The essential poems of Emily Dickinson selected and introduced by
Joyce Carol Oates
"Between them, our great visionary poets of the American nineteenth
century, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, have come to represent the
extreme, idiosyncratic poles of the American psyche. . . .
Dickinson never shied away from the great subjects of human suffering,
loss, death, even madness, but her perspective was intensely private;
like Rainer Maria Rilke and Gerard Manley Hopkins, she is the great poet
of inwardness, of the indefinable region of the soul in which we are, in
a sense, all alone." --from the introduction by Joyce Carol Oates