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amibunk's review against another edition
5.0
I remember turning to Dickinson's poems in the middle of a seemingly horrific break-up during my college years. Now I turn to her as I stand helpless watching my father die from lung cancer. One thing is for sure: Emily Dickinson knows pain. Not only that, she knows how to write that pain on paper in beautiful poems that touch my heart.
My favorite Dickinson poem is "The Fringe Gentian" and should be required reading by all girls in high school who wonder if they will ever fit in.
"It tried to be a rose and failed,
And all the summer laughed.
But just before the snows, there came
a purple creature that ravished all the hill.
Then summer hid her forehead,
And mockery was still."
My favorite Dickinson poem is "The Fringe Gentian" and should be required reading by all girls in high school who wonder if they will ever fit in.
"It tried to be a rose and failed,
And all the summer laughed.
But just before the snows, there came
a purple creature that ravished all the hill.
Then summer hid her forehead,
And mockery was still."
ladyyluna's review against another edition
5.0
A full list of Emily Dickinson's many poems listed by theme and order.
jolanda_1's review against another edition
Koliko kursuma nosis? Da li
Kraljski oziljak imas?
Andjele! Pisi ''Unaprijedjen''
Na celu Vojnicima!
252
Mogu Bol pregaziti-
Citave Bare njega -
Vicna sam tome-
Ali od najmanjega
Podsteka radosti
Moje noge se lome-
I rusim se- pijana-
Zasto se Sljunak smije-
To bjese Novo pice-
U tome sve je.
Tek u Bolu moc se skriva
U Disciplini - nasukani-
Dok Teret - ne ispliva-
Daj Melem - Divovima-
Ko Ljudi ce da svenu -
Daj Himelaje-
Pa ce da ih pokrenu-
Kraljski oziljak imas?
Andjele! Pisi ''Unaprijedjen''
Na celu Vojnicima!
252
Mogu Bol pregaziti-
Citave Bare njega -
Vicna sam tome-
Ali od najmanjega
Podsteka radosti
Moje noge se lome-
I rusim se- pijana-
Zasto se Sljunak smije-
To bjese Novo pice-
U tome sve je.
Tek u Bolu moc se skriva
U Disciplini - nasukani-
Dok Teret - ne ispliva-
Daj Melem - Divovima-
Ko Ljudi ce da svenu -
Daj Himelaje-
Pa ce da ih pokrenu-
mlindner's review against another edition
1.0
I am just past halfway and I really just want to give up on this for two reasons.
1. I don't particularly like Dickinson's poetry. Her nonstandard grammar makes it difficult to understand what she's on about. Out of 100s of poems, so far I have liked four. And one of those was only because it evoked ancient Chinese erotic poetry, if it was poorly translated, but then it is hard to write about bees visiting flowers without doing so [added: being erotic, that is].
2. The book itself. The book is clearly a cheap imprint. I got it for free as a donation. Physically--binding, paper, margins, type, etc.--it is pretty good. But intellectual content is where they skimped. There is no introduction to explain the dating and groupings of the poems, nor to explain her style, or anything else to contextualize and situate Dickinson's poetry. What little I do (now) know I found via Wikipedia. There are also typos and misspellings in the poems themselves. I have come across several "to"s which should have been "too"s. If that is, in fact, how Dickinson spelled them then, again, where is the contextual matter explaining that. I finally gave up--but for now have recanted--with "Fringed Gentian" where we have the line "And summer his her forehead,". I had to do an internet search to discover that it ought be "And summer hit her forehead,". Just a small difference. One which actually makes the poem intelligible. But it leaves me wondering how much else of my problem with Dickinson's poetry stems from the shoddy intellectual work done for this edition.
I had intended to simply give up for now and perhaps revisit Dickinson in the future when I might be readier to receive her and, also, with a proper edition of her work.
12 December 2011 - I have finally finished this book. I could complain again about the prolific number of typos, and lack of added intellectual content, situating of the poems and/or Dickinson, etc. but I think I'll let the above suffice.
1. I don't particularly like Dickinson's poetry. Her nonstandard grammar makes it difficult to understand what she's on about. Out of 100s of poems, so far I have liked four. And one of those was only because it evoked ancient Chinese erotic poetry, if it was poorly translated, but then it is hard to write about bees visiting flowers without doing so [added: being erotic, that is].
2. The book itself. The book is clearly a cheap imprint. I got it for free as a donation. Physically--binding, paper, margins, type, etc.--it is pretty good. But intellectual content is where they skimped. There is no introduction to explain the dating and groupings of the poems, nor to explain her style, or anything else to contextualize and situate Dickinson's poetry. What little I do (now) know I found via Wikipedia. There are also typos and misspellings in the poems themselves. I have come across several "to"s which should have been "too"s. If that is, in fact, how Dickinson spelled them then, again, where is the contextual matter explaining that. I finally gave up--but for now have recanted--with "Fringed Gentian" where we have the line "And summer his her forehead,". I had to do an internet search to discover that it ought be "And summer hit her forehead,". Just a small difference. One which actually makes the poem intelligible. But it leaves me wondering how much else of my problem with Dickinson's poetry stems from the shoddy intellectual work done for this edition.
I had intended to simply give up for now and perhaps revisit Dickinson in the future when I might be readier to receive her and, also, with a proper edition of her work.
12 December 2011 - I have finally finished this book. I could complain again about the prolific number of typos, and lack of added intellectual content, situating of the poems and/or Dickinson, etc. but I think I'll let the above suffice.
lyndagabby's review against another edition
4.0
So many of these poems are five star poems but some (I'm looking at you nature poems) are kind of tedious. Also the collection breaks them up by theme so that probably didn't help. Dickinson is a genius though so four stars.
swamp_witch's review against another edition
1.0
This review is of the Castle Edition, ed. by Brownell: The edits in this volume are so extensive and random that these poems can no longer be considered Dickinson's work. Instead, this edition goes to great lengths to destroy much of what makes Dickinson Dickinson, and replaces her complexity and ambiguity and delightful weirdness with ... something that isn't Dickinson anymore, but some kind of Brownell-Dickinson hybrid. To add insult to injury, this collection does not acknowledge the changes made to these poems, leaving readers unaware of how much of the poetry has been edited (the answer is, "a lot"). Please check out the Johnson edition instead, which has Dickinson's actual poems and which carefully organizes and dates her work, while detailing the editorial decisions made in their transcription.
Brownell is not an acceptable anthologizer of poetry, nor does she seem professionally qualified to edit Dickinson. She normalizes Dickinson's punctuation, de-capitalizes nouns and verbs, eliminates dashes, changes the fascinating slant rhymes to true rhymes, and wholly replaces words. By doing so, Brownell has done more than imply that she knows what Dickinson wants to say better than Dickinson does. She has continued the long and frustrating tradition of simplifying Dickinson's work, making it seem pious, sentimental, and more-or-less straightforward. It's obvious that for Brownell, Dickinson's poetry is cutesy and conventional, with no hint of linguistic experimentation or mental agility.
For example, here's one of Dickinson's most complicated (and kick-ass) poems:
I'm "wife" - I've finished that -
That other state -
I'm Czar - I'm "Woman" now -
It's safer so -
How odd the Girl's life looks
Behind this soft Eclipse -
I think that Earth feels so
To folks in Heaven - now -
This being comfort - then
That other kind - was pain -
But why compare?
I'm "Wife"! Stop there!
With the exception of two exclamation points and the question mark in the last stanza, Dickinson has no normalized punctuation. Instead, she uses her trademark dashes - perhaps to indicate a change in rhythm, to allude to a missing word, or to call into question the relations of the phrases on either side of the dash. A good example of this ambiguity are the lines, "To folks in Heaven - now -/ This being comfort - then/ That other kind." With "now" separated by the pause, it's impossible to say for sure to what words it is referring. Is it to the "folks in Heaven" or to "This being comfort"? Why is "then" not followed by a similar dash? Does it describe "comfort" as the past tense, or "That other kind" as the logical next step after comfort? If the latter (to which the grammar seems to gesture), why does the line syntactically match the previous line as if to suggest a similar relationship? As readers, we cannot know why Dickinson has made these lines so ambiguous. Dickinson was fascinated with the unknowable, the mysterious, and the hidden, and a "meaning" of a poem to her would not necessarily be something stable or finite. In this poem, the pauses in part emphasize that logic. They are not sure what Earth or Heaven "feels" like, and the boundary between "pain" and "comfort" in the context of marriage (or religion, or several other subjects) is troubled, a sensation doubled by the stare quotes around the words "'Wife'" and "'Woman.'" The speaker calls into question the definition of either of these words and, before she can reach a conclusion about them, she "Stop[s] there!" She leaves the reader in the lurch, unsure of the benefits of marriage or of the speaker's gender or sexuality in the context of the poem.
If we couple the accurate version of the poem with Brownell's "editing," much of the ambiguity has been smothered, making the poem seem a sentimental, conventional representation of a 19th-century marriage:
I'M wife; I've finished that,
That other state;
I'm Czar, I'm woman now:
It's safer so.
How odd the little girl's life looks
Behind this soft eclipse!
I think that earth seems so
To those in heaven now.
This being comfort, then
That other kind was pain;
But why compare?
I'm wife! stop there!
Brownell seems to think this poem is about wifedom's superiority to the "little girl's life." We now know that "those in heaven" ("folk in heaven" is just too bewildering and interesting a juxtaposition) are "now" thinking of how earth "seems" (they do not, for whatever reason, "feel" this difference anymore). What's more, "woman" and "wife" are not fluid, socially-determined, or mental states of being. One is "comfort," while the "other kind" is "pain." In Brownell's version, the reader is indeed left wondering "why compare?" Why read Dickinson at all? What's a woman writer for, anyway, if she's not writing something easy and sentimental? Why is this person editing Dickinson when they clearly don't know anything about Dickinson's work? Dickinson's word choice, syntax, sound, and punctuation were deliberate, thought-out, and necessary - to change them changes the poem. Why are we still discussing this in 2011? And then there's the fact that Brownell titles the poems and sections them off as "Love" (of whom?), "Life," "Time and Eternity," and other similarly breezy titles.
So, anyway, yes, I think this kind of editing is a sexist and disappointing act, and it is shameful that there are no notations indicating that the poems were even edited. Someone who is not versed in Dickinson would likely think that these are the original poems. They aren't. They are edited without the poet's approval and without basic education about her writing, without editorial explanation or scholarship.
Brownell's pastiche was my first encounter with Dickinson's poetry in middle school. Unsurprisingly, it led me to conclude that Dickinson was boring and overhyped. I was lucky to continue studying literature and to return to Dickinson in a better edition. It infuriates me that this edition had so flippantly cheated me of what should have been a revelatory experience.
Anyone will immediately notice Dickinson's genius in a decently compiled version. Again, I recommend Thomas H. Johnson's edition (published by Back Bay Books), which is a complete collection of Dickinson that is much more carefully edited.
Brownell is not an acceptable anthologizer of poetry, nor does she seem professionally qualified to edit Dickinson. She normalizes Dickinson's punctuation, de-capitalizes nouns and verbs, eliminates dashes, changes the fascinating slant rhymes to true rhymes, and wholly replaces words. By doing so, Brownell has done more than imply that she knows what Dickinson wants to say better than Dickinson does. She has continued the long and frustrating tradition of simplifying Dickinson's work, making it seem pious, sentimental, and more-or-less straightforward. It's obvious that for Brownell, Dickinson's poetry is cutesy and conventional, with no hint of linguistic experimentation or mental agility.
For example, here's one of Dickinson's most complicated (and kick-ass) poems:
I'm "wife" - I've finished that -
That other state -
I'm Czar - I'm "Woman" now -
It's safer so -
How odd the Girl's life looks
Behind this soft Eclipse -
I think that Earth feels so
To folks in Heaven - now -
This being comfort - then
That other kind - was pain -
But why compare?
I'm "Wife"! Stop there!
With the exception of two exclamation points and the question mark in the last stanza, Dickinson has no normalized punctuation. Instead, she uses her trademark dashes - perhaps to indicate a change in rhythm, to allude to a missing word, or to call into question the relations of the phrases on either side of the dash. A good example of this ambiguity are the lines, "To folks in Heaven - now -/ This being comfort - then/ That other kind." With "now" separated by the pause, it's impossible to say for sure to what words it is referring. Is it to the "folks in Heaven" or to "This being comfort"? Why is "then" not followed by a similar dash? Does it describe "comfort" as the past tense, or "That other kind" as the logical next step after comfort? If the latter (to which the grammar seems to gesture), why does the line syntactically match the previous line as if to suggest a similar relationship? As readers, we cannot know why Dickinson has made these lines so ambiguous. Dickinson was fascinated with the unknowable, the mysterious, and the hidden, and a "meaning" of a poem to her would not necessarily be something stable or finite. In this poem, the pauses in part emphasize that logic. They are not sure what Earth or Heaven "feels" like, and the boundary between "pain" and "comfort" in the context of marriage (or religion, or several other subjects) is troubled, a sensation doubled by the stare quotes around the words "'Wife'" and "'Woman.'" The speaker calls into question the definition of either of these words and, before she can reach a conclusion about them, she "Stop[s] there!" She leaves the reader in the lurch, unsure of the benefits of marriage or of the speaker's gender or sexuality in the context of the poem.
If we couple the accurate version of the poem with Brownell's "editing," much of the ambiguity has been smothered, making the poem seem a sentimental, conventional representation of a 19th-century marriage:
I'M wife; I've finished that,
That other state;
I'm Czar, I'm woman now:
It's safer so.
How odd the little girl's life looks
Behind this soft eclipse!
I think that earth seems so
To those in heaven now.
This being comfort, then
That other kind was pain;
But why compare?
I'm wife! stop there!
Brownell seems to think this poem is about wifedom's superiority to the "little girl's life." We now know that "those in heaven" ("folk in heaven" is just too bewildering and interesting a juxtaposition) are "now" thinking of how earth "seems" (they do not, for whatever reason, "feel" this difference anymore). What's more, "woman" and "wife" are not fluid, socially-determined, or mental states of being. One is "comfort," while the "other kind" is "pain." In Brownell's version, the reader is indeed left wondering "why compare?" Why read Dickinson at all? What's a woman writer for, anyway, if she's not writing something easy and sentimental? Why is this person editing Dickinson when they clearly don't know anything about Dickinson's work? Dickinson's word choice, syntax, sound, and punctuation were deliberate, thought-out, and necessary - to change them changes the poem. Why are we still discussing this in 2011? And then there's the fact that Brownell titles the poems and sections them off as "Love" (of whom?), "Life," "Time and Eternity," and other similarly breezy titles.
So, anyway, yes, I think this kind of editing is a sexist and disappointing act, and it is shameful that there are no notations indicating that the poems were even edited. Someone who is not versed in Dickinson would likely think that these are the original poems. They aren't. They are edited without the poet's approval and without basic education about her writing, without editorial explanation or scholarship.
Brownell's pastiche was my first encounter with Dickinson's poetry in middle school. Unsurprisingly, it led me to conclude that Dickinson was boring and overhyped. I was lucky to continue studying literature and to return to Dickinson in a better edition. It infuriates me that this edition had so flippantly cheated me of what should have been a revelatory experience.
Anyone will immediately notice Dickinson's genius in a decently compiled version. Again, I recommend Thomas H. Johnson's edition (published by Back Bay Books), which is a complete collection of Dickinson that is much more carefully edited.