I think the reason Peter hasn't received the response he expected to his
remarks re Emily Dickinson is that nobody so far has picked up the
reference, which I assume was not Johnson & Franklin & their editions
but the more radical viewpoint of in particular Susan Howe. Maybe
others, but I only know Howe's. For those who don't know Howe's views
here's a paragraph from her essay These Flames and Generosities of the
Heart:
'Thomas H. Johnson's _The Poems of Emily Dickinson_ did restore the
poet's idiosyncratic spelling, punctuation (the famous dashes), and word
variants to her poems. At the same time he created the impression that a
definitive textual edition could exist. He called his Introduction
"Creating the Poems", then gave their creator a male muse-minister. He
arranged her "verses" into hymnlike stanzas with little variation in
form and no variation in cadence. By choosing a sovereign system for her
line endings - _his_ preappointed Plan - he established the constraints
of a strained positivity. Copious footnotes, numbers, comparisons, and
chronologies mask his authorial role.'
She then reproduces a poem in photo-facsimile & transcribes it:
Experience is the Angled
Road
Preferred against the
Mind
By - Paradox - The
Mind itself -
Presuming it to lead
Quite Opposite - How
Complicate
The Discipline of
Man -
Compelling Him to
Choose Himself
His Pre appointed Pain -
I've tried to reproduce the spacing here but I can't show the way the
dashes in the Howe transcription vary - some with an acute slope, some
oblique. Later in the essay she discusses & reproduces ED's use of
little crosses variously positioned. At its simplest, then, Howe's
argument is that Johnson has overriden ED's word spacing, lineation &
the variety of her personal punctuation, & thus intervened in a crucial
way, producing Johnson-Dickinson poems which do not represent ED's mss
as closely as he'd have us believe. To Howe, on the other hand, these
spacings lineations etc are vital to an understanding of the poetry:
they have a semantic value which she believes a good reader would
recognise.
Of course one can argue that Howe, the most textualist of textualist
poets, is recreating ED in her own image here (the title of her larger
ED study _My Emily Dickinson_ acknowledges as much in a challenging sort
of way) & that these notions of spatiality & lineation would be foreign
to Dickinson herself. Personally I find the Howe view more interesting
than that, & find her ED studies & transcriptions open ED's work to me
in a way that the regularised Johnson/Franklin approach doesn't. But
we'd need to consider the whole scope of her presentation, which in
effect involves a complete rereading, to argue about that. As far as the
discussion on this mailbase is concerned Howe's essay quotes & comments
on some interesting exchanges with Franklin re the Dickinson copyright &
thus relates back to the opening discussion re Robinson & Clare and
Alaric's broadside.
It's worth noting too the similarities & differences in the cases of
Clare, Shelley & Dickinson texts. There's a greater similarity between
Clare & Dickinson insofar as we're considering the canonisation of
particular versions of their texts. With Clare it seems that Robinson is
offering the nearest a typographical version can get to the manuscript.
Johnson appears to offer the same but Howe's examples show this is not
so. There is on the other hand a much larger proportion of Clare's work
published in his lifetime & presumably authorised by him: & standardised
according to the conventions of his day. The Garland Shelley
facsimiles/transcripts do not seek to establish themselves as canonised
texts; they are a means to the end of arriving at a well-established
Shelley canon presented in a way consonant with Shelley's authorised (in
the literal sense) texts; the fact that they create as a by-product a
radically different kind of 'Shelley text' is probably a matter of
interest to a handful of textualist poets. Which leads to the reflection
that these textual disputes concern three of the relatively few poets
who have a popular i.e. non-specialist readership - to whom I imagine
these matters are of very little interest. Establish at long last a
clean Shelley collected edn & most readers will probably still use the
handiest 19th C dodgy text photofacsimiled by Wordsworth Editions or
whomever. The question then is whether the specialist & non-specialist
are reading the same poems. What degree of variation makes a poem a
different poem? Howe's I suppose is the extreme view: very little. I
think there's something to be said for that.
--
Alan Halsey
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