Simus Hennie, Dennis Donoghue, William Pritchard, Marilyn Butler, Harold Bloom and others have praised Helen Wendler as one of the most attentive readers of poetry. Here, Vendler turned her luminous skills as a critic to 150 selected poems by Emily Dickinson. As it did in Shakespeare's "Sonatas of Art", serves as an unmatched guide, taking into account the stylistic and fictional features of the poems. When choosing these poems for comment, Wendler chooses to show many aspects of Dickinson's work as a poet, "from her poems by one person to the poems of grand abstraction, from her exotic verses to her unique images of emotional numbness, from her comic tales to her painful poems of traces." Listed here are many of the favorite things expected in addition to the most complex and less often.

In short, Vendler's selection reveals Emily Dickinson's development as a poet, an amazing group, and her declaration of what Wordsworth called "history and sensibility." In the accompanying comments, Vendler offers a deeper interview with Dickinson, the "inventor and linguistic interpreter of its permanent themes." All of Dickinson's concerns - death, religion, love, the natural world, the nature of thought - are discussed here in detail, but Vendler is always keen to emphasize the poet's amazing imagination and linguistic ingenuity. Whether we explore less ordinary poems or favorites we thought we knew, Vendler reveals Dickinson as the "master" of the language of the revolutionary verse of impulse and power.

"Dickinson: Selected Poems and Comments" will be an indispensable reference for Dickinson students and poetry readers.