Thomas H. Johnson and the Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press have brought out in three big volumes, noted, chronologically arranged, and accurate to the last variant, misspelling, and grammatical error, The Poems of Emily Dickinson… This is, truly, a marvelous book: the reader finishes speechless, and laughing, and shaking his head in helpless wonder… All the absolutes and intensives and eccentricities of an absolutely intense eccentric have passed over him like a train of avalanches, and left him a couple of hundred feet deep in Knowledge… [Dickinson’s] poetry is the diary or autobiography—though few diaries or autobiographies compare with it for intentional and, especially, unintentional truth—of an acute psychologist, a wonderful rhetorician, and one of the most individual writers who ever lived, one of those best able to express experience at its most nearly absolute.
Randall Jarrell
Harper’s
A scholarly miracle… [This work], in three volumes, includes ‘variant readings critically compared with all known manuscripts’… [The editor] has brought sympathy and insight to bear in an illuminating way on several major Dickinsonian enigmas… The work comprises seventeen hundred and seventy-five poems, of which forty-one are known to be unpublished, in whole or in part.
New Yorker
The appearance of Thomas H. Johnson’s three-volume compilation of ‘The Poems of Emily Dickinson,’ the first authentic and really Complete Poems, is a major publishing event. A carefully collated and scholarly text has been awaited, demanded, and needed for years. The present publication is a cumulative response to that demand. It is far more than an important revision; it is a rediscovery.
Louis Untermeyer
Saturday Review