The Franklin Edition of Dickinson: Is That All There Is?

It arrived on a day when I was feeling a bit down; I’d had a bad class, perhaps. I wasn’t expecting anything special in the mail, but there it was, cheerfully packed into a red-white-and-blue box from amazon.com. I duly felt a tighter breathing and brought it into my office, where I gazed narrow at the Wall and slowly picked the lock of the box till R. W. Franklin’s Variorum Edition of the poems of Emily Dickinson, three volumes in slipcase, stood on my desk. I approached this momentous event, as I do all momentous things in my life, through the language of Emily Dickinson; but now I had a special reason to feel Zero at the Bone. The contents of the slipcase promised to readjust my attitude toward Dickinson’s language itself, once again.

Half an hour later, I was feeling less like Emily Dickinson than like Peggy Lee: is that all there is? Let me provide some history. I went to high school in a cultural backwater in South Jersey, where I first read Dickinson in the school library’s old anthologies that presented her poems in 1890s texts and typographies. When my father gave me a copy of Dickinson one Christmas in the 1970s, it was the Little, Brown Poems, the 1937 edition that collected the early printings in their glorious inaccuracy. When I got that book, the Thomas H. Johnson variorum edition had been in print for more than twenty years. But, sometimes one asks for bread and is given a stone; and sometimes the stone turns out to be tasty, if not nutritious. It was the “old” Dickinson that I came to love and to learn by heart.

In college, I squeezed $6.95 out of my beer budget and bought a paperback copy of Johnson’s 1960 one-volume Complete Poems. I spent a disoriented summer of ‘79 trying to reconcile the dashy madcap Dickinson of those texts with the poet I knew from Little, Brown. As I internalized the style of the Complete Poems Dickinson, I knew that this was only a distant echo of an even more complete poet, who was preserved in a grey three-volume boxed set I could not then hope to afford.

I went to graduate school and started a dissertation on Dickinson. I could afford the Johnson variorum less than ever. Its price was two weeks’ rent, a month’s worth of food. Not till my wife started working at the school bookstore and was able to use a 40% employee discount could I buy the book I was supposed to be in the process of dissertating about. That three-volume Johnson edition has been with me now for eighteen years, accumulating hundreds of interlined notes, clarifications, and expansions, brimming with tipped-in cards elaborating textual histories that Johnson never dreamed of, bescrawled with annotations made after Karen Dandurand discovered enigmatic new publications of Dickinson poems.

Now, I am a professor in a state with no income tax, and buying the 1998 Franklin edition is a casual business — one click on a web site that offers deep discounts as a matter of course. For the price of one meal with wine, I get the Franklin edition delivered to my door. Such are the power inequities of tenure and promotion: I easily get a book of marginal professional value to me, while today’s adjuncts and graduate students forego their own rent and food to buy this crucial text. They, like me, might expect the 1998 edition to change their vision of Dickinson as much as my previous hard-won purchases did. Yet the new variorum does not surprise the reader as Franklin’s last major edition did. That one, the 1981 Manuscript Books, cost me another two weeks’ rent back during graduate school and altered critics’ vision of the Dickinson texts forever.

I want to emphasize that the 1998 Variorum is a beautifully thorough edition. It simply fails to alter the received view of Dickinson’s texts. It’s a revision of the 1955...