New Poems of Emily Dickinson - Hardcover

Dickinson, Emily; Shurr, William; Dunlap, Anna; Shurr, Emily Grey

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807821152 ISBN 13: 9780807821152

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr, 1993

Synopsis

Gathers hundreds of poems gleaned from Emily Dickinson's letters

About this title

Reviews

YA-Readers intrigued by Dickinson's poetry will welcome this unusual volume, which increases her body of work by 498 selections. Shurr has accomplished this by combing three volumes of the poet's letters and identifying epigrams, riddles, and various longer lyrical pieces within the prose. These will both challenge and delight serious readers, for wit, unusual rhythms, and musical rhymes predominate. The organization is easy to follow: the divisions include a discussion of epigrams, a new genre for Dickinson critics; many fully developed poems-within-letters; miscellaneous experimental forms; and a collection of the poet's juvenalia, instructive for its foreshadowing of technique and themes to come. Although some critics will object to Shurr's technique of labeling prose lines as poems, this volume expands students' notions of where poetry can be found. Writing teachers will mine this rich new resource as well.
Margaret Nolan, W.T. Woodson High School, Fairfax, VA
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Shurr ( The Marriage of Emily Dickinson ) carries one step further Thomas H. Johnson's practice of extracting poetic passages from the prose of Dickinson. Scrupulously reading her letters for passages that contain her familiar iambics, meter or punctuation, Shurr gathers nearly 500 such "excavations," which he has altered minimally to conform with Dickinson's "usual poetic lines." In addition, he isolates such categories as riddles and epigrams: "I thought your approbation Fame- / and it's withdrawal Infamy." The brevity and visual intensity of many short pieces show Dickinson as a precursor of the Imagists. But instead of letting the excerpts speak for themselves, Shurr fleshes them out with other poetic excerpts that require contextual explanation and "workshop" fragments that, he tells us, would have made excellent poems had they been further developed. A repetitive discussion of Dickinson's form and metric structure prefaces chapters as well as individual works. Such academic posturing interferes with the reader's casual enjoyment of much of the material here, which falls so naturally into poetry it's difficult to imagine it as anything else.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Shurr (English, Univ. of Tennessee) has assembled the first extensive compilation of excerpts from the letters of Emily Dickinson. In doing so, he examines the poetic qualities of the letters in often daring ways. What he has not done, as many have mistakenly gathered from the media excitement, is to discover a single new Dickinson poem. Every line, regardless of its reformatting by Shurr, is excised from the previously published letters. Shurr rightly points out many poetic elements in the letters, as readers have done since 1894. His book returns to the spirit of Dickinson's first 19th-century editors, who presumed to alter the poet's lines for her. While we marvel at the brilliance of these excerpts, we are always aware of the editorial license taken with the material. Of interest to scholars but confusing to nonspecialists; not an essential purchase.
- Daniel J. Lombardo, The Jones Lib., Inc., Amherst, Mass.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807821152
• ISBN 13: 9780807821152
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 125