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Inflections of the Pen: Dash and Voice in Emily Dickinson. By Paul Crumbley.
Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky. 1997. x, 224 pp. $29.95.
Emily Dickinson's dashes appear uniform in print, but in her manuscripts they vary in length, angle, line placement, and proximity to words. It was Edith Wylder who first argued that this usage was not arbitrary, but a notational habit influenced by Ebeneezer Porter's Rhetorical Reader, a standard nineteenth-century elocution text in which acute and grave accents placed over the vowel of a word denoted rising or falling inflection. Nevertheless, most of Dickinson's editors regularized her dashes for publication. Thomas Johnson, editor of the standard texts, described her usage as "capricious," and Ralph Franklin wrote that Dickinson employed dashes casually in recipe notes as well as in letters...