Finished
#reading The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. R.W. Franklin.
By which I mean, not that I have carefully read all 1,789 poems, but that I need to take it back to the library, having read enough to convince me that I need my own copy of this book.
This is the “reading edition” of Dickinson’s complete poems, drawn from an earlier, three-volume critical edition by Franklin which includes all the multiple surviving versions of each poem. Franklin’s practice in this edition has been to use (in most cases) the last version from Dickinson’s own process of reviewing and rewriting her work. Occasionally I found myself regretting not having the version of a poem that I’m familiar with from other editions.
Franklin also preserves Dickinson’s original spelling (”opon”, “hav’nt”, “dont”, and so on) and punctuation, with an interesting explanation in the introduction for his choice of a spaced hyphen rather than an en dash or em dash, as more “appropriate to the relative weight of the dashes in most of her poems.
As for the poems, you probably already know whether you like Dickinson or not. I found that having access to her full works, rather than just selections, brought out aspects of her poetry I’d not previously fully appreciated, such as her sharp and subversive humour (such as in “You’re right - the way is narrow”), or the undercurrent of eroticism, which I’d been aware of from previous reading of her work (see, for example, “All the letters I can write”, with its “Syllables of Velvet - /
Sentences of Plush, /
Depths of Ruby, undrained…”), but which crops up in numerous other places as well (such as “Over the fence - Strawberries - grow”).
The book itself, though a paperback, is exquisitely produced. I’ll be adding this to my Christmas list…
Update: no I won’t. Thanks to a friend on Facebook, I’ll instead by adding this to my Christmas list. But either way, it involves having a lot more Emily Dickinson in my life, which can only be a good thing…
