(Cameron, Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson’s Fascicles, and Howe, My Emily Dickinson). Others have complained that the fascicles should be treated as separate volumes; or that Johnson’s division of most of the poems into quatrains is too sweeping and Dickinson’s stanza divisions are more varied than he allowed. In the original manuscript, for example, the first words of the poem “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass” (p. 96) are on two lines, with “the Grass” set as a separate line against the left margin; Johnson argues that this was due to lack of writing space, but others suggest a more deliberate experimentation with line breaks on Dickinson’s part.

It should be noted that this edition arranges Dickinson’s poems by theme, and regularizes her punctuation and capitalization; readers eager for a version of the poems closer to the manuscripts should seek out Johnson’s edition, as well as the stimulating criticism of Cameron, Howe, and others.

In a poem not included in this edition, Dickinson wrote about the posthumous fate of poets:

The Poets light but Lamps—
Themselves—go out—
The wicks they stimulate—
If vital Light

 

Inhere as do the Suns-
Each Age a Lens
Disseminating their
Circumference—(Complete Poems, poem 883)

Crudely paraphrased, the poem asserts that after poets die, they are interpreted—if they are “vital” enough—in different ways by different people. This has certainly been the case with Dickinson, who has influenced later writers in an astonishing variety of ways.

Hart Crane’s sonnet “To Emily Dickinson,” though it overlooks her wit and range, tenderly invokes a “sweet, dead Silencer”:

You who desired so much—in vain to ask-
Yet fed your hunger like an endless task,
Dared dignify the labor, bless the quest—
Achieved that stillness ultimately best.
(Crane, The Poems of Hart Crane, p. 128)

Here and elsewhere, Crane’s obsessive use of dashes shows that Dickinson’s ghost was never far from his side. Archibald MacLeish claimed, somewhat condescendingly, “Most of us are half in love with this girl” (in Bogan, Emily Dickinson: Three Views, p. 20). William Carlos Williams remarked in an interview,

She was an independent spirit... She did her best to get away from too strict an interpretation. And she didn’t want to be confirmed to rhyme or reason.... And she followed the American idiom.... She was a wild girl. She chafed against restraint. But she speaks the spoken language, the idiom, which would be deformed by Oxford English.... She was a real good guy (Williams, Poets at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, p. 169).

Elizabeth Bishop, though she admitted that “I still hate the oh the-pain-of-it-all poems,” noted, “I admire many others” (Kalstone, Becoming a Poet, p. 132).

Confessional poetry, with its harsh excavations of the self’s deepest places, would not be as rich without Dickinson’s example. Robert Frost, though seldom classed as a confessional poet, wrote several poems in which exploration of his “Desert Places” leads him to a terrifying inner antagonist, a “blanker whiteness” (Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost, p. 296) that recalls both Dickinson’s customary dress color and her observations: “Pain has an element of blank” (p. 16) and “One need not be a chamber to be haunted” (p. 224). Finding depths within oneself, of course, can be cause for celebration as well as fear, a fact of which Wallace Stevens seems acutely aware in these lines from “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”:

Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,
And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.
I was myself the compass of that sea:

 

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.
(Stevens, The Collected Poems, p. 65)

Here, as often happens in Dickinson’s work, the human and the divine change places, and the mind’s capacity is found to be equal or superior to God’s.

Several later poets, like Dickinson before them, make death a character: Anne Sexton titled one of her poems “For Mr. Death Who Stands with His Door Open,” and Sylvia Plath’s “Death & Co.” personifies not one but two Deaths. (There are also numerous moments in the work of both poets when they imagine their own deaths.) And the popular poet Billy Collins cheerfully profanes Dickinson’s woman-in-white mystique in “Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes,” describing how

I could plainly hear her inhale
when I undid the very top
hook-and-eye fastener of her corset

 

and I could hear her sigh when finally it was unloosed,
the way some readers sigh when they realize
that Hope has feathers,
that reason is a plank,
that life is a loaded gun
that looks right at you with a yellow eye.
(Collins, Picnic, Lightning, p.