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Informationen zum Autor Emily Dickinson; Edited by Emily Fragos Klappentext A selection of the remarkable letters of Emily Dickinson in an elegant Pocket Poet edition. The same inimitable voice and dazzling insights that make Emily Dickinson's poems immortal can be found in the whimsical, humorous, and often deeply moving letters she wrote to her family and friends throughout her life. The selection of letters presented here provides a fuller picture of the eccentric recluse of legend, showing how immersed in life she was: we see her tending her garden; baking bread; marking the marriages, births, and deaths of those she loved; reaching out for intellectual companionship; and confessing her personal joys and sorrows. These letters, invaluable for the light they shed on their author, are, as well, a pure pleasure to read. From the Foreword by Emily Fragos Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, and she died there fifty-five years later on May 15, 1886, in her "father's house," where she had spent almost all of her adult life in seclusion. The "weary life in the second story," as she called herself with typical Dickinsonian perspicacity, never forsook human relationships, however, daily participating in a busy household and sending herself out into the world through her passionate, witty, mournful, and celebratory letters. "My business," she told friends, "is to love" and Dickinson loved with a flame turned up to the white heat. She loved her parents and her sister and brother; her girlhood and adult friend; teachers and studies and books; the busy college town of Amherst; and the Springfield newspaper with its amusing local stories. She loved utterly Sue Gilbert, who would marry her brother Austin; and the mysterious "Master" of the famed "Master Letters" (who has never been identified but may have been Charles Wadsworth or Otis Lord or Samuel Bowles). She loved the rebirth of spring; her beautiful garden; the wild flowers of the fields; butterflies, toads, and bees; her huge brown Newfoundland, Carlo; the town's children for whom she baked cookies; the Brontës and George Eliot, the Brownings and Shakespeare; many church sermons (but certainly not all); her travels as an exuberant young girl to Washington and Philadelphia and Virginia. She was charmed by the circus that passed beneath her window and left a bright spot of red in her hyper-alert mind. She celebrated the births of babies and announcements of marriages in words of joy and kindness. Emily Dickinson found life startling and ecstatic and comical and terrible, often all at the same time. She lived in awe. Her letters, with their feverish observations, metaphors, epigrams, allusions, paradoxes, hyperbole, and rapid leaps of imagination, must have confounded their recipients — even if they were used to "Emily being Emily." Each day she lived and expressed with an intensity and a devotion that no one she knew could emulate, much less reciprocate. She would at times become wounded when her letters, into which she poured so much of herself, went unanswered, leaving her vulnerable, almost in despair. "You are like God," she wrote to a friend who had not written back. "We pray to Him and He answers 'No.'" Absence was unbearable for this poet, as it is for many, but Dickinson's losses were multitudinous and they started early in her childhood and painfully continued throughout her life. She cherished the birds that flew away because they always came back, unlike the endless stream of loved ones whose deaths undid her. I have devoted one chapter to Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the prominent man of letters who eventually helped bring her poetry to the world's attention. It is one of the greatest moments in world literature when Higginson opened that first letter from an unknown correspondent in April 1862. "Are you too deeply occupied to say i...
