Etext scanned by Jim Tinsley <jtinsley@pobox.com>
by EMILY DICKINSON
Series Two
Edited by two of her friends
MABEL LOOMIS TODD and T.W.HIGGINSON
The eagerness with which the first volume of Emily Dickinson'spoems has been read shows very clearly that all our alleged modernartificiality does not prevent a prompt appreciation of thequalities of directness and simplicity in approaching the greatestthemes,—life and love and death. That "irresistible needle-touch,"as one of her best critics has called it, piercing at once the verycore of a thought, has found a response as wide and sympathetic asit has been unexpected even to those who knew best her compellingpower. This second volume, while open to the same criticism as toform with its predecessor, shows also the same shining beauties.
Although Emily Dickinson had been in the habit of sendingoccasional poems to friends and correspondents, the full extent ofher writing was by no means imagined by them. Her friend "H.H."must at least have suspected it, for in a letter dated 5thSeptember, 1884, she wrote:—
MY DEAR FRIEND,— What portfolios full of versesyou must have! It is a cruel wrong to your "day andgeneration" that you will not give them light.
If such a thing should happen as that I should outliveyou, I wish you would make me your literary legateeand executor. Surely after you are what is called"dead" you will be willing that the poor ghosts youhave left behind should be cheered and pleased by yourverses, will you not? You ought to be. I do not thinkwe have a right to withhold from the world a word ora thought any more than a deed which might help asingle soul. . . .
Truly yours,
The "portfolios" were found, shortly after Emily Dickinson's death,by her sister and only surviving housemate. Most of the poems hadbeen carefully copied on sheets of note-paper, and tied in littlefascicules, each of six or eight sheets. While many of them bearevidence of having been thrown off at white heat, still more hadreceived thoughtful revision. There is the frequent addition ofrather perplexing foot-notes, affording large choice of words andphrases. And in the copies which she sent to friends, sometimes oneform, sometimes another, is found to have been used. Withoutimportant exception, her friends have generously placed at thedisposal of the Editors any poems they had received from her; andthese have given the obvious advantage of comparison among severalrenderings of the same verse.
To what further rigorous pruning her verses would have beensubjected had she published them herself, we cannot know. Theyshould be regarded in many cases as merely the first strong andsuggestive sketches of an artist, intended to be embodied at sometime in the finished picture.
Emily Dickinson appears to have written her first poems in thewinter of 1862. In a letter to one of the present Editors theApril following, she says, "I made no verse, but one or two, untilthis winter."
The handwriting was at first somewhat like the delicate, runningItalian hand of our elder gentlewomen; but as she advanced inbreadth of thought, it grew bolder and more abrupt, until in herlatest years each letter stood distinct and separate from itsfellows. In most of her poems, particularly the later ones,everything by way of punctuation was discarded, except numerousdashe