The Poems of Emily Dickinson (R. W. Franklin) (original) (raw)

sheets remaining from 1861 and, with her muse fully engaged, increased the number of new poems at an extraordinary rate. She composed, copied, and bound relentlessly, so that by early 1864, after two further years of work, she had a total of forty fascicles, containing over eight hundred poems in various states of completion, from fair copies to mere transcriptions of rough worksheets. Besides a somewhat larger pool of miscellaneous manuscripts, which continued to grow that year while she was away for eye treatments, she had a few leftover fascicle sheets. These odds and ends of her process remained always unbound (such are now called sets). The next year marked an important change, anticipated by those leftover sheets: she ceased binding fascicle sheets entirely, leaving them to their separate ways, even though she made enough to have assembled nine or ten more gatherings. She was energetic, if not quite exhaustive, in reducing the number of preliminary working drafts in her possession by transcribing them into these sets of 1865, which contain poems from as early as 1861, along with others known to have come from 1862, 1863, and 1864. At the end of 1865, about forty miscellaneous manuscripts remained, some of them duplicate, others of ambiguous status. Meanwhile, the number of poems on fascicle sheets, bound or unbound, had reached nearly eleven hundred. Over the last twenty years of her life, as if some form of entropy governed this workshop, she copied few fascicle sheets, stringing them out between 1871 and 1875, with none in 1866-70 or in her last decade. Most of the poems of these twenty years survive on scraps of discarded household paper-incoming letters, abandoned envelopes, advertising flyers, wrapping paper-in the second draft or, increasingly, the first. Step by step, she had abandoned the system established in 1858, though the principle of accumulation remained in force, as it had not before 1858. The complex mass of manuscripts found after her death contained forty fascicles, ninety-eight unbound sheets, and seven or eight hundred individual manuscripts, from quite rough to quite finished. Additional manuscripts had been sent to friends and family. Oddly perhaps, none went to her father, mother, or sister, with whom she shared the Homestead, but about 250 poems, by far the largest number, went to Susan Dickinson, her sister-in-law, who lived next door. At greater distance, Higginson received about a hundred, her Norcross cousins, seventy-one, with substantial numbers also going to longtime friends Samuel and Mary Bowles and Elizabeth and Josiah Gilbert Holland. About six hundred manuscripts of poems were sent to some forty recipients in what may resemble scribal publication, since the manuscripts were at times passed on to others. Not necessarily beautiful in appearance, these manuscripts were nevertheless fair copies, the text always consisting of one set of readings, without alternatives. Because such copies usually derived from her working manuscripts, often the first or second draft, Dickinson maintained a record of most poems, but because of her rules for destruction, that record, typically the fascicle, might not have been the actual source for the manuscript dispatched. She showed no interest in keeping track of the exact texts she sent out, even when derived from the fascicles, on which there is rarely an indication of later variants (though sometimes revision took place there), for she was confident that she could create another acceptable version from the text at hand. The same confidence lay behind her permitting alternative readings to enter the fascicles: one need not make a choice until one needed to make a choice. Dickinson usually kept no record of what may be called impromptu verse. Such lines, sometimes woven into letters or notes, may be brief and epigrammatic, like these in a letter to Higginson, the only source (499): Best Gains-must have the Losses' test-To constitute them-Gains. and these in a letter to Samuel Bowles, the influential editor of the Springfield Republican, also the only source (186): The Juggler's Hat her Country is-The Mountain Gorse-the Bee's-Although Dickinson may have felt such lines to be undeserving of further record, she wrote them out as verse, and a few of similar character, unattested in a letter, did enter the fascicles (31, 206): To him who keeps an Orchis' heart-The swamps are pink with June. and Least Rivers-docile to some sea. My Caspian-thee. A few longer ones, not at all epigrammatic, also exist outside of the fascicles and not otherwise in Dickinson's possession, including lines of reassurance in 1860 for Louise and Frances Norcross, eighteen and twelve years old, on the death of their mother (130): "Mama" never forgets her birds-Though in another tree. She looks down just as often And just as tenderly, As when her little mortal nest With cunning care she wove-If either of her "sparrows fall", She "notices" above. Emily Dickinson wrote nearly eighteen hundred poems, 1,789 at present count, each of them represented in this reading edition. They exist in multiple versions and survive in about 2,500 textual sources, generally holographs, but also, given the hazards of history, in a number of secondary sources-transcripts by various hands and publication in various places. Although Dickinson sent poems to others as a personal act, she did not publish, or "print" as she was inclined to call it. Still, her poems got around, and at least ten of them appeared in her lifetime, anonymously, mostly in newspapers, having been supplied by admiring friends and never seen through the press by the poet. She is known to have complained only once-about a question mark in "A narrow fellow in the grass" (1096) that stopped a line whose thought should have continued into the next. She said nothing adverse about typography or its effects on her poems. A good citizen of the age of print, she was a committed reader of newspapers, magazines, and books but could not undertake the commercial, impersonal, and fundamentally exposing act of publishing her work. This is the poet who, knowing her boundaries, said, "I do not cross my Father's ground to any House or Town." "Publication," she wrote in 1863, her most prolific year, "is the Auction / Of the Mind of Man," a "Disgrace of Price" (788): Poverty-be justifying For so foul a thing Possibly-but We-would rather From Our Garret go White-unto the White Creator-Than invest-Our Snow-This reading edition is based on The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1998), a rendering of the entire corpus of textual sources, prepared by the present editor and published by The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. A three-volume set, Poems (1998) presents the full text of each of the 2,500 source documents, often giving several versions of the same poem. It traces their particular histories, including the identification of recipients, and describes the relationships and variants among the versions. There is an account of physical lineation, which includes word division, and of emendation by the editor to restore damaged texts, correct slips of the pen, or, in the case of secondary sources, undo uncharacteristic habits of transcriber or publisher. The overall organization is chronological, reflecting a new dating and employing a new numbering. In addition to detailed publishing histories, this three-volume edition is outfitted with fourteen appendixes and an extensive introduction that provides an overview of the early publishing history and a detailed account of the Dickinson workshop. The appendixes are specialized tables and lists, including, among others, poems published in Dickinson's lifetime, poems attributed to her, titles and other characterizations she gave to them, recipients and the poems they received, word division, and emendation. One appendix, a tabulation of the number of poems per year, is reproduced as Appendix 1 in this reading edition. The numbering here is that introduced by Poems (1998), from which the texts also derive, both the transcription and the emendation. The editorial discourse and apparatus have been omitted, and the multiplicity of texts has been reduced to a single reading version for each poem-a fair copy-as Dickinson did when sending poems to others. Readers interested in further background, or in additional readings or versions, or in the texts before the policies of the present edition were applied may consult Poems (1998), which serves as a primary resource. About three fourths of the poems exist in a single source. For the rest, with from two to seven sources, the policy has been to choose the latest version of the entire poem, thereby giving to the poet, rather than the editor, the ownership of change. Dickinson many times copied or used her poems in part, writing out a few lines, or sending a single stanza to a friend, or weaving fragments into letters. While these might be considered complete poems, arguably so for those sent out of the house to an audience, they are here not regarded as independent of the rest, nor as the extent of the poem to which Dickinson was committed. Although in 1861 she incorporated three lines of "'Tis anguish grander than delight" (192) into a note to Susan Dickinson, "Her spirit rose to such a hight" (1527). In a few instances, when Dickinson settled on a shorter version, after a longer one, the choice has been the last copy of the shorter version, typically the latest itself. "Further in summer than the birds" (895), which began as seven stanzas, was recast into four, a length that survives in four copies, the last of which is the one in this reading edition. Such selection is-at first-indifferent as to whether the document is a fair copy or a working draft, a holograph or a secondary source, though additional considerations may shift the choice. A holograph, for example, takes precedence over a transcript when they are substantively identical or when, though...