4 - The Manuscripts of a Non-Print Poet

Summary

Publication — is the Auction of the Mind of Man —

(Fr788; J709)

One cannot look long at the little volumes — any of the forty — without seeing Dickinson's self-determination as an organizing poet, a crafter of books as well as of stunning and complex lyrics.

— Eleanor Elson Heginbotham, Reading the Fascicles of Emily Dickinson: Dwelling in Possibilities (2003)

Any editorial work is a construction upon the poems.

— R. W. Franklin, The Editing of Emily Dickinson (1967)

VENTING HER ANGER IN A LETTER to Thomas Wentworth Higginson over the way one of her poems, “A narrow Fellow in the Grass” (Fr1096B; J986) was misprinted in the Springfield Weekly Republican (the details of which I will get to shortly), Emily Dickinson asserted that she “did not print.” She had chosen her words carefully. “Print,” unlike “publish,” conjures up conventions of typography, not just conventions of literary taste, and she concluded that those conventions would not and could not accommodate her conception of how a poem should appear before readers' eyes. If she had been undecided before writing to Higginson, then he clinched it for her. Being a Unitarian minister, abolitionist, supporter of women's rights, essayist, and literary talent scout, he must have been the likeliest person to determine accurately not only whether her poems breathed, but whether they could breathe in print. He judged that they could not. Her poems would remain “poetry of the portfolio.”