In 1955, Thomas H. Johnson published both Emily Dickinson : an interpretive biography and the complete poems of Emily Dickinson. [i] The former has the appearance of a very long introduction to the latter, and my copy does not indicate whether the two were published as a set; but by 1955 a complete poems was sorely needed. Emily Dickinson had been loved to death, but what many people loved was the idea of Emily Dickinson, the heritage of Emily Dickinson, the genius of Emily Dickinson. Editors before Johnson had freely — sometimes very freely — edited Dickinson’s work to bring it into conformity with their conception of poetry.[ii] Someone needed to read her work as verse.
Ironically enough, Johnson’s work has been superseded by that of R.W. Franklin, in his The poems of Emily Dickinson [iii] in what Franklin (or his publishers) characterize as the “Variorum ed.”[iv] If all of this posthumous publication and republication seems a little ghoulish, I refer you to June’s post. Like Whitman, Dickinson was a master of manuscripts, but unlike him, she preferred to leave no trace of the genesis. As Thomas H. Johnson put it, “sometime during 1858 Emily Dickinson began assembling her poems into packets. Always written in ink, they are gatherings of four, five, or six sheets of letter stationery usually folded once but occasionally single.”[v] These were sewn together like some present-day chapbooks, and when she discovered them after Emily’s death, her sister Lavinia described them as “volumes”. Johnson says that “All of the packet poems are either fair copies or semifinal drafts, and they constitute two-thirds of the whole.”[vi] Franklin, the more recent editor, says that whole consists of 1,789 poems “at present count, each of them represented in this reading edition.”[vii] 1789 was a good year for this country, when the Constitution and Bill of Rights came into effect, but I doubt that Dickinson planned that coincidence. Yet to many readers, she is the constitution of American verse.
To ratify that statement, let me turn to Thomas H. Johnson again, to his interpretive biography. In describing Dickinson’s prosody, he says:
Although writers of free verse acknowledge a debt to Emily Dickinson, she wrote in fact almost nothing which today would be called vers libre, that is, cadenced verse, as distinguished from that which is metrical or rhymed…. Basically all her poems employ meters derived from English hymnology. They are usually iambic or trochaic, but occasionally dactylic. They were the metric forms familiar to her from childhood as the measures in which Watts’s hymns were composed.[viii]
Johnson identifies the “principal iambic meters” as: Common Meter, Long Meter and Short Meter — each of which is counted in syllables per line, and in 4-line stanzas, thus: CM — 8, 6, 8, 6; LM — 8, 8, 8, 8; and SM — 6, 6, 8, 6. Stanza lengths could also be 6 or 8 lines, as defined in Watts’s two books, Christian psalmody and The psalms, hymns and spiritual songs, with the latter discussing “the relative advantage of one meter over another for particular occasions.” So Common Particular Meter would form a stanza of 8, 8, 6, 8, 8, 6; Short Particular Meter, a stanza of 6, 6, 8, 6, 6, 8. “Other popular arrangements were Sevens and Sixes (7, 6, 7, 6), and Sixes.”[ix] Johnson notes that, as both of Watts’s books were in the Dickinson home, she “did not have to step outside her father’s library to receive a beginner’s lesson in metrics.”[x] There are also trochaic and dactylic meters discussed in the books, so that Emily would have many models.
I want to demonstrate that Johnson is wrong in one way. Dickinson was not counting feet. To do that, have a look at one of her early poems, one not in Johnson’s Final harvest. Franklin introduces this poem as one from outside the sewn fascicles “and not otherwise in Dickinson’s possession, including lines of reassurance in 1860 for Louise and Frances Norcross, eighteen and twelve years old, on the death of their mother” (and her cousins; in the transcription below, I indicate my understanding of the stresses with an o for an unstressed syllable and an x for a stressed syllable):
“Mama” never forgets her birds – ox xo ox ox
Though in another tree. ox ox ox
She looks down just as often ox ox ox o
And just as tenderly, ox ox ox
As when her little mortal nest ox ox ox ox
With cunning care she wove – ox ox ox
If either of her “sparrows fall”, ox ox ox ox
She “notices” above.[xi] ox ox ox
Notice that the three-stress lines are all regular iambs, but the first two four-stress lines are not; the first line has a trochee as the second foot, and the third line is missing a stress. But, and I cannot stress this enough, this kind of analysis of metrical patterns is futile in dealing with Dickinson. She is writing 4-stress and 3-stress alternating lines, but not iambic, or trochaic, or spondaic, or dactylic. Her lineation is much closer to the Welsh forms I spent so many posts on way back in the beginning. They counted stressed syllables only, or total syllables only, or patterns that included an end-rhyme followed by two unstressed syllables. They preceded the Greek and Latin forms that came into English through French and Italian, and while you can count her syllables, you cannot measure her feet. That is why some people count her a pioneer in vers libre. But there’s more to her than that.
Take this poem, for example (and those of you who know this poem only from Johnson’s work will find some surprises in this text, which comes from Franklin’s reader’s edition):
A narrow Fellow in the Grass
Occasionally rides –
You may have met him? Did you not
His notice instant is –
The grass divides as with a Comb –
A spotted Shaft is seen,
And then it closes at your Feet
And opens further on –
He likes a Boggy Acre –
A Floor too cool for Corn –
But when a Boy and Barefoot
I more than once at Noon
Have passed I thought a Whip Lash
Unbraiding in the Sun
When stooping to secure it
It wrinkled And was gone –
Several of Nature’s People
I know and they know me
I feel for them a transport
Of Cordiality
But never met this Fellow,
Attended or alone
Without a tighter Breathing
And Zero at the Bone[xii]
The question-mark in the third line is missing in Johnson; the word “instant” here is “sudden” there; there are numerous differences in punctuation. How, you might ask, could two editors dedicated to preserving Dickinson’s poems for posterity, and presenting them to the reader, so contradict each other? Well, the problem is really one of manuscripts. Remember that Dickinson’s poems were never ushered into print by her. They were written, and published by that writing to a small group of friends. But she established no text, especially by the time she came to write “A narrow Fellow in the Grass.”
The editor’s task is not easy. I have lifted an image from Wikipedia to demonstrate what I mean. This is a manuscript version of the first stanza of “Wild nights – Wild nights – !”: how would you transcribe it?
Yeah, I thought so. Check out the other example in Wikipeida. The following text is not a transcription of the above, but an explanation of why Dickinson was so different from her contemporary, Whitman, in regards to publication:
Publication – is the Auction
Of the Mind of Man –
Poverty – be justifying
For so foul a thing
Possibly – but We – would rather
From Our Garret go
White – unto the White Creator –
Than invest – Our Snow –
Thought belong to Him who gave it –
Then – to Him Who bear
It’s Corporeal illustration – sell
The Royal Air –
In the Parcel – Be the Merchant
Of the Heavenly Grace –
But reduce no Human Spirit
To Disgrace of Price –
But hold on, I hear you say: Isn’t that just the bitter poet justifying her failure to attract an audience, to find fit audience, though few?
Your turn.
[i] Emily Dickinson : an interpretive biography / by Thomas H. Johnson. — Cambridge, Massachusetts : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1955; and The poems of Emily Dickinson : including variant readings critically compared with all known manuscripts / edited by Thomas H. Johnson. — Cambridge, Massachusetts : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1955.
[ii] You can see examples of this in the Wikipedia entry at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Dickinson.
[iii] The poems of Emily Dickinson / edited by R.W. Franklin. — Variorum ed. — Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998.
[iv] My edition is The poems of Emily Dickinson / edited by R.W. Franklin. — Reading ed. — Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999, which supersedes Final harvest : Emily Dickinson’s poems / selection and introduction by Thomas H. Johnson. — Little, Brown, c1961 (which is a water-damaged paperback anyway). All quotations, unless otherwise specified, are from the former, and newer, text.
[v] Emily Dickinson : an interpretive biography, p. 69.
[vi] Ibid.
[vii] The poems of Emily Dickinson / edited by R.W. Franklin. — Reading ed., p. 4.
[viii] Emily Dickinson : an interpretive biography, p. 84.
[ix] Ibid., p. 85.
[x] Ibid.
[xi] The poems of Emily Dickinson / edited by R.W. Franklin. — Reading ed., p. 4.
[xii] Ibid., pp. 443-444.
There are a lot of poets for whom the traditional measurement of feet feels, to me, more like a procrustean bed than a natural form. You can argue (and English teachers do) that part of the energy of the poem comes from a tension between the natural flow of words and the poetic form. But in many cases, measuring the number of stressed syllables seems to me more accurately to describe what is actually going on.