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By Paul Crumbley. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997. 212 pp. $22.95.
Teachers of Emily Dickinson's poetry often hear the refrain from students new to her work: "There are so many dashes!" Until recently, readers bewildered by the dashiness of Dickinson's poetry have gotten little insight from critics into this striking graphic feature of her texts. Critical thought about the significance of the dashes has been divided between the majority opinion that says that the dashes are truly accidental and meaningless, and the eccentric minority opinion, first advanced by Edith Wylder in The Last Face (1971), that says that the dashes are a specific method of indicating rhetorical emphasis.
Is the form of Dickinson's manuscripts irrelevant to interpreting her poetry or crucial? Paul Crumbley thinks that the way the manuscript texts look on the page is crucial. His book Inflections...