Emily Dickinson Collection

A few weeks ago, when we were discussing Shakespeare's sonnets and the way editors chose to represent or encode his work by altering or omitting words, it made me think of Emily Dickinson, specifically how early editors of her work made the decision to add 'titles' to her work (perhaps for readership, book formatting, or both) as a large body of Emily's original manuscripts did not contain them.

One of the challenges of representing poetry in editing either for publication or TEI, is the decision to make changes to a text. Four years after Emily's death, Loomis Todd, along with Thomas Wentworth Higginson co-edited the Poems of Emily Dickinson for publication in 1890. "The two editors made changes to the poems, regularizing punctation, adding occasional titles, and sometimes altering words to improve rhyme or sense..."(according to Emily Dickinson Museum: The Posthumous Discovery of Dickinson's Poems).  

When I first discovered Emily's poetry as an undergraduate, they contained their 'titles.' At first, I didn't think anything of it, only that I assumed it was natural to 'name' or 'title' your work. When I learned that the 'titles' were added in.

This made me wonder a great deal about Emily's intent and the stylistic expressions for her own poetry and how she wanted them to be represented. Changing a line, or adding a 'title' ultimately influences the reader's ideas about a poem's content, images, or the poet's intended meaning.

 Recently, I came across The Amherst College (where Emily was a student) digitization project of the  Emily Dickinson Collection. It has some wonderful examples of her letters, poems, and even recipes (for doughnuts!) written on envelopes, and fragments of paper.

One of the things I like about the digital Emily Dickinson Collection is that, in the case of her poetry manuscripts, the 'title' of the manuscript is the first line of the poem.

There are also some experimental aspects of the poems as well in format. One poem written on an envelope, "how hope builds a house…" interestingly uses the shape of the envelope to represent the frame a house, with the lines 'the way' at the tip of the envelope, or roof:

The way hope builds his house. Emily Dickinson Collection.

This is an example of some of the interesting, playful ways Emily experiments with the appearance of her poem, both in the physical form and layout of the lines in a way that I have never seen represented in any modern collections of her writing.