"A Foreign Country": Emily Dickinson's Manuscripts and Their Meanings

For reasons of economy, nineteenth-century editions of poetry sometimes divided pages into two columns of print. Although this enabled more writing to be fitted onto the page, it often meant that single lines of verse had to be arranged spatially as double lines of text. Separate editions of Longfellow’s “The Wreck of the Hesperus” (1840) afford straightforward examples of this: the first quotation shows how each stanza in the poem predominantly comprised four lines of alternating tetrameter and trimeter, rhyming abcb (Fig. 1).

Then the maiden clasped her hands and prayed      That savèd she might be; And she thought of Christ, who still’d the wave      On the Lake of Galilee.

Fig. 1: “The Wreck of the Hesperus” from the Southern Literary Messenger (115)

¹ But in a subsequent edition, where the columns are narrower, the same stanza is arranged differently (Fig. 2). Clearly, we are not meant to change our reading in response to such typographical variation: the words in lines two and five begin with small letters, and are further indented, in order to indicate that their isolation does not make a formal or graphic contribution to the poem’s meaning. Here, as elsewhere, the increased space before the words in line two (to take one example), in conjunction with the blank space after them, represents a convention indicating that the words belong to the line immediately preceding.

Then the maiden clasped her hands and      prayed            That savèd she might be; And she thought of Christ, who stilled      the wave,            On the Lake of Galilee.

Fig. 2: “The Wreck of the Hesperus” from The Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (27)

     Within traditional print culture, then, there are codes which nineteenth-century readers understood and which are to some extent recoverable but not initially obvious to modern readers. The use of capital letters at the start of a poetic line is one instance of such a code, the deployment of blank spaces another. That the linear segregation of differentially indented words in lower-case was not intended to impact on the meaning of the poem does not, however, prohibit readers from appropriating that possibility. Indeed, it would seem perfectly justifiable to argue that the arrangement of Longfellow’s quatrain as six lines exists as a resource for later, contemporary, writers attentive to the meaningful potential of writing’s graphic dimensions. It anticipates (albeit unconsciously) modernist and postmodernist experiments with poetic lines.

     Emily Dickinson is another matter. Since Dickinson did not print, there is a sense in which her manuscripts can be seen as “published” and final versions—especially those manuscripts that were circulated in letters and/or gathered in autograph miscellanies. In the case of other writers with more traditional careers, manuscripts may be (and have been) seen as points of transition toward the printed book. But increasingly, Dickinson critics see her non-publication as a choice made in order to protect a much more sophisticated and flexible textual medium than conventional type could have accommodated. The irony of standard editions of Dickinson’s poetry, according to this argument, is that the material details of such a medium are lost in any conversion from manuscript to print.

     To take a specific example, Figure 3 is as close as a limited knowledge of word-processing and print technology will allow me to approximate the appearance of a Dickinson autograph lyric. The early phase of Dickinson’s posthumous publication involved a promotionally strategic but falsifying regularization of forms of punctuation, titling, vocabulary, grammar, meter, and rhyme. Only in the last two decades has it begun to be seriously argued and generally accepted that other forms of unauthorized change may also have occurred. The tidying of lines and stanzas, for example: in the standard print versions of this poem, two- and three-word lines are joined together (“August the Dust of that Domain”), and a first stanza of eight lines is...