Dickinson's Voice
Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them. Edited by Cristanne Miller

Without doubt the most existential of challenges to face Dickinson scholars is the absence of a stable edition. There is no absence of editions: Todd and Higginson, Johnson and Franklin, the Dickinson Archive and now Miller all present a poet characterised by variant timings and pace. For Dickinson’s works, left only in manuscript – handwritten in ambiguous fashion – have caused long-lasting tensions for literary critics and editors. Where to draw the line, when Dickinson draws no line, between a new stanza and a new poem? How to decide between dash and comma, full stop and blot?

When Dickinson died in 1886, she left behind nearly 1,800 poems, many contained in the manuscript gatherings that her first editors termed her ‘fascicles’. These manuscripts evade notions of a final edition, since no printed version was ever authorised. We cannot know whether the poems were finished or abandoned; their order may be planned or offhand. None of these issues is unique to Dickinson. Hopkins, too, was first edited from manuscript and revised by Robert Bridges, while most posthumous editions, including Shelley’s, require a final piece of artistry to enact the change from manuscript to print. These are the challenges that have always faced Dickinson’s scholar-critics. It is not without ambition, then, that this edition presents her poems ‘As She Preserved Them’.

Yet how Dickinson preserved them, and how that might translate into type, is far from clear. Miller defines her subtitle gnomically: ‘Like all editions, it is an interpretation of the work the poet left to us, in the form in which she left it’. That word, ‘form’, can presumably mean only the poems’ order and verse form, and it is true that Miller counterbalances previous editions by following the arrangement of the fascicles. The resulting sequence avoids those early thematic categories into which Todd and Higginson divided the poems in 1890. Some scholars have doubted the usefulness of the fascicles’ order, yet similar uncertainties surround Shakespeare’s sonnets, and there is merit in preserving their sequence. Still, Miller’s phrase ‘As She Preserved Them’ hinges on the elusive word ‘as’, two letters which drift in sense from ‘as’ to merely ‘as if’. Even while its subtitle suggests equivalence with the manuscripts, the edition is far from a facsimile: it represents and mediates these manuscripts in print. What to do with ungrammatical apostrophes (Miller corrects them)? And with underlined single letters (Miller accents them)? Or underlined words (Miller italicises)? But there are also ‘accidental errors’, which Miller ‘silently’ emends.

Other silent emendations are more controversial. First is the disputed status of the opening ‘poem’, ‘The Gentian weaves her fringes –’: Franklin printed it as three poems of one stanza each, Johnson as one poem of three stanzas. Miller’s decision is to print three separate poems, a choice she justifies in the notes at the end of the edition. There are grounds for considering it to be one poem, since the stanzas are separated by blank space, rather than the ink lines that Dickinson drew in this and other fascicles. The stanzas cohere in their theme and diction: the line ‘In the name of the Bee’, in the third stanza, recalls ‘An aged Bee’ in the second. Further compelling evidence comes in the fact that all three stanzas, and only those stanzas, appear on one manuscript page.

Miller’s transcript never claims to be diplomatic, and many editions would place introductions between the poems. Yet this edition divides the three stanzas with ornaments resembling looped lines. Those ornaments may have been decided by the press, and they appear next to an image of the manuscript. But they are also imposed upon this contentious text. Miller’s twirling insignia look more authentic than the notes of an edition, more potentially a depiction of a manuscript drawing: they supply a marking where none existed.

Punctuation, too, is far less certain in the manuscripts than in any of Dickinson’s printed editions. Transcription – especially of punctuation – is notoriously thorny for many nineteenth century poets. A long dash is clear – but what of the differences between a short, slanted dash and a comma? Or between a comma, dash, and a dashed-off full stop where the pen never fully stopped at speed? Such questions emerge instantly when comparing Miller’s transcription to the manuscripts. Even those first three poems raise immediate issues – Fascicle 1, Sheet 1 (Figure 1):

Miller (2016) A brief, but patient illness – An hour to prepare – And one below, this morning Is where the angels are – It was a short procession – The Bobolink was there – An aged Bee addressed us – And then we knelt in prayer – We trust that she was willing – We ask that we may be –

Johnson (1955) A brief, but patient illness – An hour to prepare, And one below, this morning Is where the angels are – It was a short procession, The Bobolink was there – An aged Bee addressed us – And then we knelt in prayer – We trust that she was willing – We ask that we may be.

Figure 1.

Amherst, Mass., Amherst College, Fascicle 82 [1], p. 1. With thanks to Amherst College Archives and Special Collections.

For Miller, almost all of those flying markings blend into a medium-length dash. Yet the second line may ask that there be a comma, having perhaps been corrected from a full stop. Those dashes after ‘are’ and ‘procession’ are hardly of the same length; and the mark after ‘prayer’ could so easily be a full stop, akin to the marking after ‘be’ two lines later, presented by Miller as a dash. Similar cases occur throughout the fascicles, including in number 5, where comparable marks on consecutive lines become strikingly different in print. While many editions modernise and standardise punctuation, this edition blends together markings that had already been more distinct.

The effect can be to make Dickinson seem more unworldly and ethereal than the manuscripts suggest. In Miller’s defence, she directs readers to the manuscripts in the Emily Dickinson Archive:

This edition attempts to represent the full complexity of Dickinson’s composing and copying without mirroring or accounting for a manuscript’s visual properties.

It is my conviction that Dickinson’s poems are separable from their handwritten artifacts, and that it is both useful and reasonable to reproduce them in print in the form she typically indicated she imagined them[.]

But insofar as her poems are only authorised in manuscript, those manuscripts bear the original signs (or sins) that form the basis of her ‘separable’ poems. Franklin’s transcriptions, too, are by no means immune to this criticism.

These are not small problems for Dickinson studies, since what is at stake is the poet’s tone and cadence. Miller’s edition ‘does not provide’, she insists, ‘a new analysis of Dickinson’s handwriting and punctuation’. She instead uses ‘the shorter dashes Dickinson generally produced, regardless of how they were drawn by the transcriber’. But the point here is not that the dashes would otherwise have been too long; rather, it is that certain dashes are not clearly dashes at all. The edition’s pre-emptive response is that it ‘does not attempt to replicate the look of Dickinson’s pages’, and so ‘standardizes representation of all dashes as short, straight, and midline’.

Crucially, however, Miller also makes an acknowledgement:

Like many of her contemporaries, she probably often wrote elongated periods—in a kind of rolling stop. She also may have written commas both high within her row of script and slanting right rather than left. In this edition I present some individual punctuation marks differently from the Franklin edition, typically to agree with Johnson’s or Hart and Smith’s judgments, but I do not thoroughly revise earlier interpretations of these marks.

And that decision is a missed opportunity for Dickinson scholarship. The point is made with all sympathy for the challenges facing the editor of any poet, not least a poet edited from manuscript; but the best response to this challenge seems not merely to dash it all. Miller’s moments of deviation from Franklin and Johnson are useful counterweights to the existing editions. One might also argue that a reading text need not signal matters of transcription; similar concerns exist for editions of Jane Austen and Byron, whose punctuation, as Kathryn Sutherland and Jane Stabler have shown, was repeatedly decided by William Gifford. But even Byron still witnessed his poems in print, whereas Dickinson’s manuscripts resist the illusion of closure provided by the firm stamp of the printing press. Given that Miller’s edition frames itself as Dickinson’s poems ‘As She Preserved Them’, a higher standard has been self-imposed. Here, Miller, as with any editor, co-creates part of Dickinson’s text, in the sense that Jack Stillinger meant when he mused that he had become a co-author of Keats. It is perhaps only editorial judgement and the awareness of the reader that can separate the authorial from the editorial.

For Miller’s reading edition also aligns itself with ‘genetic’ editions. The ‘principles of genetic editing’, as she explains, ‘assume that an author’s work typically consists of a series of discrete and equally authoritative versions and that all such texts are both unstable, in that they exist as part of a process, and fixed, in and of themselves’. Few would disagree, though that statement may seem so intuitive as to suggest little new – most modern editors, after all, share her distrust of the phrase ‘definitive edition’. Still, Miller explains that ‘A genetic edition does not present a “best” text or “the” poem but instead focuses on a moment or stage in a work’s presentation or genesis’. So the term, as she uses it, seems mainly to describe a text that takes a particular stage of a poem’s evolution. No reference is made to the numerous (and often very different) print and online genetic editions, allied with the movement of critique génétique, which first emerged in France in the mid-twentieth century. Instead, she leaves readers to decipher how notably this approach departs from existing editions. Franklin’s informative ‘variorum’ edition of 1998 already printed each version of the poem in full, so as not to ‘privilege’ any one stage of the composition. As for Miller, the moment she selects is ‘Dickinson’s copying of the text that, to the best of our knowledge, she retained’. When ‘more than one text survives’, that selection means ‘always taking the most complete’ version – except where two texts ‘are equally resolved or complete’, in which case the edition suddenly switches to the ‘earliest copy’. We can only infer the finer details; though are not Dickinson’s retained versions often also her final versions? If so, the result for many poems, if not the order, may in practice be similar to Franklin’s one-volume reading edition (1999) – the supplement to his ‘variorum’ edition, which takes her ‘latest full effort, adopting revisions and alternative readings’.

Miller’s edition, by contrast, includes partial variant notes, unusually (and rather neatly) in the right-hand margin. But that very choice forces a decision on the matter of final intentions. Dickinson enacted many revisions on the same manuscripts as her original versions. As soon as some variants are banished to the margin, a decision is made, and the edition is re-entangled in the passage of time. When Dickinson has underlined variants for cancelled words, Miller takes those readings; if the first reading was not specifically cancelled, she places the alternative in the margin. For more intricate instances, fewer details are provided, and so scholars and critics, as Miller has acknowledged, will mostly remain with Franklin’s ‘variorum’ edition. This new edition is also light on explanatory notes, following the inconsistency of notes in Franklin’s three volumes, discussed in Essays in Criticism (1999).

Such textual disappointments, however, are partly so on account of the otherwise impressive weight of Miller’s edition – its affordability, too, and its availability (it seems likely to become the reading edition of our time). The handsome arrangement of Miller’s poems, in the order of the fascicles, and the ease of reading are likely to secure it a wide and grateful audience. If the Dickinson that emerges is punctuated with greater doubts and hesitancy, through more doubtful punctuation, then the truth remains that this is a poet edited from manuscript. We still await a fully annotated and re-transcribed edition of Emily Dickinson’s verse. In the meantime, the limitations of this new edition remind us of the great value of manuscript enquiry for the close reading of poetry. What literary notebooks record, after all, is the very stuff of poetic timing – the ‘moments’ that editions such as these seek to preserve.