For thirty years Emily Dickinson corresponded with her sister-in-law and next-door-neighbor Susan Huntington Dickinson. The resulting mix of letters, notes, and poems was finally published in 1998 as Open Me Carefully, edited by Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith, who wrote the introduction.

John Donne was a metaphysical poet who died nearly two hundred years before Dickinson was born. His themes and reflections on the nature of God resemble Dickinson's, as well as his irregular poetry patterns. One of several good collections of his works is the Modern Library 1994 publication of The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne.

Because the author herself never arranged for the publication of her works, the process of gathering her poems for publication has been slow. The current definitive text is The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, published by Little, Brown and Company...