The Complete Poems (Penguin Classics) by Emily Bronte

by Emily Brontë

Genres: Poetry, Classics

Paperback

About the author

Emily Brontë was an English novelist and poet whose singular contribution to literature, Wuthering Heights, is now celebrated as one of the most powerful and original novels in the English language. Born into the remarkable Brontë family on 30 July 1818 in Thornton, Yorkshire, she was the fifth of six children of Maria Branwell and Patrick Brontë, an Irish clergyman. Her early life was marked by both intellectual curiosity and profound loss. After the death of her mother in 1821 and the subsequent deaths of her two eldest sisters in 1825, Emily and her surviving siblings— Charlotte, Anne, and Branwell—were raised in relative seclusion in the moorland village of Haworth, where their imaginations flourished in a household shaped by books, storytelling, and emotional intensity.
The Brontë children created elaborate fictional worlds, notably Angria and later Gondal, which served as an outlet for their creative energies. Emily, in particular, gravitated toward Gondal, a mysterious, windswept imaginary land she developed with her sister Anne. Her early poetry, much of it steeped in the mythology and characters of Gondal, demonstrated a remarkable lyrical force and emotional depth. These poems remained private until discovered by Charlotte in 1845, after which Emily reluctantly agreed to publish them in the 1846 collection Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, using the pseudonym Ellis Bell to conceal her gender. Though the volume sold few copies, critics identified Emily’s poems as the strongest in the collection, lauding her for their music, power, and visionary quality.
Emily was intensely private and reclusive by nature. She briefly attended schools in Cowan Bridge and Roe Head but was plagued by homesickness and preferred the solitude of the Yorkshire moors, which inspired much of her work. She worked briefly as a teacher but found the demands of the profession exhausting. She also studied in Brussels with Charlotte in 1842, but again found herself alienated and yearning for home. Throughout her life, Emily remained closely bonded with her siblings, particularly Anne, and with the landscape of Haworth, where she drew on the raw, untamed beauty of the moors for both her poetry and her fiction.
Her only novel, Wuthering Heights, was published in 1847, a year after the poetry collection, under her pseudonym Ellis Bell. Initially met with a mixture of admiration and shock, the novel’s structure, emotional intensity, and portrayal of violent passion and moral ambiguity stood in stark contrast to the conventions of Victorian fiction. Many readers, unable to reconcile its power with the expected gentility of a woman writer, assumed it had been written by a man. The novel tells the story of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw—two characters driven by obsessive love, cruelty, and vengeance—and explores themes of nature, the supernatural, and the destructive power of unresolved emotion. Though controversial at the time, Wuthering Heights is now considered a landmark in English literature, acclaimed for its originality, psychological insight, and poetic vision.
Emily's personality has been the subject of much speculation, shaped in part by her sister Charlotte’s later writings and by Victorian biographies that often sought to romanticize or domesticate her character. While some accounts depict her as intensely shy and austere, others highlight her fierce independence, deep empathy with animals, and profound inner life. She is remembered as a solitary figure, closely attuned to the rhythms of the natural world, with a quiet but formidable intellect and a passion for truth and freedom. Her dog, Keeper, was a constant companion and, according to many, a window into her capacity for fierce, loyal love.
Emily Brontë died of tuberculosis on 19 December 1848 at the age of thirty, just a year after the publication of her novel. Her early death, following those of her brother Branwell and soon to

Reviews

[wolfie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think the editor did a great job collecting Emily’s poems from many disparate sources and presenting them as closely to her vision as possible. The notes are rarely interpretive, though sometimes lead you to conclusions (for ex. some poems reflect passages of Wuthering Heights and the Gondal poems are pieces of a larger puzzle) so besides contextual notes the poems are left up to one’s own interpretation. To this effect, even though there is a chronology presented at the beginning of the book, the dates only appear in the notes in the back rather than at the heading of a poem. This bothered me at first but I think ultimately it prevents the reader from interpreting each poem as being about current events in Emily’s life and forming narratives that aren’t there or weren’t intended by her, though that being said many of the poems are diary like in nature, which is something I loved. It’s amazing how connected we can feel to people who lived such different lives than our own and so long ago just from shared human emotional experiences of loneliness, grief, pride, awe, etc..

I’m happy that in search for a collection of Emily’s other writing this was what I picked up :)

[Rich Lambert · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poetry here is great and worth delving into. Tbh my main issue was with the form of the book. The first 30 odd pages are a collection from Brontë's 1846 poems. Then the rest of the book is just a stream of poems split solely by dated/undated that kind of made the book difficult to pick up as there weren't clear breaks/starts/ends. Still, I liked the poetry so can't ask for much more

[Gustave Floobah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dark as - was Emily the darkest of the Brontës? - good volume - an essential if you enjoy this period of English literature

[Hannah Belgrove · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dark, haunting, illlusionary - the exploration of earthly sorrow and suffering compares to Emily’s novel Wuthering Heights in its condemnation of earthly good and romanticization of heavenly bliss

[Amy Renee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love the depths of her work and her ability to dig into deep seeded emotions associated with grief. Raw. Fearless. Ahead of her time. A true treasure!