was unnerved to learn in my twenties that the poems of Emily Dickinson that I had memorized as a girl were not the poems as she had written them. Her first editors, hoping to make her eccentric verses palatable to the general public, regularized, rewrote, censored, and titled them. In that form, the poems were relished, diffused, commented on, and memorized. Readers first encountered Dickinson’s actual poems in 1955, in the three-volume edition by Thomas H. Johnson, which was supplanted in 1998 by Ralph Franklin’s three-volume edition. Both editions included the varying drafts of the poems, revealing Dickinson’s instant or retrospective self-corrections.
But a printed page cannot reproduce a handwritten one, and it became inevitable that scholars wanted to see exactly how Dickinson’s page looked, rightly suspecting that Dickinson cared about the graphic arrangement of her lines and stanzas. Most of the poet’s manuscripts still awaited photographic reproduction. A digitized version of the Dickinson letter manuscripts, begun some years ago under the auspices of the scholar Marta Werner, has now been complemented by a digitized version of the poetry manuscripts as they appear in Franklin’s three-volume variorum. Harvard University and Amherst College have jointly issued these poems at edickinson.org. This is a relatively uncomplicated database, in which each manuscript can be viewed side by side with its transcription into print, the manuscript placed on the left and the transcription on the right.
Still, a transcription cannot render the whole appearance of the digitized manuscript page to its left. The faintness of the digitized page means that many readers will look first at the printed poem as transcribed. Is there anything to be learned from the manuscript itself that is not evident from the print transcription? I decided to seek out one of my favorite poems, “The Bible is an antique Volume –.” The most intriguing feature of the poem is Dickinson’s repeated rethinking of a crucial element: what quality in a preacher would make unwilling boys want to come to church? Her first adjective for the desired preacher is the rather feeble “thrilling”:
Had but the Tale a thrilling Teller,
All the Boys would come –
Orpheus’ Sermon captivated –
It did not condemn –
But after writing the word “thrilling,” and marking it with the miniature plus sign that was her sign for a word she might revise, she appended thirteen possible substitutions for that one word. In Franklin’s printed volume, these thirteen substitutes are run horizontally across the page, separated by small bullets and including a single comment by Franklin in italics and parentheses:
typic • hearty • bonnie • breathless • spacious • tropic • warbling • (written twice) • ardent • friendly • magic • pungent • winning • mellow
But in the manuscript, they appear below the poem, like this:
typic – hearty – bonnie –
breathless – spacious –
tropic – warbling –
ardent – friendly –
magic – pungent –
warbling – winning –
mellow –
Does the manuscript tell us something that the printed version does not? Is it enough to say “warbling (written twice)” without showing us (as the manuscript does) where it turns up a second time, which might suggest why? (Surely it is not accidental that “warbling” reappears matched with the alliterating “winning.”) All later manuscripts show “warbling” as the sole survivor among the alternatives. Why did “warbling,” twice inscribed in separated lines, win out over the other possibilities?
Dickinson’s alternatives always reveal her successive intellectual positions. “The Bible Is an antique Volume –” (headed, in one version, “Diagnosis of the Bible, by a Boy –”) suggests that the Bible stories could be retold from the pulpit in ways much more interesting than the usual ones. The preacher could draw his boyish audience with adventure-story descriptions of biblical places and people:
Eden – the ancient Homestead –
Satan – the Brigadier –
Judas – the Great Defaulter –
David – the Troubadour –
These are epithets derived from plot. But in the subsequently added final stanza, with its thirteen possible substitutions for “thrilling,” Dickinson is rebuking her own first notion. She begins to think that manner is more powerful than matter, style more convincing than any rendition of plot. What manner, then, should the Teller adopt if his Tale is to be “captivating”?
Perhaps, she first reflects, the Teller’s manner should be like that of an evangelist bringing the good news: “breathless” and “ardent.” Or warm, like that of a genial leader: “winning,” “friendly,” and “hearty.” Or ripe with experience: “mellow.” Or sophisticated in interpretation: “tropic” and “typic.” Or the Teller need only be good-looking: “bonnie.” Or spell-casting: “magic.” Or rhetorically striking: “thrilling” and “pungent.”
All of these features might be attractive in the pulpit. But they have to do with the conveying of meaning through words (or through personal handsomeness), and that is not, Dickinson reflects, what art is. The art of utterance persuades initially by its music and its rhythm, before semiotic or personal characteristics come into play. And so the preacher must have a manner without words: he must “warble,” not “speak” or even “sing.” Dickinson is remembering Milton’s “L’Allegro,” in which The Happy Man goes to the theater not for plot or character, but to hear Shakespeare “warble his native wood-notes wild.”
Even so minor an instance as this can reveal to what degree the transcription does not fully reproduce manuscript evidence. (Also, all of Dickinson’s tiny plus signs are dropped, making us lose her little self-suspension: “Think again.”) It is possible to over-interpret the graphic appearance of manuscripts, and a strong cautionary note has been struck in Domhnall Mitchell’s brilliant examination of the evidence in his Measures of Possibility: Emily Dickinson’s Manuscripts. Caution should be present in the case of any transcriptions, such as those gathered in the recent New Directions publication by Marta Werner and Jen Bervin under the title The Gorgeous Nothings.
This volume, originally an expensive art book but now mercifully released at an ordinary price, exhibits fifty-two pieces that Dickinson penciled on envelopes or parts of envelopes. Earlier in her life Dickinson chose to discard her drafts once she had carefully made fair copies in ink. Later she tended to keep, on single pages, both the worksheet for a poem and a fair copy of its final form. Finally, from frugality or some unknown motive, she took to opening up and smoothing out envelopes as writing surfaces, sometimes ruling the resulting odd-shaped “page” into two columns, each accommodating a stanza. (Mitchell points out, incidentally, that Dickinson was not alone in writing on used envelope scraps.)
In reproduction, the envelope poems exert a curious fascination, because one never knows how Dickinson will inscribe the poem on these oddly shaped “pages.” Sometimes she tilted a square page into a diamond and wrote from the narrow point down to the wide middle and then all the way down to the bottom point. Such a manuscript, so deliberate in one sense, is so fragmentarily scrawled in pencil that one can hardly believe the intimations of tragedy or comedy in the few but often piercing lines. In The Gorgeous Nothings (the title is borrowed from Dickinson), each envelope poem is photographed and then exactly transcribed by the artist Jen Bervin, who respects Dickinson’s graphic creation of, say, a diamond-shaped poem.
Some of the envelope fragments display vertical columns of words, with the poem unveiling itself down the page almost word by word. In Franklin’s edition of the poems, we can read Dickinson’s fair copy of #1,594:
No Life can pompless pass away –
The lowliest career
To the same pageant wends its way
As that exalted here –
(Dickinson noted on the fair copy that she wanted to reverse the order of words in the first verse line, reverting to her draft version: “Pompless no Life can pass away –.”)
On the envelope draft pictured in The Gorgeous Nothings, the penciled poem presents itself atomistically, in single- or two-word units (I have regularized the left-hand margin):
Pompless
no Life
can pass
away –
The lowliest
career
To the
same pag-
eant wends
it’s way
as that
Exalted
here –
Franklin says of this, “ED jotted potential readings on an envelope.” But what he calls “potential readings” are in fact, with respect to the first stanza, the very words of the poem itself, arranged in columnar fashion. (In Franklin’s defense, I must add that on the envelope the second stanza is only partially formed.)
Looking at the envelope fragment, the eye sees single words taking on an insistent presence. “Pompless” all by itself both adds and subtracts pomp; and how strongly “Exalted” rings out after the colorless monosyllables “wends its way as that” leading up to it. Did Dickinson sometimes “see” her poems unspooling in this word-by-word way, or was she simply constrained by the available space to put so few words on a line?
The virtual destruction of the graphic appearance of the hymn stanza by such isolated placement of words impedes easy metrical recognition, and this is the virtue of inspecting Dickinson’s drafts. Her capital letters reveal that she is conscious of the beginning of each new verse line, as Mitchell points out. Mitchell adds that reading the poems as if Dickinson intended them to be read in this step-by-step way is just as arbitrary as reading them in the poet’s fair copies, where the hymn-meter stanzaic shape is so firmly followed. Yet it is a stimulus to thought to read “Pompless” made monumental on its manuscript page.
Perhaps, for Dickinson, the principal unit of thought in poetic compo
was unnerved to learn in my twenties that the poems of Emily Dickinson that I had memorized as a girl were not the poems as she had written them. Her first editors, hoping to make her eccentric verses palatable to the general public, regularized, rewrote, censored, and titled them. In that form, the poems were relished, diffused, commented on, and memorized. Readers first encountered Dickinson’s actual poems in 1955, in the three-volume edition by Thomas H. Johnson, which was supplanted in 1998 by Ralph Franklin’s three-volume edition. Both editions included the varying drafts of the poems, revealing Dickinson’s instant or retrospective self-corrections.
But a printed page cannot reproduce a handwritten one, and it became inevitable that scholars wanted to see exactly how Dickinson’s page looked, rightly suspecting that Dickinson cared about the graphic arrangement of her lines and stanzas. Most of the poet’s manuscripts still awaited photographic reproduction. A digitized version of the Dickinson letter manuscripts, begun some years ago under the auspices of the scholar Marta Werner, has now been complemented by a digitized version of the poetry manuscripts as they appear in Franklin’s three-volume variorum. Harvard University and Amherst College have jointly issued these poems at edickinson.org. This is a relatively uncomplicated database, in which each manuscript can be viewed side by side with its transcription into print, the manuscript placed on the left and the transcription on the right.
Still, a transcription cannot render the whole appearance of the digitized manuscript page to its left. The faintness of the digitized page means that many readers will look first at the printed poem as transcribed. Is there anything to be learned from the manuscript itself that is not evident from the print transcription? I decided to seek out one of my favorite poems, “The Bible is an antique Volume –.” The most intriguing feature of the poem is Dickinson’s repeated rethinking of a crucial element: what quality in a preacher would make unwilling boys want to come to church? Her first adjective for the desired preacher is the rather feeble “thrilling”:
Had but the Tale a thrilling Teller,
All the Boys would come –
Orpheus’ Sermon captivated –
It did not condemn –
But after writing the word “thrilling,” and marking it with the miniature plus sign that was her sign for a word she might revise, she appended thirteen possible substitutions for that one word. In Franklin’s printed volume, these thirteen substitutes are run horizontally across the page, separated by small bullets and including a single comment by Franklin in italics and parentheses:
typic • hearty • bonnie • breathless • spacious • tropic • warbling • (written twice) • ardent • friendly • magic • pungent • winning • mellow
But in the manuscript, they appear below the poem, like this:
typic – hearty – bonnie –
breathless – spacious –
tropic – warbling –
ardent – friendly –
magic – pungent –
warbling – winning –
mellow –
Does the manuscript tell us something that the printed version does not? Is it enough to say “warbling (written twice)” without showing us (as the manuscript does) where it turns up a second time, which might suggest why? (Surely it is not accidental that “warbling” reappears matched with the alliterating “winning.”) All later manuscripts show “warbling” as the sole survivor among the alternatives. Why did “warbling,” twice inscribed in separated lines, win out over the other possibilities?
Dickinson’s alternatives always reveal her successive intellectual positions. “The Bible Is an antique Volume –” (headed, in one version, “Diagnosis of the Bible, by a Boy –”) suggests that the Bible stories could be retold from the pulpit in ways much more interesting than the usual ones. The preacher could draw his boyish audience with adventure-story descriptions of biblical places and people:
Eden – the ancient Homestead –
Satan – the Brigadier –
Judas – the Great Defaulter –
David – the Troubadour –
These are epithets derived from plot. But in the subsequently added final stanza, with its thirteen possible substitutions for “thrilling,” Dickinson is rebuking her own first notion. She begins to think that manner is more powerful than matter, style more convincing than any rendition of plot. What manner, then, should the Teller adopt if his Tale is to be “captivating”?
Perhaps, she first reflects, the Teller’s manner should be like that of an evangelist bringing the good news: “breathless” and “ardent.” Or warm, like that of a genial leader: “winning,” “friendly,” and “hearty.” Or ripe with experience: “mellow.” Or sophisticated in interpretation: “tropic” and “typic.” Or the Teller need only be good-looking: “bonnie.” Or spell-casting: “magic.” Or rhetorically striking: “thrilling” and “pungent.”
All of these features might be attractive in the pulpit. But they have to do with the conveying of meaning through words (or through personal handsomeness), and that is not, Dickinson reflects, what art is. The art of utterance persuades initially by its music and its rhythm, before semiotic or personal characteristics come into play. And so the preacher must have a manner without words: he must “warble,” not “speak” or even “sing.” Dickinson is remembering Milton’s “L’Allegro,” in which The Happy Man goes to the theater not for plot or character, but to hear Shakespeare “warble his native wood-notes wild.”
Even so minor an instance as this can reveal to what degree the transcription does not fully reproduce manuscript evidence. (Also, all of Dickinson’s tiny plus signs are dropped, making us lose her little self-suspension: “Think again.”) It is possible to over-interpret the graphic appearance of manuscripts, and a strong cautionary note has been struck in Domhnall Mitchell’s brilliant examination of the evidence in his Measures of Possibility: Emily Dickinson’s Manuscripts. Caution should be present in the case of any transcriptions, such as those gathered in the recent New Directions publication by Marta Werner and Jen Bervin under the title The Gorgeous Nothings.
This volume, originally an expensive art book but now mercifully released at an ordinary price, exhibits fifty-two pieces that Dickinson penciled on envelopes or parts of envelopes. Earlier in her life Dickinson chose to discard her drafts once she had carefully made fair copies in ink. Later she tended to keep, on single pages, both the worksheet for a poem and a fair copy of its final form. Finally, from frugality or some unknown motive, she took to opening up and smoothing out envelopes as writing surfaces, sometimes ruling the resulting odd-shaped “page” into two columns, each accommodating a stanza. (Mitchell points out, incidentally, that Dickinson was not alone in writing on used envelope scraps.)
In reproduction, the envelope poems exert a curious fascination, because one never knows how Dickinson will inscribe the poem on these oddly shaped “pages.” Sometimes she tilted a square page into a diamond and wrote from the narrow point down to the wide middle and then all the way down to the bottom point. Such a manuscript, so deliberate in one sense, is so fragmentarily scrawled in pencil that one can hardly believe the intimations of tragedy or comedy in the few but often piercing lines. In The Gorgeous Nothings (the title is borrowed from Dickinson), each envelope poem is photographed and then exactly transcribed by the artist Jen Bervin, who respects Dickinson’s graphic creation of, say, a diamond-shaped poem.
Some of the envelope fragments display vertical columns of words, with the poem unveiling itself down the page almost word by word. In Franklin’s edition of the poems, we can read Dickinson’s fair copy of #1,594:
No Life can pompless pass away –
The lowliest career
To the same pageant wends its way
As that exalted here –
(Dickinson noted on the fair copy that she wanted to reverse the order of words in the first verse line, reverting to her draft version: “Pompless no Life can pass away –.”)
On the envelope draft pictured in The Gorgeous Nothings, the penciled poem presents itself atomistically, in single- or two-word units (I have regularized the left-hand margin):
Pompless
no Life
can pass
away –
The lowliest
career
To the
same pag-
eant wends
it’s way
as that
Exalted
here –
Franklin says of this, “ED jotted potential readings on an envelope.” But what he calls “potential readings” are in fact, with respect to the first stanza, the very words of the poem itself, arranged in columnar fashion. (In Franklin’s defense, I must add that on the envelope the second stanza is only partially formed.)
Looking at the envelope fragment, the eye sees single words taking on an insistent presence. “Pompless” all by itself both adds and subtracts pomp; and how strongly “Exalted” rings out after the colorless monosyllables “wends its way as that” leading up to it. Did Dickinson sometimes “see” her poems unspooling in this word-by-word way, or was she simply constrained by the available space to put so few words on a line?
The virtual destruction of the graphic appearance of the hymn stanza by such isolated placement of words impedes easy metrical recognition, and this is the virtue of inspecting Dickinson’s drafts. Her capital letters reveal that she is conscious of the beginning of each new verse line, as Mitchell points out. Mitchell adds that reading the poems as if Dickinson intended them to be read in this step-by-step way is just as arbitrary as reading them in the poet’s fair copies, where the hymn-meter stanzaic shape is so firmly followed. Yet it is a stimulus to thought to read “Pompless” made monumental on its manuscript page.
Perhaps, for Dickinson, the principal unit of thought in poetic compo
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