The Essential Emily Dickinson

The extreme peculiar poles of the American psyche have come to be represented by Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman two of the greatest visionary poets of the nineteenth century in the United States. ... Dickinson like Rainer Maria Rilke and Gerard Manley Hopkins is the great poet of inwardness of the indefinable region of the soul in which we are in a sense all alone. She never shied away from the great subjects of human suffering loss death or even madness but her perspective was intensely private.