Poetry of Emily Dickinson

I am looking for a reference edition of the selected writing/poems of Emily Dickinson, and the available supply is rather overwhelming...

Can anyone recommend one? I would prefer a beautiful (i.e. hard cover) over a cheap version.

Do you want her poems or her letters? They are usually printed separately. Is this for someone who knows Dickinson's writing already? Is this a gift, or for scholarly study?

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Find a used copy of the Franklin one-volume edition, hard cover. That's the standard now. People use Franklin's numbers.

I think the standard correspondence is Johnson's. It's probably expensive in the full hard-cover Harvard version. There is a soft-cover selected letters from Johnson's edition.

I just realised tonight i never thanked y’all for your input. Thank you. I ultimately chose for the edition of the folio society. Their books are always nice but sometimes crazy expensive, this one wasn’t, and i am quite happy with it:

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I have such Emily Dickinson edition in my library collection - Emily Dickinson's Gardening Life: The Plants and Places That Inspired the Iconic Poet Hardcover. Do you need something like this?

Thanks Shirley, but no. I am not yet very big on poetry, just starting to see if I like it. Emily Dickinson’s poetry was referred to in Matt Haig’s “The Humans” so I thought I’d give it a try.

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Originally Posted by Linger

Thanks Shirley, but no. I am not yet very big on poetry, just starting to see if I like it. Emily Dickinson’s poetry was referred to in Matt Haig’s “The Humans” so I thought I’d give it a try.

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Try the RW Franklin edition, or the older Thomas H. Johnson edition (https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Poem...9146535&sr=8-4)

The out-of-copyright editions are all based on the series begun by Thomas Wentworth Higginson about 1890. Higginson worked to make Dickinson look more like normal 19th Century poetry, softening some bits, adding titles, capitalizing the first letters of each line, removing Dickinson's dashes. There followed a series of editions from two families who had separate collections of Dickinson manuscripts.

In the mid-1950's, Thomas Johnson edited a complete edition based on Dickinson's original texts. Johnson's was the first edition able to use poems from the two collections, and researchers had found Dickinson poems scattered around and never published before. It seems that Emily D. often sent poems in letters to friends -- her version of publishing them, I guess. Often, she sent the same poem to different people, changing it somewhat in each letter. Johnson numbered the poems, and his numbering system became a standard.

This was the standard edition until Franklin re-edited the poems in the late 1990's, adding poems that had been discovered since Johnson's edition. Franklin organized his edition chronologically, so he had to renumber them. This is the edition that is taught in colleges today. It is pretty good.

https://www.amazon.com/Poems-Emily-D...9147622&sr=8-5

Here is the letters (selected) of Dickinson: https://www.amazon.com/Emily-Dickins...9148246&sr=8-3

Here is a good biography of Emily D.: https://www.amazon.com/Wars-Are-Laid...9148326&sr=8-1