Then, in 1898 – due to a lawsuit between Todd and Lavinia Dickinson – she locked all of the remaining poems in her possession in a wooden chest (about 600-plus poems), and she did not open it until 1929. These poems were then published in 1945 in “Bolts of Melody.”
In 1929, when she and her daughter Millicent Todd Bingham opened the chest, Bingham described what was before her like this:
“The manuscripts of the poems were of two sorts: those Emily herself had worked over, and those which she had not touched since they were first captured in words – the ‘esoteric sips of sacramental wine.’ She had begun to copy her poems and to destroy the rough drafts. She wrote them in ink on sheets of letter paper measuring five by eight inches. When she had filled five or six double sheets, she would make two pin-holes in the left margin and insert a piece of string, tying the sheets together in neat little fascicle which Lavinia called ‘volumes.’”
She continued later with this information:
“Although Emily seems to have considered many of these poems finished, as I have said, they were far from ready for the printer. The arrangement, verse form, and in particular the punctuation were not clearly indicated. In some poems dashes are sprinkled about so lavishly that they give to the page the appearance of a thread on which the phrases are strung. At times the dashes seem so integral a part of the text that an editor is tempted to perpetuate them, lest without them the words should fall apart.”
And here’s where the work really got complicated:
“In a good many poems she supplied alternative words, phrases, or lines, little crosses indicating where the final choice should be inserted. The editor is obliged to retrace Emily’s steps, to follow the method she herself used, trying one word after another before deciding which best fits the particular setting.”
Editor Bingham mentioned that even Dickinson found the task of editing difficult as evidenced by these lines the poet wrote:
“I hesitate which word to take, as I can take but few, and each must be the chiefest; but recall that Earth’s most graphic transaction is placed within a syllable, nay, even a gaze.”
I’ll take a look at one particular poem tomorrow.