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Title: Selected Poems by Patric Dickinson ISBN: 0-7011-1327-8 Publisher: Vintage/Ebury (A Division of Random House Group) Pub. Date: 01 January, 1975 Format: Hardcover

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Average Customer Rating: 3 (4 reviews)

Rating: 1
Summary: censored
Comment: emily dickonson....censored. Her poems were not only the words but all those commas and punctuation marks.

Rating: 5
Summary: This is not really the edition you want.
Comment: I don't doubt that it's possible to enjoy Emily Dickinson's poems in editions like this. But you should be aware that you are not really reading what she wrote. You are reading what earlier editors _wish_ she had written - a sort of 'tidied-up' and regularized version, a badly-tampered-with-text of a genius by those who weren't.

In a way, the situation is a bit like the one that prevails with regard to food. Would you rather eat natural food or genetically modified food? Maybe the modified food doesn't taste any different, but it might be doing harmful things to us that the author of real food never intended. So why take a risk when we can have the real thing ?

There are two major editors who can be relied on for accurate texts of ED's poems. These are Dickinson scholars R. W. Franklin and Thomas H. Johnson. Both produced large Variorum editions for scholars, along with reader's editions of the Complete Poems for the ordinary reader. Details of their respective reader's editions are as follows.

THE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON : Reading Edition. Edited by R. W. Franklin. 692 pp. Cambridge, Massachusetts : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-674-67624-6 (hbk.)

THE COMPLETE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON. Edited by Thomas H. Johnson. 784 pp. Boston : Little, Brown, 1960 and Reissued. ISBN: 0316184136 (pbk.)

For those who don't feel up to tackling the Complete Poems, there is Johnson's abridgement of his Reader's edition, an excellent selection of what he feels were her best poems:

FINAL HARVEST : Emily Dickinson's Poems. Edited by Thomas H. Johnson. 352 pages. New York : Little Brown & Co, 1997. ISBN: 0316184152 (paperbound).

Friends, do yourself a favor and get Johnson's edition. Why accept a watered-down version when you can have the real thing?

Rating: 1
Summary: Good poet, bad edition
Comment: Although Emily Dickinson is a marvelous poet, this edition is not a good one to buy. The catalogue claims it is printed from "the earliest, most authorative editions" without noting that the earliest editions were heavily edited, eliminating much of what makes Dickinson unusual and brilliant. For example, another reviewer quotes from poem 258, which should read "There's a certain slant of light, / Winter Afternoons-- / That oppresses, like the Heft / Of Cathedral Tunes--"; the first editor didn't think many people would know what the word "heft" meant, so he (without Dickinson's posthumous permission) simply replaced it. Get a volume of Dickinson's poems, certainly! But not this one.