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Who can predict the half-life of a dead poet’s unfinished works? And if they are disseminated for public consumption, who—or what aesthetic—may ultimately co-opt them? These questions have become more salient after the 2006 publicationofAliceQuinn ’sEdgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box.Asiswellknown,Quinn’svariorum edition has provoked its share of controversy in the literary world, largely regarding issues of authorial intent and a deceased poets’ control over unpublished materials.1 Perhaps the most famous objection was Helen Vendler’s outrage that the “maimed and stunted siblings” of Bishop’s published poems should be collected for the public to read (“The Art of Losing”). But I am interested in other, more globally aesthetic, questions that Quinn’s volume raises. What is the nature, whether aesthetic or otherwise, of the literary world’s investment in variorum or facsimile editions? In which particular ways do these editions redramatize, recharacterize, or reinscribe our hallucinated relation to a dead poet? Can lyric poems in manuscript format be co-opted by the thrall of the “unfinished” that is operative in a more experimental poetics? And is this experimentalaestheticactuallyimbuedwithaheftierconservatismthanitsproponentsmightallow , especiallywhenitapplies (or is applied) to the works of women poets in particular? I will be addressing these questions by juxtaposing Bishop’s manuscript work with the fascicles of Emily Dickinson and by suggesting that a recent movement in Dickinson scholarship may also affect the impact of Edgar Allan Poe & the JukeBox on Bishop’s reputation. Specifically, R. W. Franklin’s manuscript edition of Dickinson’s poems, published in 1981, has brought about a change in Dickinson studies—wherein critics’ concerns have become arguably less “poetic” and more graphicorarchivalintheirorientation.2Andalthoughthejuryisstilloutregarding the lasting impact of Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box on Bishop’s critical reception, I will be arguing here that the publication of the variorum or facsimile edition as “A Lovely Finish I Have Seen” Voice and Variorum in Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box Christina Pugh “A LOVELY FINISH I HAVE SEEN” 275 such, by canceling the terms and the sublimate sonorities (or fastenings) of poetic “voice,” may paradoxically anchor the reader in a more conservative relation to the figure of the female poet in particular. Before I begin to address these similarities, however, it is important to note the significant differences in the publishing history of Dickinson and Bishop, leading to corollary differences in the impact and significance of publishing their posthumous manuscript materials. As is well known, Dickinson published only a few poems in her lifetime; the first published collection of her work appeared in 1890, four years after her death in 1886. Bishop, in contrast, published four books of poems during her life. She also lived to see her poetry recognized by both the Pulitzer Prize in 1956 and the National Book Award in 1970. Any judgment about the impact of Bishop’s newly published manuscript materials, then, must certainly be tempered by the notice given her work during her lifetime. I want to argue, however, that despite Bishop’s sizable “advantage” in lifetime published output, her work is still vulnerable to some of the same sorts of literarycritical co-options that we will see affecting the Dickinson materials, and that these co-options may necessitate a silencing of what we know as poetic “voice.” In order to address the similarities between Bishop and Dickinson in this regard, we first need to ask whether the dissemination of manuscript materials can be compatible with the emphasis on poetic voice that the lyric tradition both assumes and promulgates . Is a concern with poetic voice really viable after poststructuralism? And if it is, can the publication of a manuscript edition serve to silence that voice? Clearly, the dissemination of handwritten manuscript work would fall in line with the Derridean exhortation to treat writing as graphic trace rather than the logocentric transcription of (an ostensibly univocal) speech. But even in the wake of poststructuralism, the construct of poetic voice is alive and well in the criticism of the lyric, as seen in the work of W. R. Johnson, Mutlu Konuk Blasing, Susan Stewart, and Allen Grossman, to name only a few examples.3 Voice has also remained the coin of the realm for many contemporary poets, especially those who see Bishop’s work as seminal for the development of their own. As James Merrill wrote of Bishop, “Whether this voice says hard and disabused things or humorous and gentle ones, its emotional pitch remains so true, and its intelligence so unaffected , that we hear in it the...

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