Editing Emily Dickinson considers the processes through which Dickinson's work has been edited in the twentieth century and how such editorial processes contribute specifically to the production of Emily Dickinson as author. The posthumous editing of her handwritten manuscripts into the conventions of the book and the electronic archive has been informed by editors' assumptions about the literary work; at stake is fundamentally what a Dickinson poem may be, or, rather, how we may approach such an object.
Heginbotham's book focuses on Emily Dickinson's work as a deliberate writer and editor. The fascicles were forty small portfolios of her poems written between 1856 and 1864, composed on four to seven stationery sheets, folded, stacked, and sewn together with twine. What revelations might come from reading her poems in her own context? Are they simply "scrapbooks," as some claim, or are they evidence of conscious, canny editing? Read in their original places, each lyric becomes different-and more interesting-than when read in isolation. We cannot know why Dickinson compiled the books or what she thought of them, but we can observe what she left in them. What she left is visible only by noting the way the poem answers in a dialogue across the pages, the way lines spilling onto a second page introduce the next poem, the way openings suggest image clusters so that each book has its own network of concerns and language-not a story or philosophical preachment but an aesthetic wholeness. This book is the first to demonstrate that Dickinson's poetic and philosophical creativity is most startling when the reader observes the individual lyric in the poet's own, and only, context for them. For teacher, student, scholar, and poetry lover, Heginbotham creates an important new framework for understanding one of the most complex, clever, and profound U.S. poets.
Though generally overlooked during her lifetime, Emily Dickinson's poetry has achieved acclaim due to her experiments in prosody, her tragic vision and the range of her emotional and intellectual explorations.
“Scandal and pathos abound” (The New Yorker) in this riveting account of the mother and daughter who brought Emily Dickinson’s genius to light. Longlisted for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography • Finalist for the Plutarch Award Despite Emily Dickinson’s renown, the story of the two women most responsible for her initial posthumous publication—Mabel Loomis Todd and her daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham—has remained in the shadows of the archives. Utilizing hundreds of overlooked letters and diaries to weave together three unstoppable women, Julie Dobrow reveals the intrigue of Dickinson’s literary beginnings, including Mabel’s tumultuous affair with Emily’s brother, Austin Dickinson, controversial editorial decisions, and a battle over the right to define the so-called Belle of Amherst.
For most of her life Emily Dickinson regularly embedded poems, disguised as prose, in her lively and thoughtful letters. Although many critics have commented on the poetic quality of Dickinson's letters, William Shurr is the first to draw fully developed poems from them. In this remarkable volume, he presents nearly 500 new poems that he and his associates excavated from her correspondence, thereby expanding the canon of Dickinson's known poems by almost one-third and making a remarkable addition to the study of American literature. Here are new riddles and epigrams, as well as longer lyrics that have never been seen as poems before. While Shurr has reformatted passages from the letters as poetry, a practice Dickinson herself occasionally followed, no words, punctuation, or spellings have been changed. Shurr points out that these new verses have much in common with Dickinson's well-known poems: they have her typical punctuation (especially the characteristic dashes and capitalizations); they use her preferred hymn or ballad meters; and they continue her search for new and unusual rhymes. Most of all, these poems continue Dickinson's remarkable experiments in extending the boundaries of poetry and human sensibility.
"The author confronts the thorny question of whether any set of editing practices can adequately represent in print the distinctive characteristics of Emily Dickinson's writing".--BOOKJACKET.
The 19th–century American poet’s uncensored and breathtaking letters, poems, and letter-poems to her sister-in-law and childhood friend. For the first time, selections from Emily Dickinson’s thirty-six year correspondence with her childhood friend, neighbor, and sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Dickinson, are compiled in a single volume. Open Me Carefully invites a dramatic new understanding of Emily Dickinson’s life and work, overcoming a century of censorship and misinterpretation. For the millions of readers who love Emily Dickinson’s poetry, Open Me Carefully brings new light to the meaning of the poet’s life and work. Gone is Emily as lonely spinster; here is Dickinson in her own words, passionate and fully alive. Praise for Open Me Carefully “With spare commentary, Smith . . . and Hart . . . let these letters speak for themselves. Most important, unlike previous editors who altered line breaks to fit their sense of what is poetry or prose, Hart and Smith offer faithful reproductions of the letters’ genre-defying form as the words unravel spectacularly down the original page.” —Renee Tursi, The New York Times Book Review
