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Title: An inward life of bold, swift thought
Review: Few poems were published in her lifetime. This collection was edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and T.W. Higginson. The poetry of Emily Dickinson is a joyful experience. Loneliness is elevated to a level of philosophical knowingness and her lines sing. Pantheism is circumscribed by her very real sense of the necessary straitjacket supplied by Christian belief.The arrangement of the poems is appropriate and thematic. In the preface to the second series the portfolios of poetry left by Emily Dickinson at her death are described. Variant forms and revisions were in evidence. The poems are as luminous as the pictures of Martin Johnson Heade. The artists' common use of humming birds suggests, among other things, this point.The language is succinct, never obvious. For example, Dickinson writes that remorse is memory awake. Elsewhere she wishes to be held firmly for eternity. The topics in both series are life, love, nature, and time and eternity.
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