The Dickinson Wars David Wyatt (bio) Emily Dickinson's poems are surrounded by the sound of axes being ground. When alive, her gaze may have been toward Eternity, but her afterlife remains mired in an endless elaboration of worldly intrigues. The question of who Dickinson loved—if it were not God himself—continues to provoke heated debate. Scholars disagree as to why Dickinson chose not to see her poems into print. As editions of the poems do appear, they are met by counter-editions. The Dickinson manuscripts rescued from the households where they had been disseminated are now held by two institutions that cannot agree as to who should hold copyright. And while the two variorum editions of Dickinson's poems were produced by men, such projects were only made possible by the exertions of and the competitions between three decades of extraordinary women. "Then Vinnie came to me:" the sentence appears in a journal entry dated November 30, 1890, although the moment being remembered occurred some three years earlier. Vinnie is Lavinia, Emily Dickinson's younger sister. The author of the sentence is Mabel Loomis Todd, the mistress of Austin Dickinson, the poet's older brother. Vinnie has come to Mabel to ask her to take up a dropped stitch. After Emily's death in 1886, her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert Dickinson had volunteered to edit poems found by Vinnie in a drawer. But, according to Todd, Susan had recently concluded that the poems "would never sell—there was not money enough to get them out—the public would not care for them, & so on—in short, she gave it up." What Vinnie had found after her sister's death were some 250 unbound poems along with 40 fascicles, small booklets of poems tied together with string. When all the poems left behind by Dickinson were eventually located, the count had risen to 1,789. Only 10 of these poems were published during Dickinson's lifetime. In poem number 709 (Dickinson did not title her poems), Dickinson had openly expressed her ambivalence about bringing her work to market: "Publication-is the Auction / Of the Mind of Man." Mabel Todd began copying Dickinson's poems in the fall of 1887. As she began transcribing Dickinson's handwriting, a task described by Richard B. Sewall as one of "cryptographic proportions," Mabel found that "the poems [End Page 159] were having a wonderful effect on me, mentally and spiritually. They seemed to open the door to a wider universe than the little sphere surrounding me which so often hurt and compressed me." It is "safe to say," Sewall concludes, "that without the spiritual kinship she felt with the poet and with the poems we might have had no poems (or letters) at all." After some 300 poems had been typed—Todd was working with two early versions of the typewriter—she decided to hire an assistant, but "some of her mistakes in Emily's mad words were so ludicrous as to be pathetic." Todd turned to copying with a pen, and the work went more quickly. By the summer of 1889 she had transcribed 700 poems. The copies made were not and could not be exact, both because of the oddities in Dickinson's handwriting and because of the alternate wordings she had provided for a number of her poems. Todd sometimes registered these variants. But in transcribing she also changed Dickinson's spelling, omitted capital letters, and altered spacing and punctuation. During the winter of 1889-90 Todd submitted her findings to writer and editor Thomas Higginson, Dickinson's longtime friend and supporter. Higginson chose about 200 poems from the selection offered him and arranged them under topical headings: Life, Love, Nature, Time & Eternity. He also insisted on making changes of his own, the most famous involving his insistence on altering "I wish I were a Hay" to "I wish I were the hay." The proposed edition was then submitted to Roberts Brothers. One of the publisher's clients, a poet named Arlo Bates, acted as a reader for the press. He cut the number of poems in half and insisted on some changes of his own. Todd and Higginson...