Category: Miller Edition

Tune Up

12/3/2025

Today’s post will focus on a weird but fascinating find, but first – here’s a bit of background on how I stumbled upon it, and then I’ll reveal what “it” is after that.

My two most recent posts featured Dickinson’s poem “How happy is the little stone.” She sent one version of the work as a letter to her sister-in-law Susan, and just below the poem she wrote, “Heaven the surly Balm of a Technicality!"

I searched and searched for a copy of the letter online, but all I could find was a transcript on a site of Dickinson translated into Italian (along with options to read the poems and letters in English as well). Interestingly, the transcript of the letter to Susan included an error in Dickinson’s final statement, and presented it as “Heaven the Balm of a surly Technicality” (HERE, scroll down to letter 744).

Below left: The online transcript with the error in the final sentence. Below right: A transcript of the letter in Miller's The Letters of Emily Dickinson.

However, this is the site where I discovered the fascinating feature to which I alluded to earlier: The site (HERE), “Emily Dickinson, The Complete Works (Tutte le opere),” includes a page entitled “Musica.”

The description in Italian on the "Musica" page translates as follows:

“The Emily Dickinson Music Book, a collection of printed scores used in the Dickinson household, is available in PDF format on the Harvard University website. I used MUSE music software to transcribe the pieces (122 totaling 4 hours, 47 minutes, and 56 seconds) and to create mp3 files that can be listened to or downloaded. Below is the index of the pieces with links to the image of the opening and the mp3 file on this page.”

Under the description, there are over 100 pieces listed. You can click on every one of them to see a bit of the sheet music and to hear the song.

How cool is that?

As an example, a link to a piece by Edward L. White, “Di Tanti Palpiti” (“Of Many Heartbeats”), is HERE; the work is a set of variations on Rossini’s aria from “Trancredi,” an opera based on Voltaire's play Tancrède.

So -- click on the link above, listen to a piece of music, and imagine you're in the Dickinsons' living room (shown below) listening to Emily playing the piano. It will take your mind off our crazy world -- even if just for a few minutes. ; )

Written in Stone

12/2/2025

In yesterday’s post, I shared some contranyms (a single word with two opposite meanings), and I included Dickinson’s “How happy is the little stone,” a poem which I can interpret in opposing ways. The poem, to me, is contranym-ish – like those optical illusions of steps that seem to change direction – even as you’re looking right at them.

On one hand, the poem extols “the virtues of the humble stone, content in its simplicity and freedom from worldly concerns” (quoted from an analysis HERE). On the other hand, it seems to expose the conundrum of dealing with the “poorly educated” – they’re dumb as rocks.

Which way do you read this poem?

Dickinson scholar Thomas Johnson’s notes about the work state, “Three fair copies and the worksheet draft of this poem are known; a fourth, now lost, presumably sent to Mrs. Jackson.”

One version of the poem sent in a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson included these lines as a separate quatrain:

Obtaining but our own extent
In whatsoever Realm –
'Twas Christ's own personal expanse
That bore him from the Tomb –

Concerning this addition, Johnson commented, “Taken together the fourteen lines express a sequence of thought, from the completely fulfilled but soulless pebble to the limitless Christ who is only fulfilled in immortality.”

Under another version of the ten-line poem, as a letter-poem sent to her sister-in-law Susan, Dickinson wrote, “Heaven the surly Balm of a Technicality!"

Of that sentiment, Johnson wrote, “The thought seems to be a reflection on the Calvinist orthodoxy that only the ‘saved’ get into heaven.”

I have to add, though, that I was surprised by Dickinson’s use of the word “technicality” – it seems like such a modern word; however, the use of the word “per million words in written English” from 1850 until today has remained rather constant. Turns out Dickinson even used the word in one poem, “'Twas awkward, but it fitted me.”

As for that “happy little stone,” here are the letters associated with the poem:

In this April 1882 letter to Thomas Niles (HERE), she enclosed a copy of the poem.

In this summer 1882 letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson (HERE), Dickinson included the poem as a part of the letter with the added/separate quatrain.

Also in 1882*, Dickinson sent the poem as a letter to her sister-in-law Susan. In this letter, she included the line, “Heaven the Surly Balm of a Technicality.” I could find only one online transcript of the letter, and interestingly, it includes an error in final statement; it has “Heaven the Balm of a SURLY Technicality" (below on the left). That transcript is HERE (scroll down to letter 744).

*I’ve seen this letter dated 1880, 1881, and 1882.

Below: From Cristanne Miller's edition The Letters of Emily Dickinson, a copy of Dickinson's letter to Susan with the final line shown correctly (click to enlarge).

Below: From Cristanne Miller's The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson as She Preserved Them, Dickinson's "How happy is the little stone" with alternate line and word choices shown on the right.

Planting Ideas

11/23/2025

Whenever I visit a library, I always check to see what books they have on hand of Dickinson’s poetry. Recently, I was subbing at a local high school, and the library only had one Dickinson book in their collection – but it was a great one to have! At the time, I wasn’t able to check for other books they had that would have included some of the poet’s works – i.e. anthologies and/or other collections of poetry – but as I said, the one tome on the shelf was first-rate, Cristanne Miller’s Emily Dickinson’s Poems As She Preserved Them.

From the Harvard University Press:

“Widely considered the definitive edition of Emily Dickinson’s poems, this landmark collection presents her poems here for the first time ‘as she preserved them,’ and in the order in which she wished them to appear. It is the only edition of Dickinson’s complete poems to distinguish clearly those she took pains to copy carefully onto folded sheets in fair hand—presumably to preserve them for posterity—from the ones she kept in rougher form. It is also unique among complete editions in presenting the alternate words and phrases Dickinson chose to use on the copies of the poems she kept, so that we can peer over her shoulder and see her composing and reworking her own poems.”

Additional information from the
HUP site is HERE.

One nice feature of the book – which other “complete” editions do not include – is that alternative word and line choices Dickinson considered are printed on the right margins of the pages (see examples in the pics below). Plus, there is an appendix with interesting notes from the editor about many of the poems.

By the way, that school now has two Dickinson books in their library’s collection. While I was there the first time I subbed, I noticed that the bibliotecha had a “Free Little Plant Library,” so the second time I subbed there I brought in a donation, Emily Dickinson’s Gardening Life – you can see it there in the pics below.

No Filter?

9/15/2025

To recap: Yesterday I shared a Reels from a young man who posts videos celebrating cinematic history and Hollywood. He declaimed his views on AI filters used on old Hollywood images – “modified to modern taste” – because these new filtered images overtake search results.

“It’s becoming more and more difficult to do research and see the past,” he said, “because we are replacing the past with this AI filtered junk.” He further warned “we are down a really dangerous path where it’s going to become impossible to find anything that is original without looking in books, and it’s going to be harder and harder to find those books.”

His comments called to mind the history of the publication of Dickinson’s poetry. Back in the 1890s, editors Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson “filtered” and modified her poems from the start to satisfy public taste, and it took years to sift through and publish them as she wrote them.

In her book “Ancestors’ Brocades, The Literary Debut of Emily Dickinson,” Millicent Todd Bingham shared what her mother had told her surrounding the editing recommendations and rulings she and Higginson had to make:

“When Emily Dickinson was unknown, her acceptance by the literary world problematical, such decisions were weighty. The poems chosen to introduce her must not be too queer. The editors never ceased to feel handicapped by this limitation.”

Due to the “problematical” nature of Dickinson’s work – including form, punctuation, capitalization, syntax, grammar, and more – established publishers in 1890 weren’t keen on printing her work.

Bingham’s father, David Peck Todd, told her that Colonel Higginson first recommended the poems to Houghton Mifflin Company for publication, as he was one of their readers at the time. They declined. The poems, they said, “were much too queer – the rhymes were all wrong.”

Whenever I come across a tome of Dickinson’s poetry, the first poem I check – to determine if the book contains original versions (i.e., as written by Dickinson) or the filtered versions – is “Because I could not stop for Death.”

If the third stanza reads, “We passed the school where children played / Their lessons scarcely done / We passed the fields of gazing grain / We passed the setting sun,” then I know the book contains edited versions of Dickinson’s poetry.

How do I know? Because Dickinson began the stanza with “We passed the School, where Children strove / At Recess – in the Ring.” Yes, in the original version of the poem, Dickinson rhymed “ring” with “sun” – and that was deemed “too queer” to publish in 1890. By the way, Todd and Higginson also completely deleted the fourth stanza from the poem. I have no idea why.

This editing – sanitizing? – of Dickinson’s poems went on for years. A first series of poems was published in 1890, a second series in 1891, and a third in 1896. The chart below shows dates of other editions, and it wasn’t until 1955 that a “complete” collection of her poems was edited and published by Thomas Johnson – and by this point, Johnson and other editors strived to present the poems as written.

Of his compilation, Johnson said, “The order of the poems is that of the Harvard (variorum) edition. There, where all copies of poems are reproduced, fair copies to recipients are chosen for principal representation.”

R. W. Franklin updated the “complete” edition in 1998, and he reported, “About three fourths of the poems exist in a signal source. For the rest, with from two to seven sources, the policy has been to choose the latest version of the entire poem, thereby giving to the poet, rather than the editor, the ownership of change.”

A recent update, published in 2016 by editor Cristanne Miller, is called Emily Dickinson’s Poems as She Preserved Them.
The poems as originally written. No filter.

Well…

Things do get a bit foggy with some of the poems because Dickinson recorded numerous alternative word choices and phrases. The Miller edition includes the alternate possibilities on the right side of the page (see below).

All Ye Need To Know

7/13/2025

Recent posts have focused on Emily Dickinson’s “grammatical vagaries,” and some of them included discussion around the poem “I died for beauty – but was scarce.”

The opening lines to that poem read as, “I died for beauty, but was scarce / Adjusted in the tomb, / When one who died for truth was lain / In an adjoining room.”

Of course the grammatical discussion centered on the use of “lain” instead of “laid,” but poetry fans probably also picked up on a familiar ring to that poem – lines from John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”:

When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

In her book Emily Dickinson’s Poems As She Preserved Them, Cristanne Miller points this connection out, but adds, “perhaps (the poem) also refers to more recent allusions to this ode, for example, in Emerson’s ‘Nature’ (1836) or Barrett Browning’s ‘A Vision of Poets’ (1844). The latter reads, ‘These were poets true / Who died for Beauty, as martyrs do / For truth – the ends being scarcely two,’ lines marked, perhaps by ED, in SD’s (Susan Dickinson’s) copy.”

Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is HERE. Information on Emerson's essay "Nature" is HERE (and look on the right side of the page: there is a spot where you can download the entire essay as a PDF). Barrett Browning's "A Vision of Poets" is HERE -- and lo and behold, look what else popped up while I was looking for that poem, HERE.

No Kings

6/14/2025

I’m going to put off what I had planned for today and shift gears. Since my wife and I are going to the NO KINGS protest in town, I thought I’d look into how often Dickinson used the word “king” in her poetry.

When you run a search for the word “king” on the online Dickinson Archive, 35 entries pop up, and they represent 13 different poems; however, that really depends on which edition of Dickinson’s poetry you check.

In the poem “When I hoped – I feared,” for instance, Miller’s edition includes the word “king” in the 7th line of the 8-line poem, and Johnson’s and Franklin’s editions do not.

Why the difference?

Franklin made this statement in his reading edition of Dickinson’s poems:

“About three fourths of the poems exist in a single source. For the rest, with from two to seven sources, the policy has been to choose the latest version of the entire poem, thereby giving to the poet, rather than the editor, the ownership of change.”

Of this particular poem, Franklin noted the following in his variorum edition:

“Three fair copies, variant, about 1863, 1865, and 1871. The earliest is in Fascicle 26…recorded about summer 1863….A variant copy in pencil, addressed ‘Sue’ and signed ‘Emily,’ was sent to Susan Dickinson about 1865…Some five years later, about November 1871, ED enclosed a copy with further variants in a letter to T. W. Higginson.”

Therefore, the copy from 1871 is what appears in Franklin’s edition, and the first copy from 1863 is what appears in Miller’s edition, “Emily Dickinson’s Poems As She Preserved Them” (“the first edition of Emily Dickinson’s poems to present in easily readable form Dickinson’s own-ordering of the poems she bound into forty handmade booklets between 1858 and 1864, and of the poems she copied onto unbound sheets between 1864 and 1875”).

By the way, the same version in the Franklin edition appears in the Johnson edition, and here is what Johnson said about the poems in his edition:

“Though by far the largest number of packet copies exist in but a single fair-copy version, several exist in semifinal form: those for which marginally the poet suggested an alternate reading for one word or more. In order to keep editorial construction to a bare minimum, I have followed the policy of adopting such suggestion only when they are underlined, presumably Emily Dickinson’s method of indicating her own preference.”

Beer Nuts

3/29/2025

Dickinson described herself as “small, like the Wren, and my Hair is bold, like the Chestnut Bur- and my eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves-”

In response I checked to see if Dickinson ever used the word “sherry” in any of her poems – AND – I checked for other alcoholic terms as well – and all of that reminded me of this cartoon I saw long ago, “thirst editions” by John Atkinson.

Of course, Mr. Atkinson’s chart might make one wonder what libations would top a similar list for poets – and what would the drink of choice be for Emily Dickinson?

Well, for Emily Dickinson -- and her sister Lavinia -- the choice would be a keg of beer. There was nothing the sisters loved more than frat parties and keggers at Amherst college.

In 1849, Emily Dickinson wrote to her cousins Frances and Louisa Norcross. In her letter, Dickinson stated the following:

"There is to be a party at the Sigma Alpha Epsilon house tomorrow night. They say that home is where the heart is ~ I think it is where the Sigma house is, and the adjacent buildings.

Vinnie and I will be happy amid this delightful kegger, and well we will drink our icy beers ~ and the world there will be so beautiful, and things so sweet and fair, that my heart will be soothed and comforted."

Well, I suspect you know that this post is a jest; however, yesterday I reported on the use of “drunkard” in Dickinson’s poems (the word is used in two poems), but I did not check upon the word “drunk” – and that word appears in three poems, “Had I known that the first was the last,” “One of the ones that midas touched,” “We – bee and I – live by the quaffing.”

The latter two use the word to mean a state of inebriation; the first uses the word as the part participle of “to drink” – BUT – only in the Johnson version of the poem. The Franklin and Miller editions both use the word “mixed” instead.

The Miller edition includes this note about the poem: “Matthew 19:30, ‘many that are first shall be last; and the last shall be first.’”

Odd Numbers

3/24/2025

In 1891, the editor of New York’s The Independent published a favorable review of the newly published Poems by Emily Dickinson, and he then wrote to Mabel Loomis Todd requesting additional poems to publish in his paper. She sent him four, from which he printed three. One of the three was “God made a little Gentian.” I wrote about that poem earlier in the month, HERE.

That poem made me wonder how many works Dickinson wrote that include the word “gentian.”

When you search “gentian” on the online Dickinson archive, 15 entries pop up, and they represent seven different poems:

Distrustful of the gentian
God made a little gentian
It will be summer eventually
The gentian has a parched corolla
The gentian weaves her fringes
The springtime’s pallid landscape
While Asters

Of the seven poems listed above, the ones in bold appear in all of the major editions of Dickinson’s poetry – Johnson, Franklin, and Miller. However, “While Asters” appears only in Johnson and NOT in Franklin or Martin.

Also, the poem “The springtime pallid’s landscape” appears only in the 1896 publication of Poems (Third Series) edited by Mabel Loomis Todd, and it does not appear in any of the “complete” editions.

But all of this gets more than a little fuzzy, and it all has to do with the third poem on the list above, “It will be summer eventually.”

The poem “The springtime’s pallid landscape,” in Todd’s 1896 edition, is really just stanzas 2 through 5 of “It will be summer eventually.”

And then look at “While Asters.” This poem is just a variation of lines 14, 15, and 16 of “It will be summer eventually”; however, BOTH poems appear in Johnson, “While Asters” (poem number 331) and “It will be summer eventually” (poem number 342).

Those lines, by the way, were sent to Samuel Bowles around early 1862.

Sooo…depending upon the editions of Dickinson’s poems you check, the word “gentians” could be in 5, 6 or 7 poems.

Emily Go Bragh!

3/17/2025

Happy St. Patrick’s Day to those who wear the green and/or drive snakes out of town!

In tribute to the foremost patron saint of Ireland, I thought I’d check a few SPD terms in the poetry of Emily Dickinson.

Did Dickinson ever use the word “shamrock”?

Nope.

However, she did use the word “clover” in fifteen poems – or sixteen if you count the 1890 version of “Like Trains of Cars on Tracks of Plush.” I think in that version, though, the word “clover” was added when editors Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson combined two of Dickinson’s poems into one.

Did Dickinson ever mention St. Patrick?

Nope.

How about Ireland (or “Eire”)?

Nope.

How often did she use the word “green”?

Dickinson used the word “green” in fifteen poems – but only fourteen if you check the Johnson edition of her “complete poems.” The poem “All overgrown by cunning moss” contains the word “green” in the Franklin edition of Dickinson’s poems, but NOT in Johnson’s edition.

The Miller edition includes both sets of stanzas and makes the following observation:

“May acknowledge the anniversary of the death of Charlotte Bronte (d. 31 March 1855), who published as Currer Bell and lived in Haworth. Line 1 echoes Bronte’s “Mementos” (1846): “all in this house is mossing over.” Gethsemane is the garden where Jesus prayed on the night before his crucifixion; asphodel flowers are associated with the Greek underworld, e.g. in The Odyssey. The “Or” between stanzas between 3 and 4 (where Miller indicated the alternate stanzas) may indicate that stanzas 4 and 5 are alternatives. In their single volume editions, THJ prints stanzas 1, 4, 5 and RWF prints stanzas 1, 2, 3.”

Shifting Ground

3/9/2025

Some of my recent poems have centered on Emily Dickinson’s use of rhymes – full rhymes, partial rhymes, other types of rhymes. Some of them have examined whether or not partial or slant rhymes were used for poems of despair while full, traditional rhymes were used in poems of joy.

In “Positive as Sound, Emily Dickinson’s Rhyme,” Judy Jo Small examined other ways Dickinson used rhyme as well.

“Another tactic Dickinson employs is the deliberate dislocation of a rhyme for a special semantic effect,” wrote Small. “In the well known ‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes,’ the lines are arranged in rhymed couplets, except in the anomalous second stanza.

In the middle stanza, the unthinking ‘Wooden’ motion that continues in states of spiritual numbness is suggested not only by the idea of feet functioning mechanically without the guidance of the mind and will but also by the steady iambic movement that proceeds dully without regard to (‘Regardless’ of) stanzaic shape or placement of rhyme. ‘Ground’ rhymes perfectly with ‘round,’ but not at the end of the line where it would seem orderly and coherent. Instead, it falls almost lost amid two unrhymed lines that move as if randomly, aimlessly, like the body whose soul is stupefied by pain. The word ‘Feet,’ then refers not only to human feet but, in a subsidiary way, to poetic feet.”

Interesting, huh? But consider this.

Small’s book was published in 1990, eight years before R. W. Franklin published his “The Poems of Emily Dickinson.” Therefore, she was likely basing her analysis on Thomas Johnson’s version of the poem in his 1955 edition of “The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson.”

Oddly enough, there are differences between the Johnson and Franklin versions of the poem, albeit subtle differences. First, the Franklin edition adds quotation marks in lines 3 and 4. However, the more significant difference involves lines 6 and 7 – the order of these lines is reversed.

In Johnson’s version, “ground” comes just two syllables after “round.” In Franklin’s version, “ground” comes six syllables later. Does that matter when it comes to Small’s contention? I suppose one could say “‘ground’ falls almost lost amid three unrhymed lines’ – or does the probability that Dickinson was aiming for an internal rhyme fall apart?

A bit more trivia about the poem: "After great pain a formal feeling comes" was first published in "The Atlantic" in February 1929. At that time, it was presented in three stanzas of 4 lines, 5 lines, and 6 lines. It later appeared in that same year in "Further Poems of Emily Dickinson.

In both publications, the Franklin/Miller version of the second stanza was used.