Mc Farland & Co., 1989.

Buckingham, Willis J. Emily Dickinson: An Annotated Bibliography: 1850-1968. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1970. Z8230.5 .B8

Cameron, Sharon. Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979. PS1541.Z5 C29

- - -. Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson's Fascicles. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992.

Chase, Richard V. Emily Dickinson. NY: Dell, 1965. PS1541 .Z5 C5

Dickie, Margaret. Lyric Contingencies: Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens. Philadelphia: U of Penn. P, 1991. PS303 .D53

Diehl, Joanne F. Dickinson and the Romantic Imagination. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1981. PS1541 Z5 D5

Duchac, Joseph. The Poems of Emily Dickinson: An Annotated Guide to Commentary Published in English, 1978-1989. NY: G. K. Hall & Co., 1993. PS1541 .Z5 D82x

Eberwein, Jane D. ed. An Emily Dickinson Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn: Greenwood, 1998.

| Top | Farr, Judith. ed. Emily Dickinson: A Collection of Critical Essays. NY: Prentice Hall, 1996.

Ferlazzo, Paul J., ed. Critical Essays on Emily Dickinson. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1984. PS1541 .Z5 C7

Ford, Thomas W. Heaven beguiles the tired; death in the poetry of Emily Dickinson. U of Alabama P, 1966. PS1541.Z5 F6

Franklin, R. W. The editing of Emily Dickinson; a reconsideration. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1967. PS1541.Z5 F7

Freeman, Margaret H. "Grounded Spaces: Deictic -Self Anaphors in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson." Language and Literature 6:1 (1997) 7&endash;28.

Gelpi, Albert J. Emily Dickinson: The Mind of the Poet. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1965. PS1541.Z5

Grabher, Gudrun, Roland Hagenbüchle, and Cristanne Miller. eds. The Emily Dickinson Handbook. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1998.

Griffith, Clark. The Long Shadow: Emily Dickinson's Tragic Poetry. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1964. PS1541 .Z5 G7

Kher, Inder N. The Landscape of Absence : Emily Dickinson's Poetry. New Haven: Yale UP, 1974. PS1541 Z5 K53

Lindberg-Seyersted, Brita. The voice of the poet; aspects of style in the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1968. PS1541 .Z5 L5

Lubbers, Klaus. Emily Dickinson; the critical revolution. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1968. PS1541 Z5 L8

Lucas, Dolores D. Emily Dickinson and riddle. DeKalb: Northern Illinois UP, 1969. PS1541 .Z5L83

Martin, Wendy. An American Triptych : Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1984. PS310 .F45 M3

- - -. ed. The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UP, 2002.

Miller, Cristanne. Emily Dickinson: A Poet's Grammar. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987.

Mudge, Jean M. Emily Dickinson & the image of home. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1975. PS1541 Z5 M8

| Top | Myerson, Joel. Emily Dickinson: a descriptive bibliography. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1984. Z8230.5 .M96

Paglia, Camille. Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. NY: Vintage, 1991.

Phillips, Elizabeth. Emily Dickinson: Personae and Performance. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1996.

Pickard, John B. Emily Dickinson: an introduction and interpretation. NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967. PS1541 .Z5 P5

Porter, David T. Dickinson, the Modern Idiom. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1981. PS1541.Z5 P626

Rupp, Richard H. Critics on Emily Dickinson. Coral Gables, Fla.: U of Miami P, 1972. PS1541 .Z5 R8

Sanchez-Eppler, Karen. Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism. and the Politics of the Body. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.

Sewall, Richard B. ed. Emily Dickinson: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963. PS1541 .Z5

Sherwood, William R. Circumference and Circumstance: Stages in The Mind and Art of Emily Dickinson. NY: Columbia UP, 1968. PS1541.Z5 S5

Smith, Martha N. Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson. Austin: U of Texas P, 1992. PS1541 .Z5 S67

Smith, Robert M. The Seductions of Emily Dickinson. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1996.

Weisbuch, Robert. Emily Dickinson's Poetry. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981. PS1541 .Z5 W38

Wells, Henry W. Introduction to Emily Dickinson. NY: Hendricks House, 1959. PS1541 .Z5 W4

Wolosky, Shira. Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War. New Haven: Yale, 1984.

| Top | Selected Bibliography: Articles (* in CSUS Library)

*Benvenuto, Richard. "Words Within Words: Dickinson's Use of the Dictionary." ESQ 29 (1983): 46-55.

*Bray, Paul. "Emily Dickinson as Visionary." Raritan 12.1 (Sum 1992): 113-137.

*Buell, Janet W. "`A Slow Solace': Emily Dickinson and Consolation." New England Q. 62.3 (Sep. 1989): 323-45.

*Dennis, Carl. "Point of View in the Lyric: Some Notes on the Craft of Emily Dickinson." Denver Quarterly 28.3 (Win 1994): 43-65.

*Dickie, Margaret. "Dickinson's Discontinuous Lyric Self." American Literature 60.4 (Dec 1988): 537-53.

*Dandurand, Karen. "New Dickinson Civil War Publications." American Literature 56: (1984): 17-27.

*Eberwein, Jane D. "Emily Dickinson and the Calvinist Sacramental Tradition." ESQ 33.2 (Apr. 1986): 67-.

- - -. "Introducing a Religious Poet: The 1890 Poems of Emily Dickinson." Christianity & Literature 39.3 (Sep 1990): 241-60.

Erkkila, Betsy. "Emily Dickinson and Class." American Literary History. 4.1 (Sp. 1992): 1-27.

Ernst, Katharina. "'It was not Death, for I stood up...': 'Death' and the Lyrical I." Emily Dickinson journal 6.1 (1997): 1-25.

Freeman, Margaret. "Metaphor Making Meaning: Dickinson's Conceptual Universe." Journal of Pragmatics 24 (1995): 643-666.

| Top | Gould, John A. "ED's windborne jewel (J-245)." Dickinson Studies 78 (1991): 27-32.

*Hart, Ellen L. "The Encoding of Homoerotic Desire: Emily Dickinson's Letters and Poems to Susan Dickinson, 1850-1886." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 9.2 (Fall, 1990): 251-72.

*Hirschhorn, Norbert. "A Bandaged Secret: Emily Dickinson and Incest." The Journal of Psychohistory 18.3 (Win 1991): 251-282.

*Habegger, Alfred. "How the Dickinsons Lost Their Homes." ESQ 44.3 (1998): 151-99.

*Hockersmith, Thomas E. "Into Degreeless Noon: Time, Consciousness, and Oblivion in Emily Dickinson." ATQ: The American Transcendental Q. 3.3 (Sep. 1989): 277-95.

*Holland, Jeanne. "Emily Dickinson, the Master, and the Loaded Gun: The Violence of Re-figuration." ESQ 33.3 (!987): 137-45.

Horan, Elizabeth. "To Market: The Dickinson Copyright Wars." Emily Dickinson journal 5.1 (1996): 88-121.

Kavaler-Adler, Susan. "Emily Dickinson and the Subject of Seclusion." American Journal of Psychoanalysis 51.1 (Mar 1991): 21-38.

Koguchi, Hiroyuki. "Emily Dickinson & Apocalypse." Dickinson Studies 82 (1992): 7-23.

Loeffelholz, Mary. "Etruscan Invitations: Dickinson and the Anxiety of the Aesthetic in Feminist Criticism." Emily Dickinson journal 5.1 (1996): 1-27.

*Louis, M. K. "Emily Dickinson`s Sacrament of Starvation." Nineteenth-Century Literature 43.3 (Dec. 1988): 346-.

*Ludvigson, Susan. "God Speaks to Emily Dickinson about Her Dreams; God Speaks to Emily Dickinson about Her Absent Father." The Southern Review 30.4 (Fall 1994): 831-.

Mayer, Nancy. "A Poet's Business: Love and Mourning in the Deathbed Poems of Emily Dickinson." Emily Dickinson journal 6.1 (1997): 44-68.

| Top | McDermott Jr., John F., and David Porter. "The Efficacy of Poetry Therapy: A Computerized Content Analysis of the Death Poetry of Emily Dickinson." Psychiatry 52.4 (1989): 462-68.

McDonnell, Thomas P. "Emily and the Feminists." Dickinson Studies 75 (1990): 17-21.

Mitchell, Domhnal. "The Train, the Father, His Daughter, and Her Poem: A Reading of Emily Dickinson's 'I Like to See it Lap the Miles.'" Emily Dickinson Journal 7.1 (1998): 1-27.

Mock, Michele. "Partnership in Possibility: The Dialogics of 'his efficient daughter Lavinia and his poetess daughter Emily.'" Emily Dickinson journal 6.1 (1997): 68-89.

Mulvihill, John. "Why Dickinson Didn't Title." Emily Dickinson journal 5.1 (1996): 71-88.

Nesteruk, Peter. "The Many Deaths of Emily Dickinson." Emily Dickinson journal 6.1 (1997): 25-44.

*Runzo, Sandra. "Dickinson, Performance, and the Homoerotic Lyric." American literature 68.2 (Jun 1996): 347-365.

*Salter, Mary Jo. "Puns and Accordions: Emily Dickinson and the Unsaid." Yale Review 79.2 (Win. 1990): 88-.

*Smith, Martha Nell. "Gender Issues in Textual Editing of Emily Dickinson." Women's Studies Q. 19.3-4 (Fall, 1991): 78-111.

Sullivan, David. "Suing Sue: Emily Dickinson Addressing Susan Gilbert." Emily Dickinson journal 5.1 (1996): 45-71.

Wardrop, Daneen. "Emily Dickinson's Gothic Wedding: Dowered Bride and Absent Groom." Atq : the american transcendental quarterly 10.2 (Jun 1996): 91-111.

White, Fred D. "`Sweet Skepticism of the Heart': Science in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson." College Literature 19.1 (Feb 1992): 121-128.

*Wolff, Cynthia G. "Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Task of Discovering a Usable Past." The Massachusetts Review 30.4 (Wint 1989): 629-44.

| Top | Her Poetry

Structural Patterns (from S. W. Wilson's "Structural Patterns in the Poetry of ED." American Literature 35: 53-59.)

Major pattern is that of a sermon: statement or introduction of topic, elaboration, and conclusion. There are three variations of this major pattern:

1. The poet makes her initial announcement of topic in an unfigured line (examples: #241, #329)
2. She uses a figure for that purpose (#318, #401).
3. She repeats her statement and its elaboration a number of times before drawing a conclusion (#324).

| Top | ED and the Civil War

"Since Emily Dickinson's full maturity as a dedicated artist occurred during the span of the Civil War, the most convulsive era of the nation's history, one of course turns to the letters of 1861-1865, and the years that follow, for her interpretation of events. But the fact is that she did not live in history and held no view of it, past or current. Walt Whitman projected himself into the world about him so intensely that not only the war but the nation itself is continuously the substance of his thought in prose and verse. The reverse was true for Dickinson, to whom the war was an annoyance, a reality only when it was mirrored to her in casualty lists. Such evidently was true in some degree for all the Dickinsons, since Austin, when drafted exercised his privilege of paying the five-hundred-dollar fee to arrange for a substitute. Emily wrote Mrs. Bowles in the summer of 1861: 'I shall have no winter this year-on account of the soldiers-Since I cannot weave Blankets, or Boots-I thought-it best to omit the season.' Only once again does she make any general allusion to the mighty conflict, the repercussions of which are clearly audible even after the lapse of a century. 'A Soldier called-,' she wrote Bowles just a year later, 'a Morning ago, and asked for a Nosegay, to take to Battle. I suppose he thought we kept an Aquarium.' The attitude of mind that could prompt such shallow facetiousness can be understood in the light of her personal intent in living. Years later, on the eve of the first election of President Cleveland, she made clear to Mrs., Holland the nature and extent of her concern with social history. 'Before I write you again, we shall have had a new Czar. Is the Sister a Patriot? George Washington was the Father of his Country' - George Who?' That sums all politics to me.' The rejection of society as such thus shows itself to have been total, not only physically but psychically. It was her kind of economy, a frugality she sought in order to make the most of her world; to focus, to come to grips with those universals which increasingly concerned her."

| Top | Study Questions

1. Study a group of poems with related themes. Then write an interpretation of one of the poems that includes your expanded understanding of the way Dickinson uses the theme in other poems in the group. Choose from among the following (the poem numbers are from the Johnson edition ):

(a) poems of loss and defeat: 49, 67, 305.

(b) poems about ecstasy or vision: 185, 214, 249, 322, 465, 501, 632.

(c) poems about solitude: 280, 303, 441, 664.

(d) poems about death: 49, 67, 88, 98, 153, 182, 241, 258, 280, 301, 341, 360, 369, 389, 411, 449, 510 529, 547, 712, 784, 856, 976, 1078, 1100, 1624, 1716, 1732.

(e) poems about madness and suffering: 315, 348, 435, 536.

(f) poems about entrapment: 187, 528, 754, 1099.

(g) poems about craft: 441, 448, 505, 1129.

(h) poems about images of birds: 130, 328, 348, 824.

(i) poems about a bee or bees: 130, 214, 216, 348, 1405.

(j) poems about a fly or flies: 187 and 465.

(k) poems about butterflies: 214, 341, 1099.

(l) poems about church imagery or biblical references: 130, 216, 258, 322, 1545.

(m) poems about love: 47, 293, 299, 303, 453, 463, 478, 494, 511, 549, 568, 640, 664, 907.

(n) poems about nature: 12, 130, 140, 214, 285, 318, 321, 322, 328, 33, 441, 526, 630, 783, 861, 986, 1084, 1356, 1463, 1575.

(o) poems about doubt and faith: 49, 59, 61, 185, 217, 254, 324, 338, 357, 376, 437, 564, 1052, 1207, 1545.

(p) poems about pain and anguish: 165, 193, 241, 252, 258, 280, 305, 315, 341, 348, 365, 410, 510, 512, 536, 650, 675, 772, 1005.

(q) poems about after death or afterlife: 301, 401, 409, 413, 615, 712, 829, 964.

| Top | 2. Though alone and lonely, Dickinson is said to have loved intensely. Through a selection of her poems, discuss her treatment of love.

3. Many Dickinson poems illustrate change in the consciousness of the poet or speaker. Choose a poem in which this happens and trace the process by which the poem reflects and creates the change.

4. Closely analyze the central image in one of the following poems: 754 ("My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun - "), 1099 ("My Cocoon tightens - Colors teaze - "), or 1575 ("The Bat is dun, with wrinkled Wings - ").

5. Locate images of size, particularly of smallness, in Dickinson's poetry. Working out from 185 ("'Faith' is a fine invention"), trace evidence that Dickinson perceived a relationship between size and literary authority. Alternatively, locate images of authority in the world (king, emperor, gentlemen) and contrast these with images Dickinson uses to create her own persona as poet.

6. 1862, a year in which Dickinson wrote more than 300 poems, seems to have been a year of great emotional intensity for her. Drawing on selected poems from 1862, trace some recurrent themes or designs in the poems of that year.

7. Write four alternative first paragraphs to a paper entitled "Emily Dickinson."

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