New Poems of Emily Dickinson

William H. Shurr, William H. Shurr, Anna Dunlap, Emily Grey Shurr

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781469621531
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

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.

Chapter One: Introduction: The Metrics of the Letters

A Letter is a joy of Earth—
It is denied the Gods—
Letter 960

As readers of Emily Dickinson probably know, there are presently 1,775 poems in her canon. No additions have been made since the 1955 publication of Thomas H. Johnson’s three-volume variorum edition of the poems. This fact is surprising, because the expectation when Johnson’s work appeared was that the edition would generate a new and wider interest in Dickinson and that such publicity would bring new materials to light. But though more than thirty-five years have now passed, only an early letter and a new copy of a well-known poem have thus far been discovered.

When Richard B. Sewall finished his biography of 1974, he listed at the end a census of all known Dickinson correspondence that had not yet been found. Not even this second stimulus has produced new materials, nor have the continuing research efforts of Dickinson scholars who produce dozens of new books and essays each year. Yet we continue to hope that there are stores of Dickinson material still to be discovered, works to feed the appetite of those who would like to have more of her poems.

In the meantime—until some barn or attic yields its treasures—a source of new Dickinson poems does exist that has not yet been mined, though it has lain close at hand for many decades. I refer to Dickinson’s letters and the prose-formatted poems she included in them. A careful excavation of these letters reveals many new poems and fragments of poems, poems which should be added to the canon and studied in their rightful place there.

As her readers know, Dickinson’s letters are highly charged. Passages are nervous, intelligent, rhythmic, allusive, musical—as are the poems. She herself wrote out some passages as poetry; others echo with her typical and favored poetic devices. The present work is a study and presentation of these poetic materials in the three volumes of her letters.

The study has yielded nearly five hundred new poems which can be categorized into five types: first, Dickinson’s epigrams, to be prized as a new genre never before identified; second, what I shall call “prose-formatted poems,” passages from her letters which, when the format is altered, look very much like the Dickinson poems we are already familiar with; third, a group of miscellaneous poetic forms, including riddles; fourth, what seem to be rough drafts or workshop materials that appear in her letters as fragmentary poems; and fifth, a collection of juvenilia from her early letters which gives some unexpected glimpses into the sources of her style. These categories determine the five major chapters of this book. Each category will be discussed at greater length in the appropriate chapter.

The poems in this collection were mostly written out as prose in Dickinson’s letters, except for the very few clearly indicated citations of previously established poems included by Johnson in the Complete Poems and introduced here for comparison.

In preparing his edition of Dickinson’s poems, Johnson carefully studied the manuscript drafts of her letters, searching for those poems that “look like” poems on the written page, with each line indented from the left. He included most of them in The Poems of Emily Dickinson (3 vols., 1955) and The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (1960). But this methodology left behind many Dickinson poems disguised in the letters as prose. Numerous passages in the letters fall into Dickinson’s easily recognized “fourteeners,” a line of iambic tetrameter followed by a line of iambic trimeter. This is the ballad meter or hymn meter (also called “common measure” in the hymnbooks) which was Dickinson’s line of choice. When she thought “writing,” she frequently thought “fourteeners.” During many years of listening to Emily Dickinson’s poetry, I have come to think of this formation as a part of her poetic signature. Other elements of her signature—the use of a dash for a pause, the use of initial capitals to emphasize words, and her idiosyncratic use of “it’s” as a possessive (her lifelong campaign to legitimize this usage never prevailed)—have also aided in the search for the proper poems to excavate. All of these devices have frequently signaled a poem hidden in the prose text.

Some readers may object that these methods for editing Dickinson have no precedent, that changing her prose lines to poetry is too radical an editorial tactic. This is not true. I have not done anything that Thomas H.Johnson or, more important, that Dickinson herself did not do.

Johnson, for example, isolated an obviously prose-formatted poem and published it as one of Dickinson’s earliest works of poetry. The poem appears in its original prose format in letter 58. Johnson published it thus as number 2 of the Complete Poems:

There is another sky,
Ever serene and fair,
And there is another sunshine,
Though it be darkness there;
Never mind faded forests, Austin,
Never mind silent fields—
Here is a little forest,
Whose leaf is ever green;
Here is a brighter garden,
Where not a frost has been;
In its unfading flowers
I hear the bright bee hum;
Prithee, my brother,
Into my garden come!

No one has ever questioned the status of these lines as a poem, though they were formatted by Dickinson as prose. In printing the passage as a poem, Johnson took several liberties with Dickinson’s original letter: first, he reformatted the lines from prose to poetry; second, he broke into the middle of Dickinson’s grammatical sentence to begin his poem; and finally, he provided initial capitals for each of the lines. He reformatted several more poems from prose to poetry in the same way. Johnson himself thus furnishes a precedent for reformatting Dickinson’s letter poems, and in a manner less conservative than the one I have adopted. I have not added or omitted any words, nor have I made any changes other than the addition of an occasional period at the end or initial capital at the beginning of a poem. With the exception of spacing, the poems are presented just as Dickinson wrote them. Where she wrote them as prose, I have printed them in her usual poetic lines.

More important than Johnson’s precedent is the poet’s own editorial practice in her letters. It is of the greatest interest to note that she frequently wrote the same words indifferently as poetry or as prose. In a letter of 2 January 1885, for example, Dickinson set off the poem “Take all away from me” by writing it in verse units and placing it between two prose statements. Apparently she wanted to make it clear to her reader that the lines were poetry. And in a letter to her friend Helen Hunt Jackson (976), which Johnson dates a few months later that year, she included the same poem formatted in the same way. But in letter 1014, she takes the first two lines of the poem and blends them into her second paragraph as prose—with no indentations or other marks to signify that the lines had ever existed as poetry or that they were meant to be read as poetry. In Dickinson’s own practice, then, the border between the two genres was easily permeable, and lines were portable from letter to letter.

This example suggests not only that Dickinson herself could be indifferent as to whether she wrote out her poems in their traditional format or as prose, but also that her poems had a kind of separate existence apart from the particular letters in which they might be imbedded, since she could move them around among quite different contexts. The evidence of the letters suggests further that Dickinson kept stores of finished poetry which she had no intention of publishing in the usual printed media but which she could mine when needed for a letter. Some of these she formatted as poems in her letters; the majority of these have already been identified and published by Johnson. Others she wrote out in a prose format. Occasionally she included different versions of the same poem in different letters and in different formats. Dickinson herself, in other words, cited her words “out of context” and was indifferent to their formatting.

One of her early letters to Susan Gilbert (173), who would soon become her sister-in-law, provides still another example of Dickinson’s own editing practice. She wrote out the whole of the five-stanza poem “I have a Bird in spring,” and Johnson published it as number 5 in the Complete Poems. But around the same time she wrote out the last stanza as prose in a letter to her good friend Mrs. Holland (175).

Letter 200, written when Dickinson was nearing 30, seems to hint that she herself was thinking of some connections between poems and her prose letters. The following prose lines can easily be formatted as poetry, as her typical stanza of two fourteeners:

1. She [Lavinia Dickinson] talked of you before she went—
often said she missed you,
would add a couplet of her own,
were she but at home.

Perhaps the quatrain deserves only a minor place in Dickinson’s “canon”; but it is important to note that when Dickinson wrote she frequently fell into fourteeners, and that when she described prose, it was sometimes in poetic terms (in this case, with the word “couplet”). The prose lines furnish still another instance of the evanescence of the borderline between the two genres in Dickinson’s practice.

The letters contain many other examples of her writing the same words sometimes as poetry and sometimes as prose. “Take all away from me,” published in Johnson’s Complete Poems as number 1640, was written in letters 960 and 976 as poetry, then in 1014 as prose. And in a distinctly unfriendly letter to Susan (173) she wrote out a long poem of five stanzas, which Johnson printed as such. Then in an affectionate letter to her traveling friends, the Hollands, she wrote a prose version that merges elements of stanzas 3 and 5. If reformatted as poetry, this passage seems different enough from the previous version to stand by itself as a new poem:

2. Then will I not repine,
knowing that bird of mine,
though flown—
learneth beyond the sea,
melody new for me,
and will return. (175)

Dickinson’s practice was similar in all the different eras of her life. In the spring of 1877 she enclosed a poem in a letter to Mrs. Thomas Wentworth Higginson (498); she then sent the same poem to the family of her pastor, who was departing for a new church (499). It was printed in Complete Poems as number 1391. Once again, Dickinson’s practice makes it apparent that a letter-poem is freestanding, not totally dependent on a single context.

Similarly, the epigram I have chosen to head the present chapter was written out as a poem by Dickinson, and Johnson printed it in Complete Poems as number 1639:

A Letter is a joy of Earth—
It is denied the Gods— (960)

But a few days later, in letter 963, she wrote virtually the same words as prose: “but a Letter is a joy of Earth—it is denied the Gods.” Obviously, Dickinson manipulated her poems from letter to letter. In this case, she added one word, capitalized others, and changed a dash to a period.

In still another example, the quatrain “Pass to thy Rendezvous of Light,” which Johnson published as poem number 1564, was written as a poem into two separate letters, first to Susan Dickinson in 1883 (868) and again in a letter to Higginson two years later (972). Clearly Dickinson herself lifted her poems from one context to another quite freely. These examples should warn the critic against arbitrarily freezing her words too rigidly into the context of a particular letter.

Especially telling is the following poem, formatted as prose and sent in 1882 to James D. Clark, a friend of the Reverend Charles Wadsworth (“my dearest earthly friend,” she called him in letter 807):

3. A Letter always seemed to me
like Immortality,
for is it not the Mind alone,
without corporeal friend? (788)

Thirteen years earlier, in 1869, the same words (except that “seemed” was “feels” and the question was cast as a statement) had been sent to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in letter 330. Here is an indubitable instance of a prose-formatted poem that had a long life apart from the fixed context of a particular letter.

Dickinson’s practice thus suggests that some of the poems we have excavated were preexisting and freestanding works and that they can justifiably be printed separately. Yet another example leads to the same conclusions. Two letters dated by Johnson “about 1881” contain almost identical versions of the same poem, written out as prose in each instance:

4. Amazing human heart,
a syllable can make
to quake like jostled tree,
what infinite for thee? (710)

5. Amazing Human Heart—
a syllable can make
to quake like jostled Tree—
what Infinite—for thee! (715)

The words are identical, but I would argue for two entirely different poems here. The change in terminal punctuation changes the statement from a weak question to a strong affirmation, creating two separate poems from the same words. Dickinson also experiments here with changes in pace (through dashes) and emphasis (through capitalization). These prose-formatted passages, in other words, show a poem still in swift development, as if it had some status of its own apart from the two letters in which it appears.

The same phenomenon can be observed in another case. In a letter to her mentor Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Dickinson expresses the hope that he will visit her in Amherst and then asks in a fourteener which she formatted as prose:

6. Is this the Hope that opens and shuts,
like the eye of the Wax Doll? (553)

In the same month, according to Johnson’s dating, she was reworking this fourteener into a different poem, this time to her sister-in-law Susan:

7. This is the World that opens and shuts,
like the Eye of the Wax Doll— (554)

The change of a key word changes the subject of the second poem, as does the change in terminal punctuation. Once again, Dickinson’s poems have a fluid life beyond their static “contexts”.

Another set of poems leads to the same conclusion. The following lines were written as prose to two different correspondents at around the same time. Here Dickinson is obviously experimenting to see which has the better rhythmic structure. One is a fourteener that seems to read slowly and meditatively; the other, a set of trimeters that seems more urgent:

8. Home itself is far from home
since my father died. (433)

9. Home is so far from Home,
since my Father died. (441)

In some of his notes Johnson opens a window into Dickinson’s methods as a letter writer. It appears from his notes to letters 938, 974, and 976—to cite only a few examples—that Dickinson usually wrote at least one preliminary draft of her letters before sending the finished version. Parts of three separate drafts for a letter to Helen Hunt Jackson are extant (976). In her biography of Dickinson, Cynthia Griffin Wolff notes several other instances where phrases are repeated with variations from letter to letter and concludes that Dickinson “often . . . made preliminary drafts of her correspondence” (128), that “she was making first drafts of much of her correspondence.... Far from working haphazardly, Dickinson had begun to keep some sort of file or record of her work” (575). All of these examples suggest that the final versions of her letters might have been consciously composed from materials at hand, including her stores of poems.

One further set of examples, cited by Cristanne Miller, should be brought forward. Miller notices that Dickinson sent the same poem, printed in Johnson’s Complete Poems as 792, both to Samuel Bowles and to Susan Dickinson. This intensely anguis...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• New Poems of Emily Dickinson
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter One: Introduction: The Metrics of the Letters
• Chapter Two: The Epigrams
• Chapter Three: New Poems
• Chapter Four: Tetrameters, Trimeters, Riddles, and Such
• Chapter Five: Workshop Materials
• Chapter Six: Juvenilia, Sources, and the Growth of the Poet
• Chapter Seven: Bibliographical Essay
• Bibliography
• Index of Subjects
• Index of First Lines