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MIXED-MEDIA ART PROJECTS:
Roses
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[A single panel from Tuck’s series, “Roses,” featuring Dickinson’s lovers’ yellow.]
[ project: Roses ]
the poetry of Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) was a most extraordinary poet of the interior life, who forged
… a poetic language of her own, transforming the domestic into the lyrical, creating an entire world from the microcosm of a leaf, a blade of grass, or a single metaphor.
(from the book jacket to the Johnson edn. of Dickinson’s Complete Poems)
I have featured 13 of Dickinson’s poems relating to roses (plus her poem that opens, “Nature rarer uses Yellow”) on the project: Roses Web page, because these poems speak so eloquently to the woman struggling with a reproductive cancer.
But Dickinson’s body of poetic work was much larger than this —
… about 1,800 poems with many having two or more versions that were sent on various occasions to others in a postal envelope, the pocket of a boy messenger, or beside a bloom.
(Aife Murray, Maid as Muse, 1)
This means that there are additional poems in Dickinson’s oeuvre which touch on roses, and plenty more poems — even when they’re not about roses — that touch on topics of concern to women with gynecologic cancers, especially those of us obsessed with trying to make sense of what’s happening to our bodies and our selves.
For this reason, I have assembled here a list of resources for those of you who would like to read more of — and about — Emily Dickinson.
The two standard, authoritative editions of Dickinson’s opus (nearing 1,800 poems) are:
• Johnson, Thomas H., ed. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. 1955; rpt. Boston, New York, and London: Little, Brown and Company, 1960. (ISBN-10: 0316184136 for the 1976 reprint by Back Bay Books.)
This was the first critical edn. of Dickinson’s poems that was true to her original manuscripts, representing “the poet’s bold experiments in prosody” without apology.
Dickinson’s previous editor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, judged Dickinson’s rhymes imperfect and her meter “spasmodic,” and so took it upon himself to “improve” her verse for publication, following 19th-century aesthetic norms which were very much at odds with Dickinson’s “extraordinary poetic genius.” As explained by Johnson, Higginson “was trying to measure a cube by the rules of plane geometry.” (vi)
In contrast, Johnson allowed Dickinson’s few “[r]ough drafts … to stand as such, with no editorial tinkering.” (x) While “silently” correcting “obvious misspelling” and “misplaced apostrophes,” Johnson deliberately left Dickinson’s original punctuation and capitalization unaltered. “Dickinson used dashes as a musical device, and though some may be elongated end stops, any ‘correction’ would be gratuitous. Capitalization, though often capricious, is likewise untouched,” explains Johnson in his Introduction (x–xi).
Because this is the edition of Dickinson’s poems which I have on hand, this is the edition I used for quotes on Tuck’s project: Roses Web page.
• Franklin, R. W., ed. The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. (ISBN-10: 0674676246 and ISBN-13: 978-0674676244.)
Franklin’s edition has replaced Johnson’s as the most up-to-date, scholarly study of Dickinson’s manuscripts.
Franklin includes 1,789 poems in all, each “rendered with Dickinson’s spelling, punctuation, and capitalization intact.”
Because many of Dickinson’s poems exist in multiple versions, the scholar charged with compiling a “reading” text (which gives only one form of each poem), such as these two editions by Johnson and Franklin, is sometimes forced to make difficult “editorial decisions about a text [poem] which never was prepared by the author as copy for the printer.” (Johnson x) In most cases, the scrupulous editor is able to tell when an alternate reading was Dickinson’s preference. But,
Rare instances exist, notably in the poem “Blazing in gold,” where no text can be called “final.” That poem describes a sunset which in one version stoops as low as “the kitchen window”; in another, as low as an “oriel window”; in a third, as low as “the Otter’s Window.” These copies were made over a period of five years, from 1861 to 1866, and one text is apparently as “final” as another.
(Johnson edn. of Dickinson’s Complete Poems, x)
To see how such silent editorial decisions can impact how we read and interpret Dickinson’s poems, compare the three editors’ differing versions of Emily Dickinson’s untitled poem about nature’s use of colors:
1. As given “by two of her friends, T. W. Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd” in their 1892 printing of Poems by Emily Dickinson … Second Series (Poem XXXI, p. 58):
Nature rarer uses yellow
Than another hue;
Saves she all of that for sunsets, –
Prodigal of blue,
Spending scarlet like a woman,
Yellow she affords
Only scantly and selectly,
Like a lover’s words.
2. As given by Thomas H. Johnson in his reader’s edn. of Dickinson’s Complete Poems:
Nature rarer uses Yellow
Than another Hue.
Saves she all of that for Sunsets
Prodigal of Blue
Spending Scarlet, like a Woman
Yellow she affords
Only scantly and selectly
Like a Lover’s Words.
3. As given by R. W. Franklin in his reader’s edn. of Dickinson’s Complete Poems:
Nature rarer uses Yellow
Than another Hue -
Saves she all of that for Sunsets
Prodigal of Blue
Spending Scarlet, like a Woman
Yellow she affords
Only scantly and selectly
Like a Lover’s Words -
For literary criticism, I recommend:
• Murray, Aife. Maid as Muse: How Servants Changed Emily Dickinson’s Life and Language. Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press; Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2009. (ISBN-10: 1584656743 and ISBN-13: 978-1584656746.)
Murray’s book offers an intriguing new perspective on some of Dickinson’s rosy references & metaphors.
As Murray herself summarizes her book in a Web letter responding to Longenbach’s review, “Emily Dickinson spent many hours writing in her kitchen, in between baking and gardening. The people with whom she spoke daily were her maid, gardener, stable hand and other laborers, in addition to her immediate family. She may have been a recluse from her well-to-do peers but not from the laboring poor of the town: Irish immigrants, African-Americans, English immigrants, Native Americans and poor white Yankees. Their active presence in her life gives new meaning to Dickinson’s lines like ‘thanks for the Ethiopian Face’ that Mr. Longenbach discusses in his review.
“Emily Dickinson stored her poems in her maid’s trunk and asked her maid, Margaret Maher, to burn the poems after Emily died. Fortunately, Margaret Maher defied that deathbed oath. Dickinson’s self-scripted funeral—that self-authored final narrative—tells us more about her life than any written note she could have left. To the shock of her family and neighbors, she requested six Irish Catholic laborers—the Dickinson family’s current and former gardeners, handyman and stablemen—for the honor of pallbearers. Whom might the poet have been including with the lines: ‘The Soul selects her own Society — / Then — shuts the Door — ’?” which are also discussed by Longenbach.
• Longenbach, James. “Ardor and the Abyss.” Bk. rev. of Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds, by Lyndall Gordon. The Nation 291.1 (5 July 2010): 25–6, 28, 30.
Click/Tap here to read the complete version of this text online.
And for an inspired investigation into “The Garden Roots of Emily Dickinson’s Poetry” (and more quotations from her poems about roses), I recommend:
• journalist Paul Solman’s report (originally aired 9 June 2010 on the PBS NewsHour) on a horticultural show, launched in the summer of 2010 at The New York Botanical Garden, seeking to re-create the green spaces that inspired so much of Dickinson’s poetry
Click/Tap here to access a video podcast of the original broadcast, along with a transcript (HTML text) of the video.
• Solman has a brief companion commentary posted to his blog (or q-and-a column), “The Business Desk,” for the online PBS NewsHour
Click/Tap here for the complete text of his commentary, “Economics and Emily Dickinson”, posted 9 June 2010.
In his blog post, Solman notes that Dickinson was “not … a fan of the marketplace. Or at least, not with regard to her art.”
And he commits the unpardonable sin (at least as far as literary scholars are concerned! ;~) of again cleaning up Dickinson’s verse — this time, to make it more palatable to the casual 21st-century reader.
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N O T E : This website is no longer participating in the Powell’s Books, Inc. Partner Program.
As of 29 August 2012, we will no longer earn a percentage on books purchased through our links to Powells.com (or Amazon.com). Hence, I have decided to drop all such links. There’s no point in pushing one particular out-of-state retailer over another when local, independent bookstores everywhere need our support. Click/Tap here to learn more.
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