As English scholars, we are all well aware of the major figures in the literary canon, (James Joyce, Elizabeth Bishop, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf) and the basic process their works go through in order for them to achieve such status. Though some are more successful than others during their lifetimes, their work is often published, taken notice of, and still maintains the captivation of readers’ and scholars’ attentions today. There is a quality to their work that enables it to endure despite changes in society. Yet one of the major literary figures in the canon seems to have become one of the elite through very different events than those listed above. Emily Dickinson’s poetry was only found in the hands of the public after her death, which left her friends and editors with extensive editing decisions to make. Despite her popularity, Dickinson’s bizarre writing characteristics often force readers to question whether she simply wrote without being aware of any real structural motivations. Suzanne Wilson in American Literature argues otherwise as in her article "Structural Patterns in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson" as she writes, "…we see a pattern of structural experiment and development in these poems which seems to indicate that she had some clear notion, structurally at least, of what she was doing and wanted to do." (Wilson 59). My argument is that Wilson’s statement and those like it are moot—at least in terms of Dickinson’s initial publications and her poetry as printed in anthologies. The question is not whether or not Dickinson was being mindful in her poetic decisions, but rather the worth of poetry that was so altered in order to be consumed by society in the late 19th century. Dickinson's voice was so controlled by those around her, in that her voice was scarcely her own. In analyzing Dickinson’s voice as written by herself, modified by editors, and published through anthologies one can see that (because of her eclectic writing style, and subsequent "need" for heavy editing) Dickinson was easily molded in order to fill a feminine facet in the literary canon.

               I first want to determine what it is about Emily Dickinson’s style that led her friends, namely Mabel Loomis Todd, to edit and change so much of Dickinson’s poetry. Dickinson’s motivations for unconventional punctuation, spelling, rhyme, capitalization and rhythm were apparently rebellious according to R. W. Franklin, an avid Dickinson scholar who recently published a text of her complete poems. Franklin writes, "She was aware of external standards but did not strive to adhere to them, only slowly altering some" (Franklin 10). Franklin argues that Dickinson was completely aware of the many aberrant practices she wrote in her poetry. This is not a far stretch of the imagination; Dickinson was a well-educated woman and read often. She was very likely aware of the common practices in poetry and prose in the time she was writing. Scholars have given meaning and motive to a few of Dickinson's eccentricities. Domnhall Mitchell, of Norwegian University of Science and Technology, in his article "'A Foreign Country’ Emily Dickinson’s Manuscripts and Their Meanings," also discusses Dickinson's use of capital letters stating, "…she often assigned capitals to nouns in order to free them from their literal or conventionally assigned definitions." Mitchell is referring to Dickinson's personalization of the common practice of assigning words such as "he" (when in reference to God) with a capital "h" and applying it to words she found most important in her poetry, be it "Immortality" or "Death," as in poems I will discuss later in the essay. Jay Ladin of The Emily Dickinson Journal, describes the defiant practices as almost revolutionary in his article "'So Anthracite – to live' 1: Emily Dickinson and American Literary History:" "Dickinson's dashes and capitalizations deranged normal notions of punctuation; her conjugations and elisions confounded syntactical and semantic conventions; and her diction routinely dislocated common usage." In many many ways, Dickinson broke open the notion of what is "acceptable" in poetry by taking conventions and altering them to make the poetry and practices her own. She makes us question the capitalized letter, spelling, the semi-colon, and—most of all—the dash.

               Despite Ladin's seemingly lauding quotation on Dickinson, he considered her work to be stilted and almost uninterpretable; "The dashes interfere with the interpretive process because...they do not refer to any accepted system of punctuation, while the capitals interfere with the interpretive process because they invoke but do not conform to normal conventions of writing." In many ways Ladin's opinion represents the possible voice of Dickinson's contemporary critics. If Dickinson's poetry were printed in the late 1800s in the manner she originally wrote them, literary society would very likely react in the same manner that Ladin has in the statement above. This may very well have been Dickinson's motivation for not attempting to publish her work during her lifetime, as well as Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s motivation for altering Dickinson's text as much as they did after her death. It is not a question of the well intentions of Todd or Higginson, but instead the effects of their actions in terms of how Dickinson's words were published, and republished and how, therefore, her voice was altered until roughly a century after her death.

               The sheer amount of Dickinson’s poetry, not to mention their disarray in terms of the amount of hands holding original and un-copied versions of her works made it exceedingly difficult for those who hoped to publish her. Dickinson was meticulous and obsessive about the binding and maintenance of the much of her poetry, no question. Because many of her poems were written in letters, however, by the time Dickinson died her 1,789 poems were in the possession in parts by her sister, sister-in-law, and among her many correspondents (Morris). Unfortunately, the poems did not become more organized or at least remain uniform in terms of their interpretation of Dickinson’s writing. According to Franklin, Dickinson’s poems "exist in multiple versions and survive in about 2,500 textual sources, generally holographs, but also, given the hazards of history, in a number of secondary sources—transcripts by various hands and publication in various places" (Franklin 4). In short, it was, and still is, all very disorganized and hard to sift through. Scholars like Franklin have managed to print collections of her works, with all capitalizations, dashes, and chronology intact, yet there is still the unfortunate "undated" section which makes up for a chunk of the collection.

               Dickinson did live to see some of her poetry in text—roughly ten—that were all submitted by friends, usually to newspapers and printed anonymously after extensive editing. Franklin discusses this moment for Dickinson with great interest, especially as an academic who works to produce her work in an adequate way: "She is known to have complained only once—about a question mark in ‘A narrow fellow in the grass’ (1906) that stopped a line whose thought should have continued into the next. She said nothing adverse about typography or its effects on her poems" (Franklin 6-7). There could be a great many reasons why Dickinson remained mute (with that one exception) about the manner in which her poetry was printed. The fact she said little about it only leaves scholars struggling to produce her works accurately at even more of a loss. These devoted enthusiasts often focus more on the fact that Dickinson did not actively work for publication during her lifetime, yet this has lead to opposing opinions. John Shoptaw in Representations writes in his article "Listening to Dickinson" about the fact Dickinson bound her manuscripts: "This act of conservation implies that Dickinson probably did want her poems to reach the public, beyond the circle of correspondents with whom she shared them. But she left no instructions for publication." While Mitchell writes the opposing argument, as he describes Dickinson’s decision not to publish as "a choice made in order to protect a much more sophisticated and flexible textual medium than conventional type could have accommodated. The irony of standard editions of Dickinson's poetry, according to this argument, is that the material details of such a medium are lost in any conversion from manuscript to print." Dickinson, as well as her poetry, is a bizarre puzzle that seems almost impossible to fully understand. The motives of her actions are a mystery mostly because all of her effects on literary America happened posthumously, and her poetry provides only dense, perplexing responses to the questions we all want to ask.

               So with the immense amount of poetry within their possession, and convinced of Dickinson’s worthy genius, her friends Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson took on the task of producing a book of Dickinson’s work as, during her lifetime, "[She] could not undertake the commercial, impersonal, and fundamentally exposing act of publishing her work" (Franklin 7). Taking what I have written in the above paragraphs as the issues concerning the task of editing, it is not surprising that Higginson and Todd were forced to take great liberties with the collection they produced. Franklin describes the process, writing that Todd and Higginson "not only regularized such elements of her style but also altered texts to effect rhyme, smooth rhythm, clarify sense, and adjust irregular usage" (10). John Shoptaw discusses some of the more specific changes made by Todd and Higginson: "[They] felt free to add titles; to amend unusual words; to regularize capitalization, spelling, and punctuation." Todd and Higginson felt the had to make all of these changes in order to make Dickinson’s work more digestible to late-19th century society. Ladin, a scholar who plainly votes for the "amelioration" or Dickinson’s poetry for the page writes, "Todd and Higginson resolved [Dickinson’s poetic] problems through judicious selection of poems, excision of problematic stanzas, regularization of grammar and punctuation and other emendations designed to narrow the gap between Dickinson's language and nineteenth-century poetic norm." Despite Ladin’s opinions, editors began to slowly but surely put Dickinson’s structural tendencies back into her poetry: Martha Dickinson Bianchi removed the assigned titles in 1924, Millicent Todd Bingham reinstated the irregular rhymes in 1945, in 1955 Thomas H. Johnson restored a few of Dickinson’s misspellings, capitalization, punctuations, and arranged the poems in chronological order. R.W. Franklin actually has produced the most recent collection in hopes to print Dickinson in a representative fashion, as he published facsimiles of some of her work in 1981, and also in 2005 edited a collection that has restored all of Dickinson’s idiosyncrasies as adequately as print can produce—even "substituted a smaller en dash (closer in size to Dickinson's dash marks)" (Shoptaw). The progress has been slow and subtle, especially at first. Todd and Higginson’s interpretations of Dickinson’s poetry were reproduced throughout anthologies in the decades following. In the mid-1900s when scholars began to question the authenticity of such altered work, they became more and more interested in the original piece created by Dickinson’s hand (Gailey). These scholarly considerations eventually led to the question of who Dickinson really was as a woman and a writer, and how she had been altered by both anthologists and editors through publication.

               Despite whatever hopes Todd and Higginson had for their act of putting Dickinson into accessible text, they changed her original voice in the process. General assumptions were made in print when describing Dickinson’s character; they were often based on anthologists’ reading of her poems, and perpetuated throughout literary society. Lisa Jadwin, an English professor at St. John Fisher College, in her article "Critiquing the New Canon" tries to provide reasoning for why Dickinson was so easily added to the canon; "Despite her bold originality, multifarious voices, and bracing organicism, Dickinson has been consistently constructed as an Ideal Woman Poet: nonthreatening, nun-like, and, most important, dead before she entered critical discourse." With all of Jadwin’s listed characteristics in place, Dickinson is perfect for a masculine literary world. She is basically de-sexualized by the generalizations made about her character, and therefore makes her much more acceptable in order to be printed among such men as Whitman or Poe. Amanda Gailey, a doctoral candidate at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, also mentions that it was not solely the fault of the editors that perpetuated the myths of Dickinson’s life in her dissertation "How Anthologists Made Dickinson a Tolerable American Woman Writer":

By selecting poems specifically related to isolation, morbid thoughts, death, lost love, anthologists added to the distortion of Dickinson’s character as perceived by the public.

               Why critics and editors focus on Dickinson, especially her life, of all other poets, is another matter. Nancy Walker of Stephens College considers the act of scholars concentration on Dickinson’s life as something trauma-inflicted in her article "Review: Reading the Poet and the Poetry: Critics and Emily Dickinson," saying, "…few authors besides Dickinson have been the subject of so much mythologizing and misunderstanding on the part of biographers and critics" (Walker 229). Walker then goes on to discuss how scholars and critics claimed Dickinson’s motivation for her poetry to be the spawned from the difficult events in her life—thus diverting attention away from the work itself (230). I take Walker’s notion to mean that these critics and academics distracted the public’s awareness from the words and voice of Dickinson, and had them focus instead on the mysterious life of Dickinson—her popularity coming more from her life than her poetry. As for the appeal of Dickinson, Gailey compares Dickinson to Barrett Browning saying, "Like Dickinson, Barrett Browning is appealing because she is a shut-in. Both await discovery and liberation by men—one before her death and one after."  With Gailey’s statement, it can be argued that, despite any actual worth of Dickinson’s work, her poetry was anthologized because she filled the desirous role: a woman waiting to be "liberated" through publication—an important issue in feminist theory.

               Walker defines feminist literary criticism as a theory with the hopes "to demonstrate how art develops and flourishes because of, not in spite of, the writer’s gender" (Walker 230). Walker’s definition is especially ironic in Dickinson’s case as she did flourish specifically because she is a woman, but only in order to fulfill a passive role. Gailey interprets Dickinson’s placement in the canon in the same fashion: "Dickinson was included in these anthologies not in spite of her gender but because of it," and she goes on specifically to say, "The virtual tabula rasa of her life and poetics allowed early anthologists to construct in her the image of a female poet who satisfied the increasingly standardized, male-dominated [canon of American literature]." Given close to no hard information concerning how Dickinson led her life, editors and anthologists garnered knowledge concerning her life almost completely from her poems and what little Todd and Higginson published about her in the their collections. Dickinson became the brilliant hermit who was completely confined because of familial ties and lost love. Gailey writes, "The persistence of editors in transmitting the confined explorer image partially resulted from two forces at work in early twentieth-century scholarship: first, a prevalent sloppiness in the editing of anthologies and, second, an increasing disdain for historicizing poetry." Although scholars eventually became interested in projecting a more accurate image of Dickinson through text and introductions, the perpetuated portrayal of her was already in many texts, not to mention within her poetry itself.

               After much research in trying to decipher some scheme concerning which of Dickinson’s poems were actually picked for anthologies, I have discovered a few truly distinct patterns. Anthologists mostly garnered their chosen works from those published by Todd and Higginson—specifically those easily altered, understood, and (often) those that displayed morbid tendencies. Firstly, I would like to provide a poem that would very likely not be published in an anthology, and break down the reasoning of why that is likely the case:

To Ladin, and very likely 1890s literary society, this poem would not be acceptable. The structure is completely congested with Dickinson’s en dash and ungrammatical capitalization, which make it extremely difficult to even edit into clear and easy meaning. Though one may be able to glean some idea of what Dickinson is trying to convey, it would only be with extreme difficulty. In 1890 readers had little tolerance for such practices. Todd and Higginson would have both nodded in agreement on skipping this piece and publishing something more moldable in their collections of Dickinson. This second poem represents more of the general poem that one would find in an anthology. The anthologized version (along with its title) is below the original version as provided in Franklin’s edition.

As you can see, Dickinson’s original version has all the evils of the first, but the poem has a clear message that it is trying to convey; more importantly one that most people can identify with—a lost thought. Looking at the two versions side by side, you can see exactly what motions the editor (Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Dickinson’s niece) went through in order to produce the one below, as it appeared in The Single Hound. Bianchi removed the dashes completely, as well as the misspellings and capitalized words, and only replaced the words "Cleaving" and "Sound" with "clearing" and "reach" in order to make Dickinson’s message clearer. Surprisingly, Bianchi left the mixed metaphor of "sequence unraveling" as a "ball upon the floor," but most likely did so as it did not get in the way of the poem’s motive. The third and final poem is overwhelmingly present in the anthologies studied:

The character of the original poem lacks the characteristics that we usually associate with Dickinson—no dashes, no bizarre spellings or punctuations (with the exception of two). The avid Dickinson reader would notice by first glance that the poem was obviously Dickinson. Franklin specifically describes Dickinson’s tendency to "misplace" apostrophes in the word "its" to "it’s" to represent both possession and the "it is" contraction—as seen on "1773" first line (Franklin 10). So other than fixing that deviance, Todd only chose to add a comma in order to make this poem appropriate for early 19th century society. Surprisingly, Todd left the unorthodox capitalization of "Immortality" for readers despite the ungrammatical capitalization of the "I." In terms of the character of the piece, it represents a lot of what anthologists seemed to be looking for when they chose a piece by Dickinson—something morbid or relating to death yet simultaneously quite beautiful. In terms of the time period it was written, "1773/Parting" is one of Dickinson’s most successful pieces, but it also one of her poems that totes fewer of her idiosyncrasies than most.

               Scholars are torn on the issue of the repercussions of molding such a revolutionary poetic mind—many of them unable to decide whether it is better or worse that Dickinson made her way into the canon through such means. Gailey makes a good point when she writes, "…this depiction of [Dickinson] was transmitted by anthologies geared to all sorts of audiences: public schoolchildren, college students, and the general reader." One could argue the editors did that great deed of making Dickinson available to everyone who could read—they weeded out the en dashes and other unorthodox pieces of her poetry and made it more universally enjoyable. Jadwin has a different take on the issue, writing, "Dickinson's reputation has been constructed less on her aesthetic accomplishments than on her apparent conformity to male critics' ideas of ideal femininity," and continues by saying, "Anthologists, editors, biographers and critics have tended to praise what was decorative, diminutive, regional, apolitical in her work, and to condemn her innovations as technical failures." I have to agree with Jadwin. Though Dickinson was able to make her way into the hearts of people who would not have otherwise have appreciated her thoughts and voice, such methods are inappropriate means to become part of the canon. She was praised and republished for her conforming features, not the revolutionary ones. Yet Dickinson is in the texts and, more importantly, has been in the classrooms for decades now because of this perpetuated falsification. Gailey notes that by 1948 Dickinson was one of three women writers found in college English classes, but that she "was tenacious enough to appear in twenty-four courses, ranking her as the seventeenth most commonly taught American writer." By whatever means, she is in the canon and in the hands of young scholars to appreciate and learn in more accurate versions. And, as Walker put it, "while [Helen Hunt] Jackson allowed her poetry to be shaped by an inherited literary sensibility, Dickinson transcended tradition to create unorthodox and ultimately more enduring poetry" (Walker 231).

               The responsibility now rests on the shoulders of Dickinson scholars who are devoted to knowing Dickinson, and struggling to find appropriate means to adequately represent her voice. Mitchell asks one of the more important questions in his article "Revising the script: Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts," as many academics argue that publication of facsimiles of her manuscripts are the only possible way to properly portray her work: "Are we further misrepresenting Dickinson's poems by presenting them in manuscript form as though the manuscripts were constructed with the aim of public consumption and/or aesthetic experimentation?" These are the type of questions scholars must ask in order to rectify the misrepresentation of a poet they have come to admire. Yet despite whatever academic discussions take place concerning Dickinson’s work, Franklin makes the most important point concerning her poetry: "If the orthography, capitalization, punctuation, and usage should seem problematical, they are nonetheless Dickinson’s, not the editor’s nor the publisher’s, not, except indirectly, society’s—agents with whom she conducted no negotiation toward public norms for her poetry" (Franklin 11).

Bibliography