Out of the Top Drawer.

The article provides information on two books on poet and writer Emily Dickinson. The book "Emily Dickinson. An Interpretive Biography," is written by Thomas H. Johnson, and the book "The Poems of Emily Dickinson," edited by Thomas H. Johnson. Dickinson died in 1886,at the age of fifty-six, leaving six published poems her "papers," and many letters scattered among her various correspondents. Dickinson's papers were mainly in the form of "packets," impromptu booklets made by folding sheets of writing paper and stitching them together at the fold. Dickinson had passed through a creative burst unparalleled in the history of lyric poetry. For what Johnson centrally attests is what every well-engaged reader knows--that the biography of a poet is his poems, once people have learned to read them.