Endnotes

1.

Emily Dickinson provided titles for very few of her poems. For the sake of convenience, later editors have assigned them numbers. Today her poems (1,775 of them) are most accessible in a paperback volume edited by Thomas Johnson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Little Brown, 1958), so I have followed the numbering system used in that volume. More recently, R.W. Franklin has edited a more complete collection (1,789 poems) with another numbering system, The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, Belknap Press, 1999).

2.

For more on the poet’s religious perspective, see Roger Lundin, Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), and Beth Maclay Doriani, Emily Dickinson: Daughter of Prophecy (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1996).

3.

The poet’s letters may be found in The Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. by Johnson and Theodora Ward, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, Belknap Press, 1958); the letter numbers cited in this article refer to that edition.