Fifty Poems of Emily Dickinson

Emily Dicknson today is gaining her deserved place alongside Walt Whitman as one of the two greatest American poets of the nineteenth century. Beginning always with particulars of personal experience, her poems encompass life and death, love and longing,

At the age of 23, Emily Dickinson receded from the social whirl of her prominent family into semiseclusion. For the remaining 23 years of her life she was happiest when alone and writing. As she requested in "The Prayer," "Great Spirit, give to me a heaven not so large as yours, but large enough for me." Read by a group of very talented celebrity women such as Meryl Streep, Sharon Stone, and Alfre Woodard, these pieces lean toward the somber side of Dickinson's work (which, as her fans know, is very somber indeed). Poems include "Shipwreck," "Will There Really Be a Morning?" and "To Know Just How He Suffered." (Running time: 45 minutes, 1 cassette) --C.B. Delaney