Emily Dickinson Ways

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) did not see any of her almost 1,800 poems through the process of publication, but she did copy more than 1,100 poems in fair hand onto folded sheets of stationery, binding the majority of the sheets into the booklets Dickinson scholars call fascicles.

Although only a small minority of Dickinson’s manuscripts contain a large number of alternatives or revisions, her recurring use of this compositional, revising, or copying method suggests that at the very least she thought of her poems as always open to new formulations of her thought, or new thinking. In this she resembles her peer, Walt Whitman, who frequently revised poems for later publication. Dickinson’s variant versions of many of the poems she circulated also underline her sense of a poem’s fluidity. Writing a poem without alternatives in one copy did not prevent her from later recasting that poem in an equally stable but variant form. Dickinson’s alternatives resemble multiple performance options for a single production: variation is potentially unlimited, but when performing - in Dickinson’s case, reading a poem aloud or circulating a text to a friend - the artist chooses a single version.

Dickinson’s poems thus range along a continuum of resolution. Some scholars believe that Dickinson composed with attention not just to language but to the visual space of the page, and even to the kind shape of paper she chose to write on. They read a poem as a visual structure in which the slants of her dashes, the placement and shape of words and letters across the space of her writing surface , and the material characteristics of each scrap of paper or embossed stationery page all signify as elements of the poetry. Consequently each writing out of a set of words constitutes in effect a new poem.
Emily Dickinson's Poems: As She Preserved Them by Christanne Miller

Images of Dickinson’s poetry manuscripts are now available online in the Emily Dickinson Archive (edickinson.org)The archive gives readers the opportunity to explore the ways Dickinson might have played, brilliantly with the space on a page or the shape or previous use of some reclaimed paper scraps.

Dickinson knew by heart much of the Bible and many poems by her favorite authors. In some of her poems she quotes such sources exactly, with or without quotation marks. More frequently, she alludes to or echoes other work.

Estranged from Beauty - none can be -
For Beauty is infinity -
And power to be finite ceased
Before identity was creased
c.1879

Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them by Christanne Miller