Product Description

Though generally overlooked during her lifetime, Emily Dickinson's poetry has achieved acclaim due to her experiments in prosody, her tragic vision and the range of her emotional and intellectual explorations.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #939027 in Books
• Published on: 1964-01-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
"We have had to wait more than a century and a quarter for Final Harvest, the first truly selected poems of Emily Dickinson...'

About the Author
Emily Dickinson (1831-1886). Thomas H. Johnson is a distinguished Dickinson scholar. He edited the original 3-volume edition of the Complete Poems (1955). He also edited her letters and wrote her biography

Customer Reviews

The Loaded Gun Which
Everyone who aims for the ultimate, the elusive, and the exquisite, ought to pack. The edition is affordable, durable, well-organized, comprehensive . . . and produced with care NOT to alter the form or format of the poems . . . which for some dreadful reason a lot of folks seem to feel compelled to do . . .

more importantly . . . all that white witchcraft still dazzles

Perhaps we are looking at the wrong aspects...
Don't get me wrong, I truly love a large selection of the poems in this volume. However, that is a measure of Emily Dickenson and me, not T. Johnson's collection. What makes this book better than many that are around and about, as has been mentioned, is the lack of editing to her poems--something that has always bothered me. In this regard, the content of the poems is better than many others, however there are other issues of note.

This is, of course, an abridged collection. As such, we are forced to rely on the opinion of another. Granted this is common enough with poetry collections, but that doesn't change the very nature of each person having differing interests. There is no way to know if the ones he leaves out are just as good or even better, from each individuals perspective, without going to more comprehensive texts.

Regardless, I do have one gripe with this book that is unrelated to the above pettiness. The method of dating each poem seems silly to me. The reason is that they are all claimed to be from one of several (if memory serves 3) years separated out over several decades. That and there are two listings of dates for each poem, which I don't recall off hand why they did that, and it may serve some purpose, but it's not useful information if when these poems were written can only be pinned down to plus or minus five-ten years. I can't blame Johnson for this as I imagine that is as close as is known, but, by the same token, the dates could have been left out so that it doesn't detract from the actual poetry.

All in all I would recomend this book, but I might suggest getting a more complete version instead (so long as it is unedited--Emily hated it when people wanted to edit her poems, and I think that we should respect that).

Strong Medicine
I was never actually a fan of poetry until I encountered Emily Dickinson's poems. It seems as if she has written a poem for everyone. I strongly recomend this book, as my English teacher did to me, not only because of my love for Emily Dickinson, but for the quality of the book. It is obvious that Thomas H. Johnson, the editor, put many long hours of hard work into gathering this collection. Many of her poems were simply scribbled on little pieces of paper, which makes me wonder what kind of literary genius she must have been. With the help of this book, she has become my favorite poet, and I have learned that poetry can be strong medicine for the hurting soul. Final Harvest never leaves my side.