Fabulous criticisms of Emily D.

When it comes to commentary on the poems of Emily Dickinson, it can be difficult to know where to start. Michael Dirda of the Washington Post suggests beginning with Helen Vendler's Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries. Vendler is "regarded as our finest living critic and champion of contemporary poetry," writes Dirda. He suggests this is reason enough to pluck Commentaries from among the Dickinson garden blooming on bookstore shelves.

From the Washington Post:

For Vendler really is a great reader and teacher. Consider her superb analysis -- too long to reproduce -- of "Essential Oils -- are wrung." Or look at her discussion of the famous poem about heaven "I never saw a Moor": She points out that its last lines ("Yet certain am I of the spot/As if the Checks were given -- ") refer to train tickets, thus making Paradise nearby, just a few stops down the line from Amherst. Older editors had emended "checks" to "chart," thus losing the homely simile. Again, in her glossing of "To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee," Vendler neatly picks apart Dickinson's verbal games with the article "a" and the number "one."