In his preface to Poems by Emily Dickinson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson draws an interesting distinction, which he blames on Emerson. This is how he opens his preface:
The verses of Emily Dickinson belong emphatically to what Emerson long since called “the Poetry of the Portfolio,” — something produced absolutely without the thought of publication, and solely by way of expression of the writer’s own mind.[i]
Higginson, as I noted in an earlier post, was the editor of the Atlantic Monthly whom Dickinson asked, in 1862, “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?”[ii] Perhaps he had forgotten in the intervening thirty years that he had judged her poetry unfit for publication. But in the next sentences of his preface, he further compounds this lapse of memory by explaining why she was a portfolio poet:
Such verse must inevitably forfeit whatever advantage lies in the discipline of public criticism and the enforced conformity to accepted ways. On the other hand, it may often gain something through the habit of freedom and the unconventional utterance of daring thoughts. In the case of the present author, there was absolutely no choice in the matter ; she must write thus, or not at all.[iii]
Note how carefully Higginson delineates his world, that of “accepted ways,” and how much he urges upon us the image of the Bohemian artist in another world, working alone in her attic. He does go on to say that she was “A recluse by temperament and habit,[iv]” further entrenching her in the world of “the unconventional utterance of daring thoughts.” And he asserts that she was driven to such unconventionality (by forces unexplained). Thus is perpetuated, if not born, the myth of the Belle of Amherst. It is a myth that looms large in her legend, but it was far easier to perpetuate after Dickinson’s death. After expounding on Dickinson’s reclusive life, Higginson goes on to say:
it was with great difficulty that she was persuaded to print, during her lifetime, three or four poems.[v] Yet she wrote verses in great abundance ; and though curiously indifferent to all conventional rules, had yet a rigorous literary standard of her own, and often altered a word many times to suit an ear which had its own tenacious fastidiousness.[vi]
Higginson does not recognize her use of hymn meters at all, although they are surely very conventional rules; my guess is that her unconventional punctuation hid this very conventional meter from his eyes. But in further explaining the book, he compares her work with another presumptive portfolio poet:
This selection from her poems is published to meet the desire of her personal friends, and especially of her surviving sister. It is believed that the thoughtful reader will find in these pages a quality more suggestive of the poetry of William Blake than of anything to be elsewhere found, — flashes of wholly original and profound insight into nature and life ; words and phrases exhibiting an extraordinary vividness of descriptive and imaginative power, yet often set in a seemingly whimsical or even rugged frame.[vii]
Most likely the only poetry of Blake with which Higginson might be familiar would be Poems of innocence, and of experience; I find his comparison absurd, and note for the record that Higginson does not even suggest any kind of parallel, or contrast, with Whitman. For all I know, he had never heard of, let alone read, Whitman. But perhaps the most astounding statement in his preface is one we can test without extensive research. Immediately following the quote above, Higginson asserts of these poems:
They are here published as they were written, with very few and superficial changes ; although it is fair to say that the titles have been assigned, almost invariably, by the editors [e.g. himself and Todd].
So let’s examine that claim. This is the first poem in the collection:
This is my letter to the world,
That never wrote me, —
The simple news that Nature told,
With tender majesty.
Her message is committed
To hands I cannot see ;
For love of her, sweet countrymen,
Judge tenderly of me ![viii]
Most of the changes made from the manuscript, as transcribed in Franklin’s edition, are in punctuation, and seemingly trivial. But notice how the fourth line works with its original punctuation:
This is my letter to the World
That never wrote Me –
The simple News that Nature told –
With tender Majesty
Her Message is committed
To Hands I cannot see –
For love of Her – Sweet – countrymen –
Judge tenderly – of Me[ix]
You have two phrases, separated and joined by that fourth line: “The simple News – that Nature told With tender Majesty” and “With tender Majesty Her Message is committed To Hands I cannot see”. But as edited by Todd [and maybe Higginson], the entire second phrase is lost. And with Dickinson’s original punctuation, it is that phrase that is joined by the punctuation. This may seem a minor point until you recall what Dickinson wrote to Higginson about the publication of “A narrow fellow in the grass.” Having just told us that she “often altered a word many times to suit an ear which had its own tenacious fastidiousness[x]”, it would seem that both Todd and Higginson did not respect that fastidiousness. She exhibits the same care in the next line of the poem, again using her punctuation to swing both ways: “For love of Her – Sweet – countrymen -”, where Sweet is freed to modify both “Her” and “countrymen”, something the edited version does not allow.
These may seem “very few and superficial changes” to Todd and Higginson. They may seem that way to you and me. But what they conceal is Dickinson’s intensely grammatical dissection of her words. By contrast, here is an example of more extensive editing:
Glee ! the great storm is over !
Four have recovered the land ;
Forty gone down together
Into the boiling sand.
Ring, for the scant salvation !
Toll, for the bonnie souls, —
Neighbor and friend and bridegroom,
Spinning upon the shoals !
How they will tell the shipwreck
When winter shakes the door,
Till the children ask, “But the forty ?
Did they come back no more?”
Then a silence suffuses the story,
And a softness the teller’s eye ;
And the children no further question,
And only the waves reply.[xi]
And here it is in its original condition (the different wording does not seem to stem from the poem existing in two different drafts — at least Franklin’s “Editorial Notes” do not indicate any alternative source):
Glee – The great storm is over –
Four – have recovered the Land –
Forty – gone down together –
Into the boiling Sand –
Ring – for the scant Salvation –
Toll – for the bonnie Souls, —
Neighbor – and friend – and Bridegroom –
Spinning opon the Shoals –
How they will tell the story –
When Winter shake the Door,
Till the children urge, –
But the Forty –
Did they – Come back no more?
Then a silence – suffuse the story –
And a softness – the Teller’s eye –
And the Children – no further question –
And only the Sea – reply –[xii]
To my ear and eye, none of the superficial changes by Todd and Higginson are an improvement over the original. But that may be the result of another attempt by Higginson in his preface to explain Dickinson:
In many cases these verses will seem to the reader like poetry torn up by the roots, with rain and dew and earth still clinging to them, giving a freshness and a fragrance not otherwise to be conveyed. In other cases, as in the few poems of shipwreck or of mental conflict, we can only wonder at the gift of vivid imagination by which this recluse woman can delineate, by a few touches, the very crises of physical or mental struggle. And sometimes again we catch glimpses of a lyric strain, sustained perhaps but for a line or two at a time, and making the reader regret its sudden cessation.[xiii]
Despite the palpable condescension, you can at least credit Higginson with consistency. But his arrogance I find, given the advantage of hindsight, laughable. Especially when he goes on to say:
But the main quality of these poems is that of extraordinary grasp and insight, uttered with an uneven vigor sometimes exasperating, seemingly wayward, but really unsought and inevitable. After all, when a thought takes one’s breath away, a lesson on grammar seems an impertinence.[xiv]
If you consider that Higginson was an editor and writer for a major magazine, you might concede his point that Dickinson seems ungrammatical in her verse. But having seen what the correction of that grammar does to her sense of grammar, I have to agree that Todd and Higginson’s lessons on grammar do seem an impertinence. Dickinson in her poems atomizes her sentences, giving words and phrases and clauses a freedom that Todd [and Higginson, possibly, although Johnson asserts that Todd did most of the editing[xv]] were not willing to allow them.
I want to explore Dickinson’s relation to grammar to a far greater extent in my next post, and I have pretty much done with Higginson and Todd. I have gone on at such length about them because they illustrate the blessings and the dangers of friends and editors for a poet like Dickinson. I don’t believe for a second that Dickinson wrote “absolutely without the thought of publication, and solely by way of expression of the writer’s own mind.” Outside of the fact that she tried to publish in response to Higginson’s essay in the Atlantic Monthly, she did publish, although her efforts resemble more samizdat than sanction.
But hold on, I hear you say — sanction? By whom?
Your turn.
[i] Poems / by Emily Dickinson. — Edited by two of her friends, Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson. — Boston : Roberts Brothers, 1892, p. [iii]. This bears the copyright date of 1890 in the name of the Roberts Brothers, and is listed as the Eleventh Edition, by which I assume they mean the 11th printing of the 1st edition. I can’t verify that.
[ii] Emily Dickinson : an interpretive biography / by Thomas H. Johnson. — Cambridge, Massachusetts : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1955, p. 104.
[iii] Op. cit. And, yes, the semicolon is separated from the word “matter” by a space in the original.
[iv] Ibid.
[v] At least ten, according to R. W. Franklin, in The poems of Emily Dickinson / edited by R.W. Franklin. — Reading ed. — Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 4.
[vi] Poems, p. iv.
[vii] Ibid., p. v.
[viii] Ibid., p. 9.
[ix] The poems of Emily Dickinson, p. 235. The poem is number 519 in that edition.
[x] Poems, p. iv.
[xi] Ibid., p. 17
[xii] The poems of Emily Dickinson, p. 305. The poem is number 685 in that edition.
[xiii] Poems, pp. v-vi.
[xiv] Ibid., p. vi.
[xv] Emily Dickinson : an interpretive biography / by Thomas H. Johnson. — Cambridge, Massachusetts : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1955. The story of Dickinson and Higginson is told primarily in Chapter V, “My Safest Friend: Renunciation” pp. 103-133.
Very good illustration. As an editor, I can see why they made the changes they made. But they ran the risk that editors do in fact run when editing work by someone who is more sensitive to language than they are, and is very particular, and working toward particular ends: that is, they butcher what they do not clearly see. A cautionary editorial tale.
I do think it’s possible that Dickinson was trying for something so experimental that few readers of her time could have followed it. That being the case, it’s possible that these kinds of editorial revisions helped in a material way to popularize Dickinson’s work, though at the cost of stripping away part of what she was trying to say. (Like Peter Jackson’s popularization/evisceration of Tolkien? I digress…)