In the 1850 national census, Dickinson listed her occupation as “keeping house”; the scraps might have kept her as she did so. Lyndall Gordon, a recent biographer, argued that Dickinson was epileptic and feared suffering one of her seizures in public. But Dickinson’s preferred punctuation, while it leaves the possibility of the auxiliary clause intact, allows for other syntactical relations: “You may have met him—[if you haven’t, you should know that] / His notice instant is. This exquisitely produced book The Gorgeous Nothings—lovingly curated by Bervin and Werner—allows you to encounter Emily Dickinson’s ‘envelope poems’ in full-color facsimile for the first time.

perhaps I was reading them wrong, but I read them in the way I saw most logical and they did not make sense at all. Which is fine—there is enough, in the end, to justify the material's interest, even if I was slightly disappointed that there wasn't more actual writing (a number of pages simply contain pictures of bits of envelope addressed to or by Dickinson). The vertical column of the first panel then becomes a broad horizon, which, when the poet runs out of space, picks up on the third blank panel. We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed. It looked out over the family’s property on Main Street, in Amherst, Massachusetts, toward the Evergreens, her brother’s grand Italianate mansion, nestled among the pines a few hundred yards away.

I almost felt a bit voyeuristic reading these poems, like I walked into a room and found these scraps on someone’s desk. Uma poesia fragmentada escrita em envelopes já utilizados que acredito seja uma inspiração de momento, um registo do fugaz sem emenda e hesitante entre uma palavra ou outra.

Dickinson’s handwriting, though occasionally illegible, isn’t like the script in a Cy Twombly blackboard painting; it is meant to be read.A complete and mostly unaltered collection of her poetry became available for the first time in 1955 when The Poems of Emily Dickinson was published by scholar Thomas H. There are countless expressive features of a Dickinson manuscript, all but a few of them effaced when her poems enter a standard print edition.

The poems of Emily Dickinson began as marks made in ink or pencil on paper, usually the standard stationery that came into her family’s household. Dickinson seems to have preferred “instant” over “sudden” in later drafts of the poem, but when it appeared in the second edition of her work, edited by Todd and Higginson, a comma materialized in the spot where the question mark had gone. my rating literally comes from the aesthetic appeal of the book, I am in fact judging a book by its cover. Except that the actual manuscript has multiple anomalies, cross-outs, and alternate words surrounding the lines I have just quoted.After a gregarious girlhood, it was said, Dickinson had gradually become a near-total recluse, known around Amherst as “the myth. Then, in 2013, a handsome facsimile edition, “ The Gorgeous Nothings,” was published by New Directions, followed, this fall, by a compact selected edition, “ Envelope Poems,” the fruits of a collaboration between the Dickinson scholar Marta Werner and the poet and visual artist Jen Bervin. Also interesting is the incredible glimpse into a master poet's creative process—alternative words, phrases crossed out, poems re-written on facing pages.