On Franklin's Gifts & Ghosts

Variorum” was not a word we expected to see attached to R.W. Franklin’s long awaited The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition (1998), since Franklin himself was not using that word for his production as recently as 1997. Yet Franklin’s splendid achievement deepens, broadens, and redirects conversations about how her texts should be arranged to make Poems of Emily Dickinson and uses notes by different persons (i.e., synthesizes much of the prior editorial knowledge, as responsible textual studies should) as it strives to render every known variant embodiment of Dickinson’s texts. So “variorum” is appropriate, as long as readers do not receive the term as synonymous with “comprehensive,” for though overflowing with information, this new edition is not quite all-inclusive.

“The aim of this edition is a comprehensive account, not a selection for a specific end. Within individual entries, the texts are presented without priority, sequenced chronologically. When sequence is not clear, as when manuscripts are missing and the text incomplete, convenience of presentation may be followed instead” (FP, p. 29). Though Franklin’s emphatic tone and declarative sentence structure suggest that there indeed are specific ends or goals in mind (and indeed there are), his actual presentations of texts and their histories are not so much contests for as they are contesting any claims to definitude that may attach to any goal, even his of organizing the poems chronologically. Nevertheless, that the volumes are exquisitely dressed and bear the imprimatur of Harvard University Press, an especially powerful lineage in Dickinson studies, and are coming out after years and then more years of fastidious preparation, will make some treat his performance of The Poems of Emily Dickinson as definitive. The publisher’s choice of the term “variorum” is an attempt to authorize these volumes as such a standard, and if we are to regard them critically we must analytically contend with that authorization which ultimately lays claims to “most authentic,” whatever Franklin’s renderings reveal. His renderings are most aptly celebrated not as the standard to which all proper representation of Dickinson’s texts must conform, but as the presentation of thoroughly researched documents that raise astute, generative questions first about what counts as a poem by Emily Dickinson and then as a poem of Emily Dickinson, what counts as a significant textual detail and what not (placement of epistolary and poetic writings in relationship to one another, different signatures to different correspondents, for example), what count as relevant paratexts and what do not.

Though Franklin’s edition will disappoint our colleagues who want to fix the boundaries and identity of a “poem by Emily Dickinson,” the effects of this edition on study of writings by Emily Dickinson will at the very least be to confound those who casually refer to her poems by the numbers assigned by editors. Anyone referring to #214 now has to specify whether she means “Poor little Heart!” (FP214, identified by Franklin) or “I taste a liquor never brewed -“ (JP214, identified by his forebear, Thomas H. Johnson). This alone will prove to be quite a shift for some Dickinson readers and will, these reviewers hope, finally usher in an era of referring to her poems by their words instead of by the numbers assigned to them by editors and their publishers.

If The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition sets a standard (and indeed, we believe it does), the nature of that standard is not in that the account is all inclusive or absolutely correct but is in the fact that Franklin’s critical attention to textual details is an exemplary heuristic for any study of Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts designed to learn about her compositional and distribution practices. Framed by most of the important questions necessary to analyze the many telling characteristics of the manuscripts and of subsequent editing practices, Franklin’s edition records features such as line breaks, page breaks, stanza breaks, and word divisions, the dating and transmission of each document, its subsequent handlings, and publishing history. All of these elements have proved and will continue to prove crucial...