Here for the first time is the poetry of Emily Dickinson as she
herself "published" it in the privacy of her upstairs room in the
house in Amherst.
She invented her own form of bookmaking. Her first drafts,
jotted on odd scraps of paper, were discarded when transcribed.
Completed poems were neatly copied in ink on sheets of folded
stationery which she arranged in groups, usually of sixteen to
twenty-four pages, and sewed together into packets or fascicles.
These manuscript books were her private mode of publication, a
substitute perhaps for the public mode that, for reasons
unexplained, she denied herself. In recent years there has been
increasing interest in the fascicles as artistic gathering,
intrarelated by theme, imagery, or emotional movement. But no
edition in the past, not even the variorum, or has arranged the
poems in the sequence in which they appear in the manuscript
books.
Emily Dickinson's poems, more than those of any other poet,
resist translation into the medium of print. Since she never saw a
manuscript through the press, we cannot tell how she would have
adapted for print her unusual capitalization, punctuation, line and
stanza divisions, and alternate readings. The feather-light
punctuation, in particular, is misrepresented when converted to
conventional stop or even to dashes.
This elegant edition presents all of Emily Dickinson's
manuscript books and unsewn fascicle sheets--1,148 poems on 1,250
pages--restored insofar as possible to their original order, as
they were when her sister found them after her death. The
manuscripts are reproduced with startling fidelity in 300-line
screen. Every detail is preserved: the bosses on the stationery,
the sewing holes and tears, and poet's alternate reading and
penciled revisions, ink spots and other stains offset onto adjacent
leaves, and later markings by Susan Dickinson, Mabel Todd, and
others. The experience of reading these facsimile pages is
virtually the same as reading the manuscripts themselves.
Supplementary information is provided in introductions, notes,
and appendices.
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