58).

Because of her many poems about death—some of which happen to be among her most famous—Dickinson has been unfairly labeled a morbid poet. In fact, her interest in death makes perfect sense for a number of reasons. For one thing, Dickinson’s subject matter is so varied that it would be stranger if she didn’t write about death. Furthermore, as her biographer Cynthia Griffin Wolff has pointed out, Dickinson grew up in a culture highly preoccupied with death. Nineteenth-century children were taught to read with the New England Primer, which contained prayers that, as Wolff writes, “served to initiate even the youngest into an acknowledgment of death” (Wolff, Emily Dickinson, p. 69). Deaths from childbirth were extraordinarily common; New England grave-stones frequently represented death with vivid and memorable icons; and deathbed vigils—so eerily described in “I heard a fly buzz” (p. 252)—were practically social events. Not surprisingly, this cultural saturation influenced Dickinson’s poetry. This does not make her morbid; it merely shows how she transformed cultural preoccupations into poetic concerns. If Dickinson is obsessed with death, she is also capable of writing the most life-affirming of poems, as the following poem not included in this edition demonstrates :

Did life’s penurious length
Italicize its sweetness,
The men that daily live
Would stand so deep in joy
That it would clog the cogs
Of that revolving reason
Whose esoteric belt
Protects our sanity. (Complete Poems, poem 1717)

Here, adding her bracing contribution to the carpe diem genre, Dickinson argues that an awareness of death can fill us with an intoxicating, almost crazy joy in being alive. It is one of the least morbid poems ever written.

 

The long, involved story of the posthumous fate of Dickinson’s poems could fill its own volume. Only seven of her poems were published in her lifetime, five of them in the Springfield Republican. But after her death, her sister Lavinia discovered almost two thousand poems in her desk drawer, many written on scraps of paper or the back of grocery lists, others bound into what were later called “fascicles,” or sewn paper booklets. Lavinia resolved to see them into print. Soon she had persuaded Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Higginson to help her edit the poems, and the three of them approached Robert Brothers, a publishing house in Boston. The first volume of Poems appeared in 1890 and became a bestseller. Already, however, the long history of modifying Dickinson’s poems had begun, with some of her best and strangest lines omitted or changed, sentimental titles attached, rhymes regularized, and syntax standardized. Later editions, including The Single Hound: Poems of a Lifetime (1914), edited by Dickinson’s niece Martha Dickinson Bianchi, also distorted the poems. In her acute short poem “Emily Dickinson,” the contemporary British poet Wendy Cope wryly comments on this unfortunate trend:

Higgledy-piggledy
Emily Dickinson
Liked to use dashes
Instead of full stops.

 

Nowadays, faced with such
Idiosyncrasy,
Critics and editors
Send for the cops.
(Cope, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, p. 23)

Finally, in 1955, Thomas H. Johnson’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson offered readers access to all of Dickinson’s poems, arranged in estimated chronological order and with her idiosyncrasies—slant rhymes, dashes, capitals—intact. Johnson’s restored text went a long way toward undoing the follies of earlier editors. (To take just one example, Todd and Higginson had changed “Because I could not stop for Death” (p. 200) so that the line “Cornice—in the Ground” read “The cornice but a mound,” thereby reducing an eerily sinking grave to a simple pile of dirt.)

For a long while (until the publication in 1999 of an edition of the poems by R. W. Franklin), most readers, scholars, and teachers regarded Johnson’s edition as the authoritative one. But for some, it did not go far enough. The critics Sharon Cameron and Susan Howe, for example, argue that the variant words Dickinson often included at the bottom of a manuscript page should be read as essential parts of the poems; among Dickinson’s myriad innovations, they claim, is a new approach to poetics in which writers and readers need not always choose one word and meanings can proliferate in fruitful mayhem.