Emily Dickinson, poet of the interior life, imagined
words/swords, hurling barbed syllables/piercing. Nothing about her
adult appearance or habitation revealed such a militant soul. Only
poems, written quietly in a room of her own, often hand-stitched in
small volumes, then hidden in a desk drawer, revealed her true
self. She did not live in time, as did that other great poet of the
day, Walt Whitman, but in universals. As she knowingly put it:
"There is one thing to be grateful for--that one is one's self and
not somebody else."
Dickinson lived and died without fame: she saw only a few poems
published. Her great legacy was later rescued from her desk
drawer--an astonishing body of work revealing her acute, sensitive
nature reaching out boldly from self-referral to a wider, imagined
world. Her family sought publication of Dickinson's poetry over the
years, selecting verses, often altering her words or her
punctuation, until, in 1955, the first important attempt was made
to collect and publish Dickinson's work, edited by Thomas H.
Johnson for the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Now, after many years of preparation by Ralph Franklin, the
foremost scholar of Dickinson's manuscripts, a new comprehensive
edition is available. This three-volume work contains 1,789 poems,
the largest number ever assembled. The poems, arranged
chronologically, based on new dating, are drawn from a range of
archives, most frequently from holographs, but also from various
secondary sources representing lost manuscripts. The text of each
manuscript is rendered individually, including, within the capacity
of standard type, Dickinson's spelling, capitalization, and
punctuation. Franklin gives Dickinson's alternative readings for
the poems, her revisions, and the line and page, or column,
divisions in the source. Each entry identifies Franklin's editorial
emendations and records the publication history, including
variants. Fourteen appendices of tables and lists give additional
information, including poems attributed to Emily Dickinson. The
poems are indexed by numbers from the Johnson edition, as well as
by first lines.
Franklin has provided an introduction that serves as a guide to
this edition and surveys the history of the editing of Dickinson's
poems. His account of how Dickinson conducted her workshop is a
reconstruction of a remarkable poetic life.
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