Selected and presented by Joyce Carol Oates, our great visionary poets of 19th-century America, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, represent the extreme, idiosyncratic poles of the American psyche. Dickinson never shied away from the great themes of human suffering, loss, death, and even madness, yet her perspective was intensely private. Like Rainer Maria Rilke and Gerard Manley Hopkins, she is the great poet of interiority, that undefinable realm of the soul where we are, in a certain sense, completely alone.