It’s a pattern, so an editor would be within reason to call all dashes after final, uncrossed “t”s the crosses for those letters and not any kind of dash – open, of course, to particularized objections. Oxford did a boo-boo.) There’s a similar, what, laterally dislocated cross, crossing the “t” in “at”, in that first line between *at* and *the*, and another in the first word of the fifth line: *But*. (I don’t see any mark on that line after the question mark at all. Well, in that overrun first line, the dash between the *Heat”* and the *?* is how Dickinson crossed her final “t”s. February 11th, 2011 / 4:38 am Steveroggenbuck!!.If I am wrong about any of this, please call me out. *Note: I am far from a Dickinson scholar. I just think it’s funny that for all the “Dickinson without dashes is blasphemy!!” sentiment, there are still discrepancies between contemporary versions, and not all the dashes made the cut. Does it change the poem entirely? Not really. For example, that dash at the end of the first line of the Oxford version could potentially be discussed ad nauseam ( what does it mean?) even though it’s totally absent in other versions and might be a typo. They make for different experiences and therefore different poems. So, if you buy into the power/theory of Dickinson’s dashes - that they break up conventional thought processes and provoke the reader to a more active reading (these are conclusions we came to in class) - then the above discrepancies are not totally inconsequential. Either way, this dash in the Oxford version is a little weird. This dash is not present in the print reproduction of the manuscript (the 2nd image), but if you look closely at the original manuscript image there is what might be a dash after the word “Heat” but before the question mark, although this could also be the missed place cross of the “t” - it’s hard to tell. This is identical to the Johnson version with the exception of an added dash at the end of the first line. Here’s another contemporary version, this one from The Oxford Book of American Poetry edited by David Lehman (the retarded underlines are mine): (If you look at the manuscript, these marks are a little ambiguous, but I don’t see how you can call the line after “tint” a dash and not the lines after “conditions,” “Blaze,” or “blacksmith.”) Went with “vivid,” “vanquished,” and “it.” The dash after “conditions” becomes a comma, the one after “blaze” becomes a period, the one after “blacksmith” is removed completely. Johnson and originally published in 1960 (sorry for the blur on the left): Now here’s the poem as it appears in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson edited by Thomas H. Went with “vivid” over “quickened,” “sated” over “vanquished,” “it” over “she,” removed some quotation marks and capitalizations, even changed some words. Here is poem #365 as it was published in 1924 (I think this was the earliest publication of it): And her sister found the poems and got them published and the dashes were famously removed by editors. Further, her manuscripts (most of them) were found bound in 40 separate booklets ( “fasicles”), therefore possibly implying they were finished works - meant to be read with alternate words and all.īut she died. This is kind of interesting right? Her final manuscripts include alternate word choices, sometimes more-than-marginally effecting the outcome of the poem (e.g. Here are two different versions of poem #365: 1) a copy of the original manuscript and 2) an all-inclusive print representation of the manuscript (both from Inflections of the Pen: Dash and Voice in Emily Dickinson by Paul Crumbley) em dash thing, but even their placement and existence. I did some further reading, though, and noticed/learned something I think is interesting: even among the “accepted,” contemporary, “dash-inclusive” collections of her work, the dashes still aren’t fully represented the way she wrote them in her manuscripts… and I’m not just talking about the hypen vs. ( I posted about this a few days ago.) My one sentence conclusion: “They’re nearly as important as the words are.” yeah ok whatever… Last night for school I was asked to give a brief presentation on the importance of Emily Dickinson’s dashes.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |