(this review originally appeared in Harvard Review Online).
Emily Dickinson’s poetry explores the relationship between
the temporal world and the infinite. As Wallace Stevens examines the tensions
and negotiations between imagination and reality, so Dickinson teases out the
ways in which the ineffable presses upon the mortal and ephemeral. Stevens notes
that the pressure of reality on the imagination varies with circumstance
(wartime, for example), but for Dickinson the pressure of the infinite on mortality
is constant and compelling:
For Death – or rather
For the Things ‘twould buy –
This – put away
Life’s Opportunity –
The things that Death will buy
Are Room –
Escape from Circumstances –
And a Name –
With Gifts of Life
How Death’s Gifts may compare –
We know not –
For the Rates – lie Here –
(325;
Franklin 644)
Death and life, in her world, overlap and compete, although
death always has some advantage: since it leads to eternity it is permanent. Keeping
this binary opposition in mind clarifies our reading of her work, which is sometimes
oblique and idiosyncratic. Her characteristic hymn-like rhythms and structures
enable an unmatched range of aesthetic tactics, and her wide array of topics
impresses, but her primary focus on the stress and strain of the immortal
pushing upon the mortal runs like a live wire through all of her work. This essentially
religious concern does not explain her reluctance to present her work to the
world at large. Nor does it resolve the apparent contradiction between her
unwillingness to publish and her care in preserving the bulk of her poetry. One
might expect a poet concerned with the most major of human issues to offer her poems
to a larger audience than the handful of relatives and friends who read her work
in her lifetime (only ten poems appeared in print while she lived, some more
than once but none with her approval). Despite oddities of punctuation,
diction, rhyme and rhythm, her cumulative achievement surprised Mabel Loomis
Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, her first editors. No one, not even her
sister Lavinia, had foreseen such a large and powerful body of work. Higginson
in the 1860s had judged her poems too eccentric for publication; but after her
death, when he saw how much she had accomplished, he realized how seriously he
had erred, and used his full influence to promote her work. The enthusiastic public
response since her first book appeared in 1890, four years after her death, has
never abated.
About a dozen collections, most of them edited by Martha
Dickinson Bianchi (Emily’s niece) or Millicent Todd Bingham (Mabel’s daughter),
followed that first book. All early editions revised her poetry to conform to
ordinary conventions of punctuation and often to correct her wayward rhythms
and rhymes. They frequently added titles, which Dickinson had usually avoided.
All editors selected from the whole (or at least the available) range of her
work until Thomas Johnson published his comprehensive three-volume variorum
edition in 1955. Johnson arranged the poems chronologically, depending partly
on his understanding of the evolution of Dickinson’s holograph over the years
of her writing career. He honored her eccentricities, including her reliance on
dashes, her resistance to titles, her sometimes challenging sense of rhythm,
and her off-rhymes. In 1998 R.W. Franklin produced a heavily revised variorum
edition, also nominally chronological. But well before that, in 1981, he
complicated the textual issues by publishing a two-volume facsimile edition of
Dickinson’s forty “fascicles,” small thread-bound compilations of poems.
These fascicles may not always include only poems from a narrow
time period (although Franklin seems confident that, for the most part, they
do), and therefore may challenge the assumed chronology. To complicate things,
Dickinson, after the first eight fascicles, includes alternate words and
phrasing for many of the poems, so we cannot be sure that she considered even
this orderly presentation to be close to final. Although Franklin arranged the
fascicles chronologically by holograph, Dickinson usually discarded her
worksheets when she transcribed her poems into her little folders, so a given
poem may have been composed years before she copied it. Hers is a complex
compositional process. We might wonder if one reason Dickinson chose not to
publish, aside from her argument that “Publication -- is the Auction / Of the
Mind of Man—”, is that she never actually finished any of her poems.
In 1986 I published in ESQ
an essay arguing that at least some of the fascicles were linked by common
themes, subjects, or motifs. Many scholarly essays and several books have since
delved into the fascicles, exploring Dickinson’s selection and arrangement and
offering various theses about the intention and accomplishment of these tiny
books. While this has been in many ways a fruitful discussion, I no longer
believe that theme, topic, or motif are germane. If, as I now argue, all of her
poems, regardless of their superficial subject, engage the meta-subject of
temporality and infinity and expend themselves revealing the interstices,
tensions, and mutual pressures of those concepts, then any arrangement or
juxtaposition will amplify that basic concern.
Still, the issue of presentation haunts the Dickinson world.
Should the presumptive chronology and almost imperceptible development of her precocious
style shape our reading, as Johnson and Franklin’s variorums suggest? Has
tracing her work chronologically, through heroic textual editing, helped us
understand her complex and oblique art? I don’t think that so far it has. If
chronology hasn’t helped, should we then read her gatherings as determined
sequences, or as a psychologically acceptable substitution for the publication
she claimed to detest? Are the little poem-packets working toward finished
products, or would she have arranged her poems in yet another form for actual
publication? Did she hope that her small established audience, particularly her
sister-in-law Susan Gilbert Dickinson (to whom she sent some 250 poems), would
find and read these packets? Can such considerations shape our critical readings
in useful ways? Numerous Dickinson scholars have gnawed at these questions
without arriving at a general consensus.
And then, in 2013, just when we thought Dickinson’s textual
adventures had peaked, a coffee-table book entitled Emily Dickinson: The Gorgeous Nothings
appeared. This facsimile edition presents scraps of writing—scrawls on
envelopes, shreds with three or four words on them, and small draft pages, all
carefully related to finished poems or known letters and handsomely reproduced
full-sized in color—and poses yet more tenuous theses and gravid questions.
Although the editor insists that Dickinson’s is a visual art and finds the
significance of these tatters in the poet’s sensitivity to space and layout,
and although Susan Howe provides a brief, compelling[O1] ,
and suggestive if factually challenged preface, it’s not yet clear that this beautiful
book has added much to the discussion. Like some other recent critical work, it
challenges but does not disprove Franklin’s assertion that “a literary work is
separable from its artifact.” That doesn’t mean this edition is useless.
Although Franklin took these fragments into account, further consideration by
other critics might better establish the earliest genesis of some of her poems.
And this large-format facsimile reminds us that Dickinson’s art is truly home-made,
as Elizabeth Bishop might say (“Home-made, home-made! But aren’t we all?”
observes her Crusoe), and that it originates in a domesticity contrasting
nicely with its vast metaphysical concerns.
So now Cristanne Miller’s new edition enters the picture.
Like Johnson and Franklin, Miller is a scrupulous and thoughtful editor. She
has chosen to present the poems by first transcribing the forty fascicles, then
the unbound sheets on which Dickinson transcribed poems without grouping or
binding them. These constitute the work Miller believes Dickinson most wanted
to preserve because left in the most orderly state. After these roughly eleven
hundred poems Miller presents poems left loose, transcribed by others, or sent
to correspondents but not apparently retained by the poet. Miller has chosen to
reproduce the texts as Dickinson transcribed them, in a complete although possibly
unfinished state. Miller calls her own process “genetic editing” (a term I
thought applied to manipulating the human genome), and acknowledges that
Dickinson’s work was always in process, that the poems as she presents them may
not embody the poet’s vision of her work in its ultimate completion. We will
never know how far this text varies from that theoretical state of completion.
Even in the fascicles, Dickinson frequently lists alternative words or whole lines,
and Miller, although not attempting another variorum text, transcribes those
alternate words into the generous white space on the right side of her page. So
although this intends to be a reading text, we do get a good sense of the flux
of Dickinson’s process, as well as a clear signal that the texts we possess are
tentative and inherently unstable.
It is conjecture to think that Dickinson intended the
fascicles and transcribed but unbound sheets to represent her poems as she
wished them to be preserved. Perhaps she had no desire to preserve any of her
work. If Bright’s Disease had not interrupted, maybe she would have eventually
destroyed her poetry to protect it from the prying eyes and minds of strangers.
It is equally possible that if she had remained healthy for another decade she
would have recopied, decided on final texts, and shipped her work to a
publisher. We just don’t know, and her extant manuscripts do not reveal whether
she had any intentions beyond simply writing the poems and distributing a few
to friends. So Miller’s subtitle As She
Preserved Them must be regarded with skepticism. As She Left Them would be more accurate. Like the preceding editors
of Dickinson, from Todd and Higginson to R. W. Franklin, she has bid for
possession of Dickinson’s poems at that very auction of the mind the poet
claimed to deplore. But ultimately no one, no editor or reader, can fully
possess these poems, which so easily escape our intellectual grip and evaporate
into the ether.
Miller’s bid, however, is as valid as anyone’s. Some years
ago she wrote Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s
Grammar, an insightful look at the poet’s demanding and eccentric style.
And now with further scholarly homework she has produced a comprehensive,
thoughtfully framed, and readable text. Her introduction, although it says
nothing about the poems as poetry and nearly everything about the poems as
textual problems, gives a clear overall picture of the issues involved, and her
fifty-nine pages of notes are invaluable for the general reader. My only
complaint is the awkward way in which this text coordinates with Johnson’s and
Franklin’s variorums. She has resisted numbering the poems, as they do,
because, as she notes, Dickinson did not do so. Granted, those numbers do not
belong above the texts. But to compare her texts with the variorums’ we have to
refer to an index of first lines. Why not place the numbers in the white space
on the right-hand side of the page, above the alternate words and lines? Off to
the side they would not impinge on the text of the poem but would be handy for
those of us who are interested enough to check the variorums for alternate
versions and other information. Still, this is a minor issue. Miller has
produced a conscientiously edited and highly readable text that gives us a
clear overview of Dickinson’s work as she left it. This collection could
supersede for classroom use the paperback version of Franklin’s edition as the
most useful one-volume Dickinson, and it is a helpful supplement to the
variorums and Franklin’s facsimile of the fascicles. Yet none of these complete
editions is suitable for those new to Dickinson. For readers of poetry outside
of the academy, if any exist, Johnson’s Final
Harvest, a thoughtful and extensive selection from his 1955 variorum, remains
the best introduction to Dickinson’s world.
Cristanne Miller, editor. Emily Dickinson's Poems: As She Preserved Them. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2016. ISBN-13:
978-0674737969. $30.00, hardcover
Other editions of Emily Dickinson’s poetry mentioned in this
review:
Poems by Emily
Dickinson, ed. Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Boston:
Robert
Brothers, 1890.
The Poems of Emily
Dickinson. ed. Thomas H. Johnson. 3 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press,
1955.
Final Harvest: Emily
Dickinson’s Poems, ed. Thomas H. Johnson. Boston: Little, Brown, 1962.
The Manuscript Books
of Emily Dickinson, ed. R. W. Franklin. 2 vols. Cambridge: Harvard
University
Press, 1981.
The Poems of Emily
Dickinson: Variorum Edition, ed. R.W. Franklin. 3 vols. Cambridge:
Harvard
University Press, 1998.
The Gorgeous Nothings:
Emily Dickinson's Envelope Poems, ed. Jen Bervin
and Marta Werner New York: New
Directions, 2013.
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