Essential Dickinson

From the introduction by Joyce Carol Oates Between them our great visionary poets of the American nineteenth century Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman have come to represent the extreme idiosyncratic poles of the American psycheDickinson 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