The Complete Poems
Dickinson published almost nothing in her lifetime and spent it largely in her room in Amherst, Massachusetts. From that room she sent out 1,800 poems that redefined what poetry could do. Her slant rhymes, dashes, capitalized nouns, and compression of cosmic subjects into domestic images ("Because I could not stop for Death / He kindly stopped for me") are entirely original. Harold Bloom placed her among the handful of greatest writers in the Western tradition.
Reading all 1,775 poems consecutively reveals what anthologies conceal: hundreds are slight, occasional, or near-duplicates, and nearly everything moves in the same hymn meter, so the dazzle arrives wrapped in sing-song. Dickinson never prepared these for print, and it shows; you are reading an archive assembled from editors' guesses, more than a finished book.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
