Emily Dickinson's Second Thoughts

Emily Dickinson was a poet of second thoughts. 'A Doubt if it be Us | Assists the staggering Mind', she wrote in 1865. To many of us, inhabiting such turns of thought proves seductive. Dickinson's manuscripts put us in mind of what Susan Howe calls 'Cancelations, variants, insertions, erasures, marginal notes, stray marks and blanks'.¹ To David Porter, she writes 'the verbal equivalent of sfumato'; for Marta Werner, Dickinson's poems are a 'mob of traces'.² This aphasic intimacy is made even more meaningful by scrutinising Dickinson's revisions–by registering, for instance, the plus sign she attached to a word she was tempted to substitute, and tracing a route to the corresponding cross at the bottom of the poem where an alternative to the original shimmers. To consult Dickinson's fascicles is to encounter, through the variations that she often penned in the margins, or between the lines of the manuscript albums she began to hand-stitch in 1858, a sub-stream of second lives. The experience of reading Dickinson, then, prompts us to reflect on how we inhabit doubt. What does it look like on the page? Should we attempt to follow a mind in the course of changing direction? How might we begin to account for Dickinson's revisions and indecisions?

Emily Dickinson's Poems as She Preserved Them is the first annotated edition of her work to gear itself towards the general reader, while at the same time indicating the alternative words and phrases she began to include on her manuscript pages around 1861. Cristanne Miller's volume is not a variorum. Two three-volume variorum editions are already currently in existence: Thomas Johnson's initial 1955 version, and R. W. Franklin's updated, corrected, and expanded text from 1998. Nor is it an attempt to assemble all the extant variations of Dickinson's nigh-on 1,800 poems. Miller's introduction makes her intentions bold–less universalising but still comprehensive:

My goal has been to provide clear, accurate texts for the general reader in the context of their use and circulation, while also indicating the range of Dickinson's practices in copying the poems and in marking a text's fluidity or irresolution at various stages of copying and composition.

(p. 22)

Perhaps only an academic could think of this 845-page tome as a general 'reading edition' (p. 1). But Miller's approach does make Dickinson's variants accessible to the non-specialist. She operates according to the tenets of genetic editing, which propose no definitive edition of a particular poem, but choose to represent a text at one moment of its compositional or publication history. Where possible, Miller prioritises the stage at which Dickinson chose to copy out a poem in fair hand, and this edition reproduces the poems according to the order in which Dickinson herself arranged them in the fascicles. (Both the Johnson and Franklin editions are structured, instead, according to the chronology of the poems' composition.) Given our knowledge that in 1858 Dickinson started to copy her poems out cleanly and then discard her preliminary drafts, Miller's method seems sound. We also know that by 1866 Dickinson had copied all except thirty-two of over 1,100 poems onto bifolium sheets, most of which she then stacked together, punched through, and sewed into fascicles. But if Miller seems to be ploughing an uncontroversial editorial furrow, certain scholars will see this attempt to 'present' Dickinson's poems 'in easily readable form' as sacrilegious (p. 1). Since the publication of The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson in 1981, the loping calligraphy in which these poems survived has become a literary-critical fetish. Take, for instance, Howe's injunction from My Emily Dickinson: 'No manufactured print. No outside editor | "robber"'.³

Dickinson saw none of her own work through to publication, and any attempt to account for her attitude towards editorial intervention must be speculative. She did not object to the regularisation of...