| The standard editions of Emily Dickinson's poems and letters inaccurately represent her handwritten manuscripts, and dividing her writing by genre leads to confusion about the complex relationship between poetry and prose. Features such as lineation, punctuation, capitalization, and spacing serve as signals, expressive markings that create meaning and guide readers. Although Thomas Johnson restores some symbols removed by previous editors, his lineation misrepresents Dickinson's line breaks, and he makes other kinds of alterations. As a result, ways of reading poems are limited and subverted, poetic devices in letters muted and obscured I argue here that the best way to organize Dickinson's work for publication is to return to the categories in which it was originally discovered or collected: manuscript volumes; unbound letters, poems, and drafts; and correspondences. Although photofacsimiles and electronic editions can provide more exact reproductions of manuscripts, print translations, with commentary, are the most democratic texts--accessible, economical, and easily reproducible, capable of meeting the needs of Dickinson scholars as well as the writer's diverse popular audience.;To emphasize the problems with Johnson's editing methodology, and to advise against any editorial or critical endeavor that fails to recognize the essential role of manuscript study, I review a collection of poems extracted from Johnson's edition of Dickinson's letters by William H. Shurr. Then, accentuating intersections of critical, biographical, and textual studies, I provide two models for editing correspondences, first, recovering the text of previously unpublished sections of letters to Maria Whitney, thirteen documents presented in full in print translations. The second model is a collaborative work-in-progress, The Book of Susan and Emily Dickinson, the writing to Susan Huntington Dickinson, friend, sister-in-law, neighbor, critical reader of Dickinson's work, with whom the writer was in love throughout her adult life. Here I identify and discuss poems that have not been previously associated with Susan; explore comparative readings with poems in the manuscript volumes; and advocate lesbian and feminist editing strategies for producing an edition of Dickinson's writing to Susan that foregrounds the primacy of their bond. |
