THE SINGLE HOUND, Poems Of A Lifetime

Nothing of Emily Dickinson's was published during her lifetime. Her fame is entirely posthumous. "Publication is the auction of the mind of man," she said. Three volumes of her poems have been edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who was a friend of the Dickinsons. Recently some unknown poems have been discovered, and these have been published as "The Single Hound," with a revealing preface by Emily Dickinson's niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, herself a poet. Mrs. Bianchi and Mrs. Todd have both edited letters of Emily Dickinson, among the most sparkling and clever letters ever written.

Emily Dickinson's poems are all very short, some of them being only four lines in length. They resemble Father Tabb's lyrics in their brevity, and might like them be called little "tabs" of verse.

The thought in them is at times so condensed that it is hard to understand. At best they are like snatches of song. Their persistent melody makes them easy to memorize. In the scope of literature there is no more adored genius than Emily Dickinson.