Essential Dickinson

<P>From the introduction by Joyce Carol Oates: <P>Between them our great visionary poets of the American nineteenth century Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman have come to represent the extreme idiosyncratic poles of the American psyche....<P>Dickinson never shied away from the great subjects of human suffering loss death even madness but her perspective was intensely private; like Rainer Maria Rilke and Gerard Manley Hopkins she is the great poet of inwardness of the indefinable region of the soul in which we are in a sense all alone.