Whose Dickinson?

The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Edited by Ralph W. Franklin, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998

Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson, Edited by Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith, Paris Press, 1998

Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets: An Anthology, Edited by Paula Bernat Bennett, Blackwell Publishers, 1998

Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries: Women's Verse in America, 1820-1885, By Elizabeth Petrino, University Press of New England, 1998.

Editing has always been a culturally embedded and interpretive activity, in the sense that it involves decisions that determine how a text is read. Usually such decisions remain all but invisible to readers and are ignored by most critics. With particular authors and at particular moments in the history of their literary reception, however, such decisions dominate literary scholarship. This is such a moment in Dickinson studies. Textual editors and scholars debate questions as basic as what constitutes a Dickinson poem, how many poems she wrote, whether her hand-scripted manuscript booklets constitute publication and determine the order in which poems should now be printed, and how the poems are most accurately transcribed in print. Two dramatically different responses to this debate, and to philosophies of editing generally, appear in the recently published, traditionally authoritative variorum Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Ralph W. Franklin, and the biographically interpretive Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson, edited by Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith. Because this debate has to do with basic assumptions about how Dickinson conceived her poetry and what constitutes a poem, no discussion of her work is untouched by them. Elizabeth Petrino's Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries: Women's Verse in America, 1820-1885 positions itself ambivalently and with some contradiction. In contrast, Paula Bennett's excellent anthology Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets: An Anthology introduces its section on Dickinson with extended explanation of its manner of printing the poems. This current debate affects even works that do not take on the questions it poses. For example, in a review of Martin Orzeck and Robert Weisbuch's 1996 collection Dickinson and Audience, Hart finds the volume "disappointing" precisely because it does not address the "new questions raised in editing projects, in debates on how to read Dickinson's variants and versions, in discussions of genre and the relationship between poems and letters" (118).

The history of the editing of Dickinson's poems is complex and frequently rehearsed (see Franklin's introduction to The Poems of Emily Dickinson; Horan; or Smith, "Dickinson's Manuscripts" [1998]). Until the fall of 1998, two editions of the poems--Thomas H. Johnson's 1955 variorum and Franklin's 1981 holograph edition of the manuscript books--dominated Dickinson study. Johnson was the first editor to have access to all the poet's extant manuscripts--although as Franklin reveals, Johnson was allowed to see the manuscripts in Millicent Todd Bingham's possession only twice and so had to work primarily from photostats of these poems (Poems 6). His Poems of Emily Dickinson revolutionized study of the poet by presenting a corpus of poems much larger than previously suspected, arranged in approximate chronological order (given the limits of such judgments and the resources available), reproducing for the first time the poet's elaborate use of dashes (standardized by type), and including Dickinson's variant words or phrases for each text. While Johnson did not claim his edition was definitive in reproducing the form or chronology of the poems, he provided standards for comparison with respect to punctuation, capitalization, rhyme, and variants. Until Franklin's publication of The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, Johnson's edition of the poems was regarded as admirably faithful to the poet's texts and as authoritative.

The facsimile reproductions of Franklin's edition of the poet's "fascicles" (as Mabel Loomis Todd, one of Dickinson's first editors, called them in Poems [1890]) reopened a number of questions. Susan Howe was perhaps the...