In 1993, long after Thomas H. Johnson’s edition of the complete poems of Emily Dickinson,[i] the University of North Carolina Press brought out New poems of Emily Dickinson.[ii] I bought it, of course, because, after all, if these were new poems by Emily Dickinson, then I had never read them before, especially not in Final harvest.[iii] So when I got around to reading the verso of the title page, which is usually where the Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data are usually found, you can imagine my consternation[iv] at finding instead the following notice:
Selected poems are reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
I suppose that none of those fellows are narrow fellows in the grass, but still this notice surprised me — such a tangle of permissions for what should be, after all, new poems. Where then had these new poems come from, if select poems amongst them were reprinted? But to my astonishment, that note was followed by this even more cryptic notice:
Excerpts from selected letters are reprinted by permission of the publishers from The letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, copyright © 1958, 1986 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
There they are again, the President and Fellows of Harvard College, though how they got hold of these copyrights is not clear. Emily Dickinson should have held the copyrights, or the estate of Emily Dickinson should have, until they expired seventy years after her death, in 1956. It was such an expiration of copyright that permitted the explosion of reprints of Mark Twain’s work seventy years after his death (which occurred in 1910 — although the syndics of the University of California had already launched their series The Works of Mark Twain, their project to secure a new copyright)[v] — but reprinted under the pseudonym Samuel Langhorne Clemens, because Mark Twain was a trademark of the author’s estate, which would not permit its use by the avaricious re-publishers greedy to feed upon the body of Twain’s work.
So what, I ask you, was the copyright situation with R. W. Franklin’s “Reading edition” of The poems of Emily Dickinson, which, you will recall, was a new variorum edition, published forty-three years after Johnson? But a single glance at the verso of the title page reveals even more copyright notices:
Copyright © 1998, 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
© Copyright, 1951, 1955, 1979 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
© Copyright, 1914, 1918, 1919, 1924, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1935, 1937, 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi
© Copyright, 1952, 1957, 1958, 1963, 1965, by Mary L. Hampson
All rights reserved[vi]
“All rights reserved,” indeed. That would include the right of copywrong, the “right” claimed by some publishers to restrict fair use of copyrighted materials, if indeed that is any longer possible.[vii] In that first notice above, for Johnson’s 1955 edition, which, you will note, came just in time to renew copyright on Dickinson’s poems, some of said intellectual property is “reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College” — perhaps because some of the manuscripts are held by Amherst College (and no, I don’t know which publishers gave permission.)
This is all both depressingly reminiscent of the bloated Harvard endowment, and of Dickinson’s very specific rejection of publication (not to mention her more generalized distrust of fame and notice). Given the fact that “A narrow Fellow in the Grass,” one of but ten poems published in her lifetime,[viii] was, in her view, stolen and mangled by a newspaper,[ix] she may not be too far off in this verse assessment of 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 our White Creator –
Than invest – Our Snow –
Thought belongs 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 – [x]
From the foregoing copyright notices, publication would seem to be the auction of Dickinson’s words, if not her mind. Dickinson was not Whitman, who was a printer, a publisher, a journalist, and understood copyright. She had never considered copyrighting her poems, as far as I can tell from her biographies. But that does not mean that she was indifferent to their proper appearance. Her complaint regarding “A narrow Fellow in the Grass” (published under the title “The Snake” in February, 1866) is that it was edited clumsily, and without her knowledge. She had written the first stanza as:
A narrow Fellow in the Grass
Occasionally rides –
You may have met him? Did you not
His notice instant is –
The editors (of the Republican) published the third and fourth lines as
You may have met him – did you not?
His notice instant is,
She wrote the following to Thomas Higginson, a man of letters she had earlier asked if her poems were publishable, and to whom she had thereafter announced that she had decided not to publish, to explain the publication, inclosing a copy of “The Snake:”
Lest you meet my Snake and suppose I deceive it was robbed of me – defeated too of the third line by the punctuation. The third and fourth were one – I had told you I did not print – I feared you might think me ostensible.[xi]
Some of you may be wondering what Dickinson means, and whether she is making a mountain out of a tempest in a hookah. Dickinson wanted the last part of the third line to function with the fourth line, with a bit of wordplay on that fourth line: “notice” being either your notice of him or his notice of you, with the implication that if he notices you, he’s gone. But my point is not to explain Dickinson’s point — you can work that out for yourself. My point is that Dickinson was not arbitrary nor capricious in the particulars of her poetry — but she was very particular. A particle as small as a question-mark was important to her sense of how the poem worked. So she had good reason for not trusting editors.
That may be why “Publication – is the Auction” does not treat the idea of any public life kindly. But it is not a singularity in Dickinson’s body of work. The poem is a specific incidence of the more generalized (and earlier) sentiment expressed in the following poem, presenting both a wariness of, if not disdain for, engagement with the world, and a hunger for the companionship of like-minded people:
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!
How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog![xii]
I’m not quite sure when Dickinson stopped using that more conventional punctuation; Franklin dates this poem to 1861[xiii] and “Publication – is the Auction” to 1863, both very productive years, in fact when she was at her most fecund — and three years before “The Snake” was snatched. But I am sure when I first encountered Emily Dickinson’s poems. It was in third or fourth grade, in Wasatch Elementary School in Provo, Utah. I don’t remember whether my teacher read “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” to us first, or the poem below. But I remember two things: first, she used the former to help us quieten for a serious discussion; and second, she asked us what the title of the poem below should be, and I said, smart-aleck that I was, “Indian Summer.” She was disconcerted by my perspicacity, and I spent English periods for the rest of the year in the library, reading the complete Modern Library collection of Grimms’ fairy tales — which she must have felt more suitable to my talents. So this is the poem that turned me into a librarian:
These are the days when Birds come back –
A very few – a Bird or two –
To take a backward look.
These are the days when skies resume
The old – old sophistries of June –
A blue and gold mistake.
Oh, fraud that cannot cheat the Bee.
Almost thy plausibility
Induces my belief,
Till ranks of seeds their witness bear –
And softly thro’ the altered air
Hurries a timid leaf.
Oh sacrament of summer days,
Oh, Last Communion in the haze –
Permit a child to join –
Thy sacred emblems to partake –
Thy consecrated bread to take
And thine immortal wine![xiv]
And this is where my earlier discussion of copywrong comes in. You can get the poem above off the internet, at a site called Poetry Archive,[xv] but it doesn’t look quite the same. It interests me what the differences are, so I will inflict them on you, but please don’t skip over the next few lines, because they are central to my argument. The lines from Poetry Archive are first, followed by the lines as transcribed by Franklin, in italics:
These are the days when birds come back,
These are the days when Birds come back –
A very few, a bird or two,
A very few – a Bird or two –
To take a backward look.
To take a backward look.
These are the days when skies put on
These are the days when skies resume
The old, old sophistries of June,–
The old – old sophistries of June –
A blue and gold mistake.
A blue and gold mistake.
Oh, fraud that cannot cheat the bee,
Oh, fraud that cannot cheat the Bee.
Almost thy plausibility
Almost thy plausibility
Induces my belief,
Induces my belief,
Till ranks of seeds their witness bear,
Till ranks of seeds their witness bear –
And softly through the altered air
And softly thro’ the altered air
Hurries a timid leaf!
Hurries a timid leaf.
Oh, sacrament of summer days,
Oh sacrament of summer days,
Oh, last communion in the haze,
Oh, Last Communion in the haze –
Permit a child to join,
Permit a child to join –
Thy sacred emblems to partake,
Thy sacred emblems to partake –
Thy consecrated bread to break,
Thy consecrated bread to take
Taste thine immortal wine!
And thine immortal wine!
All right, so I lied — there are not so many changes. In the fourth line Poetry Archive has “put on” where the original has the much more evocative “resume,” a verb which gives the skies a personality, and portrays them as a bit goofy (“A blue and gold mistake,” which is a lovely image of a sky clad in leaves, the worthy companion to Frost’s “Nature’s first green is gold”). But it is in the last stanza that Dickinson is most damaged in this text. She has written as if the speaker were a child asking to take part in a grown-up activity, the Last Communion — Dickinson never did join with any church, any congregation, which disappointed her father[xvi] — but the edited text has the speaker asking to break the communion bread and taste the wine as if a celebrant, while in the original the child is asking to take the consecrated bread and the immortal wine, though not a communicant. That’s a huge difference!
The text I took from Poetry Archive appears to come from a sources credited on Bartleby.com as “The Complete Poems, with an introduction by her niece Martha Dickinson Bianchi. – Boston : Little, Brown, 1924.”[xvii] You will recall that Martha appears in the copyright notice to Franklin’s Complete poems like this: “© Copyright, 1914, 1918, 1919, 1924, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1935, 1937, 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi.” It would seem, then, that the editors of the Republican were not the last to tinker with Dickinson’s verse. Because I don’t have either of the variorum editions, I am not certain whether there is more than one ms. for the poem. But both Johnson and Franklin agree in the text of the poem. So I must accuse Bianchi of helping Dickinson avoid rhyming “partake” and “take,” which would be a crime against rhyme. It would seem from that string of dates that she published Dickinson’s poems over a span of many years, perhaps making a cottage industry of it.
But she wasn’t the first. An extensive biography of Dickinson on the website of Poetry magazine says it like this:
Emily Dickinson died in Amherst in 1886. After her death her family members found her hand-sewn books, or “fascicles.” These fascicles contained nearly 1,800 poems. Though Mabel Loomis Todd and [Thomas] Higginson published the first selection of her poems in 1890, a complete volume did not appear until 1955. Edited by Thomas H. Johnson, the poems still bore the editorial hand of Todd and Higginson. It was not until R.W. Franklin’s version of Dickinson’s poems appeared in 1998 that her order, unusual punctuation and spelling choices were completely restored.[xviii]
So maybe Higginson and Todd are responsible for correcting Dickinson. My question is do they, or any of the other editors, deserve to hold copyright to Dickinson’s poems? This may be where the concept of copyleft comes in, since it describes the practice of those early editors. That would put Dickinson way ahead of her time. Now, I have run out of time, and must leave it to you to look up “copyleft” in Wikipedia, if you don’t already know about it. But I want to present for your consideration another note on publication from that biographical sketch at the Poetry magazine website:
When the first volume of her poetry was published in 1890, four years after her death, it met with stunning success. Going through eleven editions in less than two years, the poems eventually extended far beyond their first household audiences.[xix]
That stunning success meant that someone was profiting from the sale of those books edited by Higginson and Todd. The reverse of the title page for the 11th edition bears the notice “Copyright, 1890, By Roberts Brothers. Eleventh Edition” (transcribed from a PDF downloaded from Google Books). It also bears the notice of publication: “University Press : John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A.” — which would, of course, be the press of Harvard University. I’ll save you the trouble — the Roberts Brothers do not show up in any of those copyright notices above.
But hold on, I hear you say: what about those New Poems of Emily Dickinson that set this whole thing in motion? Glad you asked: had I read the flap of the jacket, I could have saved myself a few dollars. It reads, in part:
This daring book presents a stunning new literary discovery—nearly five hundred new Dickinson poems.
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 498 new poems that he and his associates excavated from her correspondence…[xx]
Who says you can’t judge a book by its cover? Just another grave robber polishing potsherds.
Your turn.
[i] 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 — which had appeared thirty-eight years earlier.
[ii] New poems of Emily Dickinson / edited by William H. Shurr, with Anna Dunlap & Emily Grey Shurr. — Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, c1993.
[iii] Final harvest : Emily Dickinson’s poems / selection and introduction by Thomas H. Johnson. — Little, Brown, c1961
[iv] And if you can’t imagine why such a notice consterned me, I am, after all, a librarian, which means I read the fine print.
[v] I jest, of course — there are no syndics of the University of California; the copyright notice of my copy of The prince and the pauper in the series The works of Mark Twain reads: “PREVIOUSLY UNPUBLISHED MATERIAL BY MARK TWAIN COPYRIGHT © 1979 BY THE MARK TWAIN COMPANY [/] ORIGINAL MATERIAL COPYRIGHT © 1979 BY THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA,” (and you thought regency romance was dead) — although in that long-ago pre-internet era, a statement in all caps may not have been the equivalent of shouting.
[vi] The poems of Emily Dickinson / edited by R.W. Franklin. — Reading ed. — Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. Note that Martha Dickinson Bianchi may indeed be part of an EMILY DICKINSON COMPANY, if such existed. But how did Mary L. Hampson get into the mix?
[vii] The concept is explained in wikipedia, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_misuse
[viii] This count of known poems published in her lifetime appears in many sources, e.g. My wars are laid away in books : the life of Emily Dickinson / Alfred Habegger. — New York : Random House, c2001, p. 389, fn. 12, as well as in Franklin’s Poems of Emily Dickinson, p. 4.
[ix] The story is relayed in many places; in, for instance, Emily Dickinson : an interpretive biography / by Thomas H. Johnson. — Cambridge, Massachusetts : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1955, p. 120.
[x] Franklin, Poems, no. 788, pp. 351-352.
[xi] Johnson, Emily Dickinson, p.120.
[xii] Ibid., no. 260, pp. 116-117.
[xiii] Ibid., “Appendix 1. Distribution by Year, ” p. 639
[xiv] Ibid., no. 122, p. 63.
[xv] Specifically, at http://www.poetry-archive.com/d/these_are_the_days.html, accessed 26 August 2015
[xvi] The question of Emily Dickinson’s religious beliefs is well summarized in the biographical note at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/emily-dickinson, and at length in Habegger.
[xvii] http://www.bartleby.com/113/2078.html, accessed 26 August 2015 — which posted the further publication notice “New York : Bartleby.com, 2000.”
[xviii] http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/emily-dickinson, accessed 30 June 2015; the biographical note is not paginated, but when copied into Word it runs to 24 pages; this quote is from the final paragraph of text.
[xix] Ibid., end of the first paragraph.
[xx] Shurr, Op. cit.
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