Great American Poets

New Hampshire, Tender Buttons, Select Poems, and Selected Poems

Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781504065023
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

These four timeless poetry collections showcase the pioneering work of some of America's most beloved and influential poets. New Hampshire by Robert Frost: This Pulitzer Prize–winning collection features some of Frost's most enduring works, all inspired by the cold and wild New Hampshire winter. Along with the title poem, this volume includes "Fire and Ice, " "Nothing Gold Can Stay, " and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, " which Frost himself called "my best bid for remembrance." Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein: Stein's first published work of poetry, this avant-garde meditation on ordinary living is presented in three sections: "Objects, " "Food, " and "Rooms." Emphasizing rhythm and sonority over traditional grammar, Stein's wordplay has garnered praise from readers and critics alike. Selected Poems by T. S. Eliot: This twenty-four poem volume is a rich collection of Eliot's greatest works—including "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, " "Gerontion, " "Sweeny Among the Nightingales, " and others—all of which expertly explore the desires, grievances, failures, and heart of modern humanity. Selected Poems by Emily Dickinson: This collection of poems by "one of America's greatest and most original poets of all time" includes some of Dickinson's best-known works, reflecting her thoughts on nature, life, death, the mind, and the spirit (Poetry Foundation).

Selected Poems

Emily Dickinson

Introduction

Emily Dickinson was born on December 10,1830, in a New England where Puritanism was dying and literature was just coming to life. Her birthplace was Amherst, a quiet village in the Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts, nearly a hundred miles from Concord and Cambridge in space, and at least half that number of years in time. Here she lived a life, outwardly uneventful, inwardly dedicated to a secret and self-imposed assignment—the mission of writing a “letter to the world” that would express, in poems of absolute truth and of the utmost economy, her concepts of life and death, of love and nature, and of what Henry James called “the landscape of the soul.”

Unpublished in her lifetime, unknown at her death in 1886, her poems, by chance and good fortune, reached, at last, the world to which they had been addressed. “If fame belonged to me,” she had written in 1862, “I could not escape her; if she did not, the longest day would pass me on the chase, and the approbation of my dog would forsake me.” The long day passed and fame was finally hers; fame not only for her poetry, but for her personal history.

From her family Emily had love without understanding. Her father, leading lawyer of the village, and, in later life, treasurer of Amherst College and member of the legislature and of Congress, dominated the household. “His heart was pure and terrible,” Emily wrote after his death in 1874, “and I think no other like it exists.” Her gentle, colorless mother lived in his shadow. Austin, the only son, patterned himself on his father but lacked the formidable self-righteousness of the old Puritan. Lavinia, crotchety and outspoken, was watchdog and protector of her shy, sensitive, and sometimes rebellious sister. The family lived in a brick mansion set in spacious grounds on Amherst’s main street, and neither sister ever married.

After two years at Amherst Academy and one at the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, Emily Dickinson settled down to the customary life of a New England village. Many years later a school friend remembered her as “not beautiful, yet she had great beauties. Her eyes were lovely auburn, soft and warm, her hair lay in rings of the same color all over her head, and her skin and teeth were fine. She had a demure manner which brightened easily into fun where she felt at home, but among strangers she was rather shy, silent, and even deprecating. She was exquisitely neat and careful in her dress, and always had flowers about her. She was one of the wits of the school, and there were no signs in her life and character of the future recluse.”

Into her life during these years came two young men who may have had some slight influence on her career: Leonard Humphrey, principal of Amherst Academy, and Benjamin F. Newton, a law student in her father’s office. Both stimulated her interest in books; Newton encouraged her to write. Both died young and were remembered in the lines:

I never lost as much but twice,

And that was in the sod;

Twice I have stood a beggar

Before the door of God!

Reticence was a Dickinson characteristic, and most of what we know or surmise about Emily’s emotional life comes by inference from her poems and letters. Sometime during her twenties she had begun seriously to write poetry; just when cannot be known because her early poems were destroyed, or are unidentifiable as such. By 1858 she was copying her poems in ink and gathering them together in little packets, loosely bound by thread. In that year she appears to have written fifty-two poems. In 1862 there was an astonishing total of three hundred and fifty-six. In 1865 the number had fallen off to eighty-five, and thereafter averaged about twenty a year.

The fuse that touched off the creative explosion of the early sixties appears to have been a Philadelphia clergyman: Charles Wadsworth, forty-one years old, a husband and a father when Emily Dickinson met him in May, 1855, while on her way home from a visit to her father in Washington. Correspondence must have followed since drafts of three letters to him—letters pathetically eager and pleading, in which the writer calls herself “Daisy” and the recipient “Master”—were found among Emily Dickinson’s papers after her death.

Whether Wadsworth responded to, or was alarmed by, the intensity of the emotion he inspired, as evidenced by these drafts and by certain of her poems, cannot be determined, since his letters were destroyed. But it is known that he called on her in 1860, while visiting a friend in nearby Northampton. And it is conjectured that sometime during the following year he told her that soon he would have “left the land,” having accepted a call to a church in San Francisco. The shock of separation may account for the prodigious output of 1862. “I had a terror since September, I could tell to none,” she wrote in that year, “and so I sing, as the boy does by the burying ground, because I am afraid.” And this is the loss to which the last two lines of the poem quoted above must refer:

Angels, twice...