Some of us call running syntax over linebreaks enjambment,
which is anyway much rarer in Dickinson than coincidence of
phrase and line ending (also enforced with her rhymes).
That you can sing some of her poems to "Yellow Rose" negates
the fashionable idea that editors have "squashed" Dickinson's
music into hymn meter, since hymn meter accounts for most of her
poems, regardless how postmodernly some, like Howe or McGann (not at
all "current conventional understanding"), attend more to the vagaries
of D's handwriting than to the sound of her poems. The effort to transcribe
D's writing as a kind of free verse would be like transcribing
without line breaks the metered poems found unlineated in Latin
or Greek manuscripts, claiming that Virgil's "music" has been
traduced by modern editors.
Mark Baker
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