Emily Dickinson today has gaining her deserved place alongside Walt Whitman as one of the two greatest American poets of the nineteenth century. Beginning always with particulars of personal experience, her poems encompass life and death, love and longing, joyfulness and sorrow. With sparse, precise language, she conveyed a penetrating vision of the natural world and an acute understanding of the most profound human truths.

The poems included in this collection are grouped by three time periods, 1890, 1891, and 1896, and by the subjects of life, love, nature, and time and eternity.