The Gardens of Emily Dickinson

By: Judith Farr and Louise Carter

368 pages, 24 colour illustrations & 12 tritone illustrations

Publisher: Harvard University Press

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ISBN: 9780674018297 Paperback Nov 2005 Not in stock: Usually dispatched within 1 week
£26.95
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Price: £26.95

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About this book

In this first substantial study of Emily Dickinson's devotion to flowers and gardening, Judith Farr seeks to join both poet and gardener in one creative personality. She casts new light on Dickinson's temperament, her aesthetic sensibility and her vision of the relationship between art and nature, revealing that the successful gardener's intimate understanding of horticulture helped shape the poet's choice of metaphors for every experience: love and hate, wickedness and virtue, death and immortality.

Introduction 1. Gardening in Eden 2. The Woodland Garden 3. The Enclosed Garden 4. The "Garden in the Brain" 5. Gardening with Emily Dickinson Louise Carter Epilogue: The Gardener in Her Seasons Appendix: Flowers and Plants Grown by Emily Dickinson Abbreviations Notes Acknowledgments Index of Poems Cited Index

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Biography

Judith Farr is Professor of English Emerita, Georgetown University. Louise Carter is a professional landscape gardener and horticulturist.

By: Judith Farr and Louise Carter

368 pages, 24 colour illustrations & 12 tritone illustrations

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Media reviews

If you want poetry and gardening of equal merit, turn to Emily Dickinson, whose gardens--poetic and herbaceous--are the subject of an attractive new book, "The Gardens of Emily Dickinson", by Judith Farr. It includes a chapter on 'Gardening with Emily Dickinson' by Louise Carter. This book catches a constant tension in Dickinson's life. An interesting, skillful gardener, she had a strong literal regard for the immediate world in which she gardened. And yet the garden in her poems is never just her garden. Nature serves her visionary passion. A dandelion demonstrates how 'Winter instantly becomes/An infinite Alas.' I suspect that as she passed among her flowers in Amherst they evaporated into the symbolic ether behind her. And yet, as Farr notes, Emily Dickinson had strong gardener's hands. -- Verlyn Klinkenborg "New York Times Book Review" (06/06/2004)

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