Envelope Poems

Resumen del libro

Although a very prolific poet and arguably America's greatest Emily Dickinson (1830 1886) published fewer than a dozen of her eighteen hundred poems. Instead, she created at home small handmade books. When, in her later years, she stopped producing these, she was still writing a great deal, and at her death she left behind many poems, drafts, and letters.

It is among the makeshift and fragile manuscripts of Dickinson's later writings that we find the envelope poems gathered here. These manuscripts on envelopes (recycled by the poet with marked New England thrift) were written with the full powers of her late, most radical period. Intensely alive, these envelope poems are charged with a special poignancy addressed to no one and everyone at once.

Full-color facsimiles are accompanied by Marta L. Werner and Jen Bervin's pioneering transcriptions of Dickinson's handwriting. Their transcriptions allow us to read the texts, while the facsimiles let us see exactly what Dickinson wrote (the variant words, crossings-out, dashes, directional fields, spaces, columns, and overlapping planes).

Biografía del autor

La poetisa norteamericana Emily Dickinson nació en Amherst, Nueva Inglaterra, en 1830. Estudió en la Academia de Amherst y en el Seminario Femenino de Mount Holyoke, Massachusetts, donde se formó en un ambiente calvinista muy rígido, contra el que manifestó un obstinada rebeldía, pero que impregnó profundamente su extraña concepción de Universo.<br> Emily Dickinson se aisló muy pronto del mundo y no admitió, a partir de entonces, entrar en contacto con nadie que no estuviera a la altura de sus conocimientos y de sus afectos, como lo estuvieron, por ejemplo, sus cuatro preceptores : Benjamin Franklin Newton, quien le hizo leer en edad muy temprana a Emerson, y luego el reverendo Charles Wadsworth, el escritor Samuel Bowles y el Juez Otis P. Lord, con quienes mantuvo una correspondencia abundante y asidua a la que hoy recurren todos aquellos que desean ahondar en la aventura espiritual de tan peculiar personalidad.