Editing Emily Dickinson

The Production of an Author

Lena Christensen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781135914288
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Chapter One
Authoring Emily Dickinson

We must never forget this paradox: what was written before and had, at first, no after, we meet only after , and this tempts us to supply a before in the sense of a priority, cause or origin

(Jean Bellemin-Noël)

Once literary criticism is viewed as a form of ‘re-production,’ literary debates must shift from positions of ‘intrinsic’ meaning to considerations of their own modes of working

(Moyra Haslett)

“The basic need is to determine the Dickinson canon,” wrote Thomas Johnson in 1950, five years before he was to publish the first variorum edition of Emily Dickinson’s poems in three Harvard University Press volumes (“Prisms of a Poet” 263). This “need” to determine and settle Emily Dickinson’s work has been and continues to be a fundamental problem in Dickinson studies, even as such determination is recast as liberation of texts from the idea of the final ‘work.’ We can thus understand editing as a topos or critical place among others that most Dickinson critics at some point pay a visit to. In the early twentieth century this critical place was informed by a desire to establish and settle Emily Dickinson as an author in American literature. A number of conflicting editions were published, continually revising the canon of poems of Emily Dickinson, offering ever ‘new,’ ‘further,’ and ‘unpublished’ poems. Implicitly revealing the contingency of any editorial project these editions in their confusing disarray triggered the articulation of a need to edit definitively Dickinson’s work. In this chapter I explore the editorial-critical debates of the early part of the twentieth century that resulted in Johnson’s 1955 volumes, thus contextualizing Johnson’s variorum edition in its critical discursive field, while also linking it to current trends in Dickinson studies. Because this edition did in so many respects establish Dickinson’s texts as canonical to study the period leading up to it means to delineate how such an official canonization of the poet came about in terms of both an internal canon of Dickinson’s work (her poems) and external canon of her work’s place in the wider academic construct of an ‘American literary history.’

In the first section of the chapter I turn to what must be characterized as the renewed interest in Emily Dickinson in the 1920s and 1930s, as key New Critics engaged with Dickinson’s work. I furthermore consider the relationship of modernist writers to Dickinson that is interesting from today’s critical engagements with Emily Dickinson as an avant-garde artist. Several critics, in particular Christopher Benfey, Timothy Morris, Martha Nell Smith and Betsy Erkkila, have offered meta-critical considerations of the period’s production of the figure of Emily Dickinson, in particular highlighting the sexism that informs this figure. However, rather than seeing intellectual history as a linear progression (or as defined by clear paradigm shifts) I wish to accentuate similarities or continuities in critical thinking and writing between this period and today.

In the final part of the first section I test these various meta-critical notions that center on concepts like the canon and American literary history. In the second section I first consider the status of Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts in the early twentieth century before I turn to the 1955 publication of The Poems of Emily Dickinson Including Variant Readings Critically Compared with all Known Manuscripts to elucidate Johnson’s influential construction of the artist and of her work. While other editions are now superseding this edition, it is still central to readings of Dickinson’s work as much of the key Dickinson criticism of the late twentieth century must be understood as conditioned by a decisive critique of this work. Rather than continuing such a critique of Johnson’s edition my aim is to historicize its argument and to situate it as a defining and important answer to a scene of anxieties regarding the Dickinson text. However, while this edition has served as the standard edition of the poet’s work until 1998, it almost immediately raised serious questions from reviewers and critics, regarding its editorial practice and the material results of that practice. Hence we can see that the reception of Dickinson has always been heavily conditioned by editorial problems, considerations, and debates.

NEW CRITICISM’S EMILY DICKINSON

To study the New Critical reception of Emily Dickinson is not a new undertaking by any means: it is, of course a historical period in Dickinson studies, through and from which later criticism has had to move. Hence, according to Roland Hagenbüchle New Criticism’s engagement with Dickinson signifies the first serious critical analysis of her work (358–59); Robert McClure Smith writes that New Criticism “established the formal evaluative criteria that would assure Dickinson’s later canonization as a key figure in American Romanticism” (“New Critical” 206); Betsy Erkkila describes Dickinson as a major figure in New Criticism’s methodology of close reading that would ultimately develop into a strict delineation of “the individual poem as self-enclosed aesthetic object” (“Emily Dickinson Wars” 16); and Marjorie Perloff notes how Dickinson’s work was included in Understanding Poetry, the New Critical pedagogical toolbox that would promote close reading as method in the undergraduate classroom for most of the twentieth century (n.pag.). This means that to engage with New Criticism is to engage with a critical period of Dickinson reception that consolidated her work as serious and worthy of inclusion in an academic canon of American literature. Thus, in his 1968 survey of Dickinson scholarship and commentary, Klaus Lubbers describes the period beginning in 1930, roughly equivalent to the earliest New Critical engagement with Dickinson, as a “period of consolidation and steadily increasing scholarly concern with Emily Dickinson” (198). But the establishing of Emily Dickinson as a key writer for New Critical methods was not a simple affair by any means. Feminist criticism, in particular, has challenged the unselfconsciously heterosexist vocabulary employed by these male New Critics in their production of Emily Dickinson and her work. Such criticism also reveals how difficult it was for critics to move beyond the biographical bias that New Criticism in theory rejected as part of an old fashioned study of literature as literary history in a limited sense of the life of authors. Put simply, gender—a social category—governs New Critical analyzes of Dickinson to the point that we can say that New Criticism canonized Emily Dickinson in spite of her gender.¹

The life of the woman writer creeps into the narratives of these critics. One of the first critiques of such patriarchal descriptions of the poet was offered by Adrienne Rich in her important essay “Vesuvius at home: The Power of Emily Dickinson,” where she cites John Crowe Ransom’s verdict of the poet as “a little house-keeping person” who “while she had a proper notion of the final destiny of her poem [ . . . ] was not one of those poets who had advanced to that later stage of operations where manuscripts are prepared for the printer, and the poet’s diction has to make concessions to the publisher’s stylebook” (quoted in Rich 182). In this pungent quotation Rich captures Ransom’s utter discomfort with both the female and the domestic or private aspects of Dickinson’s life and with her work. Ransom’s verdict of course comes across as both a diminutive portrayal of ‘Emily Dickinson’ and, significantly for this study’s consideration of specifically editorial concerns as a disciplining of poetic language’s bibliographic codes, as connecting ‘real’ poetry (or, at the very least the ‘advanced’ poet) with typography, and, in particular, with the typography of that ‘publisher’s stylebook.’ Since Rich’s essay was published in 1976, feminist criticism has thoroughly revisioned the figure of Emily Dickinson.

Does the New Critical period, then, have anything to offer the present? As the very ground on which New Criticism ‘canonized’ Emily Dickinson has since been radically questioned as partial, sexist and otherwise untheorized, the New Critical version of Emily Dickinson has come to serve two roles in recent criticism: it functions as both the first ‘positive’ criticism of her work from an organized and increasingly academic point of view that led to a further solidification of her presence in critical study and the negative ground from which recent critics can make their cases in antagonism, polemic and opposition. While praising and establishing Emily Dickinson, critics like Allen Tate and Richard Blackmur also produced her as the token female, as the anomalous ‘poetess’ who was only awkwardly fitted into the narrative of literary history. This begs the question of whether New Critical narratives may serve as anything else but a useful ‘negative’ background, a part of literary history from which to depart without much ado. Or can we rather see literary history, here represented by the history of reception of one author, as a continuous presence? Is criticism a linear progression of ever more informed narratives or can we see it as an on-going debate? I will here trace some connections between New Criticism and the present. In their attempts to ‘locate’ Emily Dickinson, critics in the early twentieth century dealt in a symbolic geography, variously inflected as ‘Europe’ and ‘America,’ the rural and the urban, the genteel and the capitalist, the conservative and the modern, and the traditional and the experimental, and of the old and the new. These binaries have continued to shape the study of Emily Dickinson until the present time. Amy Lowell’s uprooting of the poet from her rural Amherst in order to posit her as an Imagist on the experimental vanguard is reflected in contemporary criticism that figures Dickinson as a protomodernist experimenter with form.² Similarly Tate’s nostalgic reading of the poet as essentially and importantly part of that rural Amherst for his reading of the poet as a conservative cultivator of lost values can be understood as a (however problematic) precursor of contemporary criticism that attempts to figure the poet in her time.

Timothy Morris argues by employing the metaphor of a symbolic mapping of the body (of the poet, of the text) that critics associated with the New Criticism made use of and employed ‘Emily Dickinson’ as the final virginal site in American literary history (Becoming Canonical 73). But it is not only Emily Dickinson who has been mapped: her work, too, is continually mapped as a territory. Morris’ analysis of the New Critical love affair with Dickinson as basically an enactment of the critical desire for the “ultimate virginal” site of interpretation, points, in poignant ways, to Martha Nell Smith’s exploration of the ‘New World’ that she sees in the (we could say ‘Virginal’) material body of the manuscript page Exploiting the poet’s own employments of “geographical and cartographical metaphors of exploration,” Smith develops her critique of ‘Old World’ means of editing and reading the poet (Rowing 51). Employing the symbolism of such metaphors in the particular context of an American imagination, Smith develops her thesis that Dickinson’s manuscripts offer a new kind of poetics, visual, anti-bookish, and reader-oriented.³ Metaphorically, such a poetics offers a “New World” of poetic form. Rather than offering the reader an ‘Old World’ poetics of finished and organic poems (such as her print editors have offered the reader), Smith suggests that, if “we are prepared to step out of the critical circumference” of such Old World editing and criticism, we will discover “new, Edenic modes of appreciation and interpretation of the holographs” (Rowing 51). Smith’s positing of a binary opposition between print and handwriting according to such a symbolic geography inevitably reminds us of the continual struggle to fit Emily Dickinson’s work into a narrative of ‘old’ and ‘new.’ Smith’s formulation of the critical task as specifically pursuing ‘new ways’ of reading, according to a “New World” of form, pays allegiance to Lowell’s modernist reading of Emily Dickinson as part of the “vanguard” of the new: it implicitly challenges Tate’s reading of the poet as part of a ‘tradition’ of the genteel as opposed to the modern and experimental.

If we consider the editions of Emily Dickinson’s work that appeared after the slump in editorial concern with the poet in the first one and a half decades of the twentieth century, we see that these tensions between ‘old’ and ‘new’ are effected by (however implicit) editorial choices. Anna Mary Wells writes about how the radical absence of Emily Dickinson in American literature in the first fifteen years of the twentieth century triggered a feeling of ‘discovery’ and generational shift from Victorian to Modern among those readers who encountered Dickinson in the 1920s. Wells writes in 1929 that “it was the 15 years of obscurity between 1900 and 1915 that led to the popular misconception that no one before our own generation had appreciated Emily Dickinson” (258). But in 1914 The Single Hound: Poems of a Lifetime was published, an edition of Dickinson’s work that, as Linda Leavell points out, numbered poems instead of entitling them and did not interfere with punctuation, rhyme and meter as had Higginson and Todd (3). The visual impression of the poems of The Single Hound, the edition that would ‘revive’ interest in Emily Dickinson, is as Leavell writes “strikingly modern” to the reader (3). Amy Lowell considers this editorial shift from “an editorial eye to conciliating criticism” in her praise of The Single Hound as representing Emily Dickinson’s ‘genius’ better than the three previous volumes of her work (345). Lowell’s consideration of Dickinson champions the older poet for her ‘Imagistic’ form. But her appraisal of Dickinson is not without implicit criticisms: Dickinson achieved her modern style without “knowing that a battle was on and that she had been selected for a place in the vanguard” (339). Hence Dickinson’s modern poetic persona somehow creeps into her texts “in spite of [herself ]” (348). In her analysis, Lowell brands Dickinson a fighting revolutionary of Imagism but also declares that Dickinson “was of too unanalytical a nature” to have discovered theoretically the difference between conventional verse based on units of accents and modern verse based on a unit of time: again, Dickinson’s modern traits were not consciously practiced poetic art but serendipitous events (348). Nevertheless, Lowell’s essay speaks mostly praise, and it contributes to a historicizing narrative of modernism itself as she writes that what Dickinson “did seemed insignificant and individual, but thirty years after her death the flag under which she fought had become a great banner, the symbol of a militant revolt” (339). Lowell’s essay is a precursor to recent reconsiderations of Emily Dickinson in the context of modernism, studies that expand the notion of modernism by tracing its historical links to poets past. But Lowell’s New Critical contemporaries preferred to read Emily Dickinson in her past as essentially disconnected from the modern vantage point of their own position. From an antagonistic position Blackmur, in his rigorously negative estimate of Dickinson, echoes Lowell’s concern with the poet’s ‘unanalytical’ personality when he laments that, “she never undertook the great profession of controlling the means of objective expression” (223). Rather than seeing the poet’s lifetime as that “perfect literary scene,” as Tate was to formulate it in his praise of the poet, Blackmur criticizes not only the poet but “the habit of her society as she knew it” through which she could never have learned that “that poetry is a rational and objective art and most so when the theme is self-expression” (223).

Tate’s estimate of the poet is based in a nostalgic reading of a mythical lost New England that brought solace against modern life. In Dickinson’s work Tate saw a potential to articulate such a past as a remedy to the present; and the present concern, implicit in the essay, is the development of an American literature, not provincial but on a par with the literature of the ‘old’ world. For Tate this does not mean that literature of the ‘new’ world (or any poetry) could be ‘revolutionary’ (as Lowell would have it) but rather that it would surface as the equal of an inherited tradition (of the old world). Hence he constructs the notion of ‘the perfect literary situation’ and claims Dickinson and John Donne to have been two poets to have occupied and exploited such a situation (164). Dickinson, the American author, is on a par with Donne, the poet of tradition. For Tate, Dickinson’s poem “Because I could not stop for death–” becomes a central argument for Dickinson’s part in a tradition; an American inflection of such a tradition. In this respect Tate’s analysis of “Because I could not stop for death–” is paradigmatic. I consider here this poem and the early twentieth century’s reception of it at length, as an example of the politics of both editing and criticism.

Tate’s 1932 essay “New England Culture and Emily Dickinson” served to inaugurate New Critical attention to the poet. Tate has been variously been granted a major role in the reception and production of Emily Dickinson. Christopher Benfey calls the essay a “real trumpet blast” through which Dickinson’s texts were included into the map or canon of American literature (35). But the essay was contested by Yvor Winters who argued that Tate’s reading of Dickinson’s work as great was “fraudulent” and “unconvincing” and generally “unsound” (192–93).

Tate’s essay employs the symbolic geography of the ‘old’ and ‘new’ world in at least two senses. His aim was two-fold: to situate Dickinson as a specifically American author in opposition to the ‘old world’ literary history and to situate her as the upholder of a tradition, a rural and historical America that was disappearing in the midst of modernity. I wish here to explore these tensions through Tate’s treatment of “Because I could not stop for death–.” The poem emerges through Tate’s essay as both a supreme Dickinson poem and a poem of powerful cultural nostalgia, serving well Tate’s desire for a national literary-cultural history. Indeed, this poem builds on what was already in Emily Dickinson’s lifetime starting to fade into a cliché: the genteel woman, the genteel driver, and the carriage, as stock figures, hark back to an era of nostalgic middle-class gentility. For Tate this was part of the poet’s genius, her negotiation in the midst of the decline of her very culture, of that culture.

But the question, from the current scene of reading this poem, with all its editorial versions laid bare, is ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE: AUTHORING EMILY DICKINSON
• CHAPTER TWO: MATERIAL DICKINSON: THE FUNCTION OF THE MANUSCRIPT IN DICKINSON STUDIES
• CHAPTER THREE: DIGITAL DICKINSON: FROM EDITIONS TO ARCHIVES
• CONCLUSION
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY