This comprehensive edition contains the largest number of Dickinson's poems ever assembled, arranged chronologically and drawn from a range of archives. The text of each manuscript is rendered individually, including, within the capacity of standard type, Dickinson's spelling, capitalization, and punctuation.

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."< P>