Twenty-Five Poems by Emily Dickinson: Unpublished Variant Versions

Abstract

W1 Z HEN HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS published Poems of Emily Dickinson in i955,' generations of confusion about the Dickinson canon seemed to be over. publisher's introduction called the edition definitive and epoch-making. subtitle of the three volumes, Including variant readings critically compared with all known manuscripts, was reassuring. In his acknowledgments the editor, Thomas H. Johnson, made it clear that he had studied and made photostats of Millicent Todd Bingham's large collection of Dickinson manuscripts and also the many transcripts made by Mrs. Bingham's mother, Mabel Loomis Todd, the first editor of Emily Dickinson's poems. transcripts were important textually because they preserved poems and variant versions of poems whose originals were missing or destroyed.* following twenty-six versions of twenty-five poems by Emily Dickinson do not appear in the Harvard volumes. All of them come from Millicent Todd Bingham's Dickinson papers. All but one are among the papers which Mrs. Bingham presented to Amherst College in I957; the exception, The Show is not the Show, is one of three poems Mrs. Bingham gave to the Library of Congress in I956. poems are grouped in four categories, according to source: I, Emily Dickinson's manuscripts (six poems, plus a second version of one of them); ii, transcripts by Mabel Loomis Todd of lost manuscripts (thirteen poems); III, transcripts made by Frances Norcross of poems sent to her and her sister Louisa by Emily Dick-