Because I could not stop for Death

It's rather the perfect Halloween Poem: Death takes you out on a romantic ride, or so it seems at first glance. Emily Dickinson's "Because I Could Not Stop for Death" is a brilliant composition in six stanzas of decreation. For a reliable text of the poem, see Poets.org
 (https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/because-i-could-not-stop-death-479).

Dickinson rarely gave titles to the poems that she inscribed into her own hand-crafted and hand-sewn notebooks, and this is no exception, but over time, first lines have provided titles. You will notice that Dickinson's favorite punctuation mark appears to be the dash, and it has taken a century for her editors to respect her own punctuation. Was that because she was a woman?

So it is helpful to check any published version of a Dickinson text against her own handwriting. It is now possible to do that on-line through the Emily Dickinson archive:
http://www.edickinson.org/editions/1/image_sets/235752

Visit Dickinson's surroundings ---

Links

If you are a casual reader, The Emily Dickinson Homestead offers their own poem of the week: 
http://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/node/12 .  

More academic readers may enjoy links to "Digital Dickinson" here: http://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/resources_bibliography#electronicresources.

Listen to an NPR (National Public Radio) broadcast about Dickinson:
http://www.npr.org/2016/06/18/482478311/nevermind-the-white-dress-turns-out-emily-dickinson-had-a-green-thumb

i.m. M.H. Abrams

Here, speaking at Cornell, Abrams offers excellent detailed analysis of poems by Auden, Dickinson, Wordsworth, Dowson, and Ammons.



See also:  http://ithacavoice.com/2015/04/one-greatest-professors-cornell-history-died

Dickinson Update

It's been a Dickinson Autumn.  First the lecture by Cristiane Miller in October. Then finding the Dickinson envelopes in an Amsterdam bookshop. Now, a friend's kind FB hints.  See the relevant links below.

Emily Dickinson Archives (http://www.emilydickinson.org).
Cristiane Miller (October 22, 2013).
Craig Morgan Teicher, "Dickinson's Envelope Writings," NPR (November 30, 2013).

After changing the accepted vision of TSE, a new take on ED?

Lyndall Gordon's new book on Emily Dickinson, Lives Like Loaded Guns (2010) suggests that her epilepsy is something that scholars have yet to reckon with.

Links:

Lyndall Gordon, "A bomb in her bosom: Emily Dickinson's secret life," Guardian (February 13, 2010).

Poésies complètes

Emily Dickinson is enjoying Paris this autumn. At least figuratively speaking, the "Recluse" is alive and well and living in Paris. French students are reading her work in preparation for the competitive teacher's examination, the agrégation, and her complete poems have just been translated as Poésies complètes by Françoise Delphy (published by Flammarion, November 12, 2009). Delphy follows several other translators in popularizing Dickinson to the French: there is the magisterial work of Claire Malroux, based on the Johnson edition, in Car l'adieu, c'est la nuit (Gallimard/NRF, 2007), following her earlier translations (Belin, 1989 and Corti, 1998). Even earlier, there was Guy Jean Forgue's translation, Poèmes, published by Aubier-Flammarion (1970).

Links

Flammarion Editions (editions.flammarion.com).

Patrick Kéchichian, "Emily Dickinson ou la trace de l'ange," La Croix (November 19, 2009).

Bibliography for the English Agrégation and Capes from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (www.bnf.fr) and from the SAES site, as prepared by Isabelle Alfandary and Antoine Cazé (web.univ-pau.fr/saes).

On ghosts & voices

The latest issue of Sillages Critiques (8, 2006) features several articles on poetry including Pascal Acquien's "Psychanalyse du spectre" (on Ted Hughes), Antoine Cazé's "Lyrismes : La voix spectrale (on music in Gertrude Stein, Pascal Dusapin, Rae Armantrout, and Emily Dickinson)," and Geneviève Cohen-Cheminet's "La lettre et l'archive" (on Jerome Rothenberg and Arie Galles).

The romance(s) of Emily Dickinson

And another book about this, featuring Wentworth Higginson:

White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (2008) by Brenda Wineapple, reviewed in the New York Times (August 22, 2008).