Product Description: Emily Dickinson, who regarded a letter as a joy of Earth, was herself a gifted epistolary artist cryptic and allusive in style, dazzling in verbal effects, and sensitively attuned to the recipients of her many letters. In this volume, distinguished literary scholars focus intensively on Dickinson's letter-writing and what her letters reveal about her poetics, her personal associations, and her self-awareness as a writer...read more

The first book to portray one of the most remarkable friendships in American letters, that of Emily Dickinson—recluse, poet—and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, minister, literary figure, active abolitionist.Their friendship began in 1862. The Civil War was raging. Dickinson was thirty-one; Higginson, thirty-eight. A former pastor at the Free Church of Worcester, Massachusetts, he wrote often for the cultural magazine of the day, The Atlantic Monthly—on gymnastics, women’s rights, and slavery. His article “Letter to a Young Contributor” gave advice to readers who wanted to write for the magazine and offered tips on how to submit one’s work (“use black ink, good pens, white paper”).Among the letters Higginson received in response was one scrawled in looping, difficult handwriting. Four poems were enclosed in a smaller envelope. He deciphered the scribble: “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?”Higginson read the poems. The writing was unique, uncategorizable. It was clear to him that this was “a wholly new and original poetic genius,” and the memory of that moment stayed with him when he wrote about it thirty years later.Emily Dickinson’s question inaugurated one of the least likely correspondences in American letters—between a man who ran guns to Kansas, backed John Brown, and would soon command the first Union regiment of black soldiers, and the eremitic, elusive poet who cannily told him she did not cross her “Father’s ground to any House or town.”For the next quarter century, until her death in 1886, Dickinson sent Higginson dazzling poems, almost one hundred of them—many of them her best. Their metrical forms were unusual, their punctuation unpredictable, their images elliptical, innovative, unsentimental. Poetry torn up by the roots, Higginson later said, that “gives the sudden transitions.”Dickinson was a genius of the faux-naïf variety, reclusive to be sure but more savvy than one might imagine, more self-conscious and sly, and certainly aware of her outsize talent. “Dare you see a Soul at the ‘White Heat’?” she wondered. She dared, and he did.In this shimmering, revelatory work, Brenda Wineapple re-creates the extraordinary, delicate friendship that led to the publication of Dickinson’s poetry. And though she and Higginson met face-to-face only twice (he had never met anyone “who drained my nerve power so much,” he said), their friendship reveals much about Dickinson, throwing light onto both the darkened door of the poet’s imagination and a corner of the noisy century that she and Colonel Higginson shared.White Heat is about poetry, politics, and love; it is, as well, a story of seclusion and engagement, isolation and activism—and the way they were related—in the roiling America of the nineteenth century.

Product Description: Despite her reputation as a reclusive poet, Emily Dickinson wrote more than one thousand "letters to the world," engaging in lively epistolary conversations with close to one hundred correspondents. Although these letters have found many avid readers since they were first published in 1894, they have often been viewed as mere background materials or vehicles for the writer's poems...read more

Excerpt from Letters of Sidney Lanier: Selections From His Correspondence, 1866-1881Are ye so sharp set for the centre of the earth, are ye so hungry for the centre of things,O rains and springs and rivers of the mountains?Towards the centre of the earth, towards the very Middle of things, ye will fall, ye will run, the Centre will draw ye, Gravity will drive you and draw you in one:But the Centre ye will not reachy ye will come as near as the plains, - watering them in coming so near, - and ye will come as near as the bottom of the Ocean, seeing and working many marvels as ye come so near:But the Centre of Things ye will not reach,O my rivers and rains and springs of the mountains.Provision is made that ye shall not: ye would be merged, ye could not return.Nor shall my soul be merged in God, though tending, though tending.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Product Description: This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work...read more

Product Description: More than 40 years after the inaugural volume's original publication, Ted Genoways brings scholars the latest volume in Walt Whitman: The Correspondence. Among the more than 150 letters collected in this volume are numerous correspondence concerning Whitman's Civil War years, including a letter sending John Hay, the personal secretary to Abraham Lincoln, a manuscript copy of O Captain, My Captain! Additional letters address various aspects of the production of Leaves of Grass, the most notable being an extensive correspondence surrounding the Deathbed Edition, gathered by Whitman's friend Horace Traubel, and reproduced here for the first time...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Presents selections from Emily Dickinson's thirty-six year correspondence to her sister-in-law Susan Huntington Dickinson (view table of contents)

Product Description: The author, here, examines both the personae adopted by Dickinson when writing to her most important correspondents and her maturation as a poet. The text studies the links between her letters and her poems, identifying poetic sources within her prose.

The biography and selected letters of this literary great includes over 60 newly discovered letters written to many other literary giants of the time, including Robert Browning and William Morris. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Approximately 100 letters are published here for the first time, including almost all of the letters to Jane Humphrey and to Mrs. J. Howard Sweetser. The new material is even more extensive than it might appear, for many of the letters previously published were censored when first made public...read more

Product Description: Walt Whitman experienced the agonies of the Civil War firsthand, working, in his forties, as a dedicated volunteer throughout the conflict in Washington's overcrowded, understaffed military hospitals. This superb selection of his poems, letters, and prose from the war years, filled with the sights and sounds of war and its ugly aftermath, express a vast and powerful range of emotions...read more

Gathers hundreds of poems gleaned from Emily Dickinson's letters

Letters from each period of his life document Whitman's relationships with his family, friends, and fellow writers

The famous American poet as a person and a literary figure is seen through sensitive and expressive correspondence that spans her life from childhood to maturity

Product Description: The years just before and during the Civil War marked the high point of Bryant's influence on public affairs, which had grown steadily since the Evening Post had upheld the democratic Jacksonian revolution of the 1830s. A founder of the Free Soil Party in 1848 and the Republican Party in 1856, Bryant was lauded in 1857 by Virginia anti-slavery leader John Curtis Underwood, who wrote to Eli Thayer, What a glory it would be to our country if it could elect this man to the Presidency-the country not he would be honored & elevated by such an event...read more

Product Description: Book by Hayne, Paul Hamilton, Moore, Rayburn S.

Product Description: The second volume of William Cullen Bryant's letters opens in 1836 as he has just returned to New York from an extended visit to Europe to resume charge of the New York Evening Post, brought near to failure during his absence by his partner William Leggett's mismanagement...read more

Product Description: 3 HARDCOVER BOOKS

Product Description: Volumes III and IV of this edition bring together all the extant letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow for the period 1844-1865, most of which have never before been published. These letters carry Longfellow through the remarkable period when he was gaining renown both at home and abroad as the poet laureate of America...read more

(view table of contents)