I shifted gears yesterday to discuss one of Dickinson’s three poems which uses the word “October,” but today I’m back at exploring why some of Dickinson’s poems are not linked to their full texts on an A to Z listing on Wikipedia. I’m up to “Flees so the phantom meadow” and “Fly – fly – but as you fly.”
 | The first, “Flees so the phantom meadow” is quick to explain: Poem numbers 26 and 27 in Franklin, “Distrustful of the Gentian” and “Flees so the phantom meadow” are combined as one poem in Johnson, number 20, “Distrustful of the Gentian.” Therefore, only one link is necessary. BTW: That longer dash (line?) you see in line 5 IS, in fact, included in both Johnson & Franklin. See the pic below -- I've pointed out Dickinson's dashes in lines 4 and 5. |
| Things get a bit trickier for “Fly – fly – but as you fly.” Probably about fifteen years ago I was in Chicago, and I visited the library at the Poetry Foundation. I pulled a book off the shelf of Dickinson’s “selected poems,” and I stumbled upon the poem “Fly – fly – but as you fly.” I was completely unfamiliar with this poem. I made a mental note of it, and when I got home I looked it up in the index of my Johnson edition of “The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson.” It wasn’t there. I couldn’t even find it on the Internet with various searches – about the only thing that would pop up with “Dickinson” and “fly” was “I heard a Fly buzz when I died." |  |
TBH, this is still true today; I ran a Google-search, and this poem never popped up – see the pic below.
At the time, I emailed a contact I had at Harvard’s Houghton Library, and that’s when I found out that Johnson’s “complete” poems by Dickinson was no longer “complete” – that Franklin’s 1998 edition of “The Poems of Emily Dickinson” had renumbered the poems and that that edition included additional poems, including “Fly – fly – but as you fly.”
Yep, Franklin number 1244, “Fly – fly – but as you fly” is not included in Johnson’s edition at all – not it’s not even combined with any of the other poems.
Interestingly, Miller’s 2016 edition of Dickinson’s poems includes this poem – AND – it also provides info about a note of Johnson’s from his research: “THJ categorizes these lines as ‘raw material for a poem’ in his appendix ‘Prose Fragments’ (“Poems of Emily Dickinson,’ PF75).”
Prose fragments? Raw material for a poem? It seems rather complete to me.
Does that have anything to do with why no link is provided on that Wikipedia list? Hmm...but the lines are included as a stand-alone poem in Franklin.
Seems odd to me.
FYI: A post about "Fly -- fly -- but as you fly" from 2019 is HERE.
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