Dickinson's Poetic Revelations: Variants as Process

With the publication in 1981 of R. W. Franklin's The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, her work can be read not only in edited typeface but also in Dickinson's own highly-stylized, handwritten productions, complete with cryptic marks and variant words in the margins of her manuscripts. These variants may encourage the reader to imagine the poet poised in consideration of the words which will shape her poem. The variants, I will argue, are not only evidence of deliberation and revision but also an artistic expression of the creative process of writing that she chooses to include in her text.

Dickinson's poetry was found not only in fascicles, but also in packets of various sizes, on scraps of paper, envelopes, shopping lists, and other handy papers. Her manuscripts are evidence that she was more engaged in writing poetry than in doing the "housekeeping" of making books. Her writing, done alongside her daily tasks, reflects her everyday experiences, including her own literary endeavors. Dickinson apparently was not primarily interested in preparing her verse for print, but the variants are not simply evidence of a half-formulated state of composition. Dickinson increased her use of variants over time. Franklin notes that not until a year after she began to construct fascicles did variants begin to appear; then, "there are only about a half dozen [variants] in the first ten fascicles, through about 1860. About 1861, and continuing thereafter, alternative readings [or variants] became abundant" (75). Furthermore, Franklin notes that these variants are found on fair copies of poems:

Dickinson did not compose onto fascicle sheets. Even those whose compositional state might be called 'worksheet' do not have the physical appearance of one, for, like other fascicle sheets, they were copied with care sometime after the initial act of composition.

("Fascicles" 12)

The variants remain as part of the scriptural artistry of Dickinson's fair copies. As the poet and Dickinson critic Susan Howe says, "In the precinct of Poetry, a word, the space around a word, each letter, every mark, silence, or sound volatizes an inner law of form—moves on a rigorous line" (145). If these variants are not simply editorial markings on work sheets, then how are they to be read?

In Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson's Fascicles, Sharon Cameron suggests that Dickinson's "variants extend the text's identity in ways that make it seem potentially limitless" (6). Cameron points out that to "consider poems as individual lyrics is to suppose boundedness," and, therefore, Dickinson's "unbounded" or "limitless" lyric constitutes a new lyric form (5). Like Cameron, I see these variants as an integral part of a "limitless" lyric; however, I would add that because variants destabilize the exact thought or emotion, Dickinson's process of choosing (or not choosing) foregrounds the act of word choice itself and indicates that she was more interested in the process of creation and self-expression than in editing her poetry for typographical publication.

This is not to say that her poems are unfinished; Dickinson's manuscripts contain evidence that she was engaged in a kind of private publication through fascicles and letters. In these she maintained her independence from the editorial confines which would eliminate variants and prevent her from, as Jerome McGann has phrased it, creative "play with her text's graphic features" (31). McGann reminds us, "Her surviving manuscript texts urge us to take them at face value, to treat all her scriptural forms as potentially significant at the aesthetic or expressive level" (38). Martha Nell Smith in Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson analyzes Dickinson's handwriting styles and finds that Dickinson uses "a casual hand for scripting drafts, as well as what one might call a 'performance script,' a more stylized holograph for 'publication'" which contains "profound changes in letter formation, spacing and lineation" (63). In her "performance script," Dickinson "pay[s] more and more attention to the effects of lineation in both her letters and poems, leaving more variants, and shaping her letters more dramatically" (Smith 88). Dickinson's variants can thus be read as integral to her scriptural and...