The Complete Poems

This volume constitutes the first major edition of Emily Brontë’s complete poems to appear for half a century. ‘A family in whom appears to run the instinct of song . . . rising, in that of Ellis, into an inspiration,’ wrote the Athenaeum, reviewing Poems (1846) by the ‘three brothers’ Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. Twenty-one of Emily Brontë’s poems appeared in that volume, passionate songs of the spirit and of nature, and they were the only poems of hers to be published in her lifetime. For this new edition Janet Gezari has arranged the poems as nearly as possible in chronological order of composition, printing the published texts of the 1846 poems but otherwise taking the most recent manuscript versions. She also provides a scholarly introduction and extensive textual and contextual annotations to the poems.