Boston: Roberts Bros. 1896. First edition. A lovely, just about Fine copy in Myerson's binding "B" grey cloth with beveled boards and "ghost pipes" design in gilt. Contemporary news clipping tipped in facing copyright page. An excellent example.

After Dickinson’s death in 1886, her acquaintances Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd edited her Poems, printed in a run of 500 copies. Many further print runs were soon called for, encouraging the publication of a Second Series and Third Series, printed in initial runs of 960 and 1,000 copies, respectively. Published posthumously, this is the third and final book in the series of poems edited by Loomis and published by Roberts Bros.

Loomis and Higginson's editorship has since become controversial: the changes made to Dickinson's original enjambment, language, and punctuation are now widely regarded as having compromised Dickinson's poetic vision. Nevertheless, the original Roberts Bros. editions introduced the world to one of the most innovative English-language writers in history, and remained the standard until Thomas H. Johnson's more faithful edition, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, appeared in 1955.

“Dickinson never shied away from the great subjects of human suffering, loss, death, even madness, but her perspective was intensely private; like Rainer Maria Rilke and Gerard Manley Hopkins, she is the great poet of inwardness, of the indefinable region of the soul in which we are, in a sense, all alone” (Joyce Carol Oates, Essential Dickinson).

“Except for Shakespeare, Dickinson manifests more cognitive originality than any other Western poet since Dante…at the height of her powers, [she is] the best mind to appear among Western poets in nearly four centuries” (Harold Bloom). Fine (Item #7988)