![]() ![]() In school, I probably encountered one of the many anthologized versions that reproduced an earlier published version. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1955). Johnson (and Dickinson scholars who followed), we’ve known about these dashes for a long time now see Johnson, ed., The Poems of Emily Dickinson, 3 vols. Higginson (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1890), 138. * Poems, edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and T. The classics of the future may depend on the decisions that we make today. If it was an act of editorial overkill to conform Emily Dickinson to the published standards of her day, we might use her as a cautionary tale.Īs the typographical and linguistic innovations of texting and social media make their way into published works, editors will want to resist the urge to apply conventional rules for their own sake. Whatever you decide, the line between manuscript and published work must be drawn somewhere.** Looking Ahead She almost certainly wouldn’t have chosen a typeface that mimics handwriting. ![]() In Dickinson’s time, an em dash with no spaces on either side was the convention for works published in English (on both sides of the Atlantic), so I’m guessing that Dickinson herself might have accepted those. But in two editions of Dickinson’s work published by Harvard since Johnson’s, spaced hyphens were used.‡ Johnson rendered them as spaced en dashes, a common convention for the dash (and one that’s become the norm in the UK). So when I transcribed Dickinson’s stanza, I imposed Chicago style-an em dash with no space on either end.ĭickinson’s handwritten dashes were more like spaced hyphens. It might be a dash (-) or a dash (–) or a dash (-). Not that an editor’s job will ever be easy: a rose is a rose ( or the name of a person-and Gertrude Stein, like Dickinson, broke with the conventions of her day), but a dash is never just a dash. In her work, they suggest the rush of composition and a freedom from constraints. That means that Emily Dickinson can have her dashes if she wants them. Dashes and DashesĮditors and publishers have a lot of responsibility, but one of the main ones is to ensure that nothing gets in the way of the author’s voice. In the first published edition that final dash-which almost seems to challenge the idea that a poem has an ending or that time could contain it even if it did-was replaced by a period. Here’s the final stanza of the same poem, transcribed here from Dickinson’s handwritten manuscript: Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.ĭickinson also used dashes in place of periods-often at the ends of lines. Courtesy Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. The final dash-Dickinson’s dashes look more like hyphens-follows the cross for the second “t” in “Eternity.” Emily Dickinson Archive. That’s exactly how many of us would still use a semicolon today-and how every edition of The Chicago Manual of Style since 1906 would recommend using one.īut Dickinson herself ended that line-as well as the first and third lines-with a dash.† (Another difference: “carriage” and “ourselves,” like “Death,” were capitalized in the original.)Įmily Dickinson, “ Because I could not stop for Death” (ink, ca. So, for example, when Dickinson’s poem about a fateful carriage ride was first published in 1890, as “The Chariot,” it featured a suitably nineteenth-century semicolon at the end of the second line of the first stanza: And her publishers, who were worried about public reception, made a lot of small but significant changes to conform the poet’s unconventional work to contemporary expectations. Her poems were first published in full only after she died. I had this image of the poet sitting upright and alone in a window-lit attic writing precisely punctuated midcentury Victorian poetry as a countermeasure against the uncertainties and disappointments of life beyond the page and outside her room.īut the real Emily Dickinson didn’t quite work that way. ![]() But I do remember liking Emily Dickinson. When I was in school (many years ago) I didn’t read poetry unless a teacher or professor assigned it. Editors can and should suggest changes and fix problems-and try to anticipate what might work for readers-but the author has the final say. But for a more creative work, the line blurs. ![]() In a history journal or academic monograph, yes: a copyeditor can impose Chicago or house style (serial commas!). This can mean something as simple as embracing idiosyncratic or even nonstandard punctuation. One of the goals of Fiction+ has been to encourage writers and editors to leave the stylebook behind whenever it gets in the way of creative expression. ![]()
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