Preliminary notes on the text and some of its challenges:

The text of this chapbook is taken from The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, edited by Ralph Franklin, 1981: Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Very few of Dickinson's poems were published during her lifetime. With the few that were so published, she objected bitterly to such editorial practices as supplying titles, and normalizing her punctuation, capitalization, spelling, and line-breaks, and therefore refrained from publication. Instead, she maintained her poems, in the forms in which she preferred them, in her own fair-copied books, sewn together at the spine.

These original manuscript books were taken apart by her first editors after her death, the poems removed from them, and the original groupings and orderings into books destroyed. The original volumes (which I call chapbooks, the correct term for a volume of 40 pages or less, but they are commonly called fascicles, a term for packets of pages attached together, carrying no connotation of their being intended as books) were reassembled by Ralph Franklin on the basis of archival research into similarities of types of paper, and the actual physical locations of spinal stitch-marks, watermarks, stains and tears on adjoining pages, etc. He numbered them according the chronological order in which she had assembled them, as established by the dates of manufacture of the paper she used for each.

Dickinson did not supply titles for any of her poems. The numbers above the poems in this text (which are now commonly used in place of titles to identify them) were supplied by Thomas Johnson, the editor who in 1955 first attempted to restore her texts to their original spelling, punctuation, line and stanza forms, rhymes, and language. Johnson did not, however, try to restore the original groupings and order. Nor did he try to deal with Dickinson's innovative retention, in her final copies of poems, of alternate word choices. In her bound chapbooks, Dickinson used the +sign before a word to indicate an alternate choice for the word, or sometimes for part or all of the line, which she then placed, sometimes in the order in which they pertain to the text, sometimes not, often at the bottom of each page, but occasionally in the margins near the original choice to which they refer. I have moved a few of these to clarify their original reference point. Sometimes, as with the second + in the first poem below, there will be more than one alternative choice for that location in the poem. In those cases, I've indicated by spacing that two successive choices are alternates for the same original reference point. It is not always clear from her handwriting when she intends a capital letter and when a small; sometimes she uses an intermediate size. I've transcribed them as best I could.

Because she withheld her poems from publication, rather than permit these characteristics of her work to receive editorial alteration, it is vital to read her poems as she intended them, with all their elements of difference and indeterminacy. In effect, the indeterminacy itself constitutes a radical new poetics, precursor not merely of modernism, but, in many significant ways, of postmodernism.

return to Emily: A Reconsideration

go to Chapbook 33 title page