Emily Dickinson's Poems: As She Preserved Them ed. by Cristanne Miller (review)

The gleam of an heroic act

Such strange illumination

The Possible's slow fuse is lit

By the Imagination

—Emily Dickinson

Despite being widely recognized as one of the most distinctive voices in the American canon, little is known about what plans Emily Dickinson had for the nearly 1800 poems she left behind in manuscript, much less the process by which she composed them. Indeed, speculation about her intentions, competing claims for how (and if) her idiosyncratic handwritten works should be translated to the printed page, and even debate about the texts' status as "poetry" have attended Dickinson's reception since Mabel Loomis Todd's 1890 edition of Poems was first published by Roberts Brothers. The history of Dickinson's manuscripts—the bulk of which were shared first among family, then entrusted to Todd, and finally divided between Amherst College and Harvard amidst bitter disagreements—and the fact that Dickinson herself did not play an active role in the anonymous publication of the ten poems that saw print in her lifetime have continued to present significant editorial challenges.

Bearing such debates and known-unknowns in mind, it is hard to overstate the significance of Cristanne Miller's new edition, Emily Dickinson's Poems: As She Preserved Them, which, almost gobsmackingly, aims to provide readers "legible access to the full complexity of Dickinson's work and her working process" (vii). If the goal of giving access to the full range of Dickinson's "work" alone is ambitious, that of disclosing Dickinson's "working process" appears at first glance utterly implausible. However, the arrangement and apparatus of this edition are what enable Dickinson's process to come into view, refracted prismatically through what we know Dickinson did with the poems. Miller's edition represents several significant "firsts" in approach to this body of work. It is the first edition to present Dickinson's own ordering of the poems in her 40 handmade booklets or "fascicles," the first to show her alternative words or...