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A review by swamp_witch
Emily Dickinson Poems by Emily Dickinson
1.0
This review is of the Castle Edition, ed. by Brownell: The edits in this volume are so extensive and random that these poems can no longer be considered Dickinson's work. Instead, this edition goes to great lengths to destroy much of what makes Dickinson Dickinson, and replaces her complexity and ambiguity and delightful weirdness with ... something that isn't Dickinson anymore, but some kind of Brownell-Dickinson hybrid. To add insult to injury, this collection does not acknowledge the changes made to these poems, leaving readers unaware of how much of the poetry has been edited (the answer is, "a lot"). Please check out the Johnson edition instead, which has Dickinson's actual poems and which carefully organizes and dates her work, while detailing the editorial decisions made in their transcription.
Brownell is not an acceptable anthologizer of poetry, nor does she seem professionally qualified to edit Dickinson. She normalizes Dickinson's punctuation, de-capitalizes nouns and verbs, eliminates dashes, changes the fascinating slant rhymes to true rhymes, and wholly replaces words. By doing so, Brownell has done more than imply that she knows what Dickinson wants to say better than Dickinson does. She has continued the long and frustrating tradition of simplifying Dickinson's work, making it seem pious, sentimental, and more-or-less straightforward. It's obvious that for Brownell, Dickinson's poetry is cutesy and conventional, with no hint of linguistic experimentation or mental agility.
For example, here's one of Dickinson's most complicated (and kick-ass) poems:
I'm "wife" - I've finished that -
That other state -
I'm Czar - I'm "Woman" now -
It's safer so -
How odd the Girl's life looks
Behind this soft Eclipse -
I think that Earth feels so
To folks in Heaven - now -
This being comfort - then
That other kind - was pain -
But why compare?
I'm "Wife"! Stop there!
With the exception of two exclamation points and the question mark in the last stanza, Dickinson has no normalized punctuation. Instead, she uses her trademark dashes - perhaps to indicate a change in rhythm, to allude to a missing word, or to call into question the relations of the phrases on either side of the dash. A good example of this ambiguity are the lines, "To folks in Heaven - now -/ This being comfort - then/ That other kind." With "now" separated by the pause, it's impossible to say for sure to what words it is referring. Is it to the "folks in Heaven" or to "This being comfort"? Why is "then" not followed by a similar dash? Does it describe "comfort" as the past tense, or "That other kind" as the logical next step after comfort? If the latter (to which the grammar seems to gesture), why does the line syntactically match the previous line as if to suggest a similar relationship? As readers, we cannot know why Dickinson has made these lines so ambiguous. Dickinson was fascinated with the unknowable, the mysterious, and the hidden, and a "meaning" of a poem to her would not necessarily be something stable or finite. In this poem, the pauses in part emphasize that logic. They are not sure what Earth or Heaven "feels" like, and the boundary between "pain" and "comfort" in the context of marriage (or religion, or several other subjects) is troubled, a sensation doubled by the stare quotes around the words "'Wife'" and "'Woman.'" The speaker calls into question the definition of either of these words and, before she can reach a conclusion about them, she "Stop[s] there!" She leaves the reader in the lurch, unsure of the benefits of marriage or of the speaker's gender or sexuality in the context of the poem.
If we couple the accurate version of the poem with Brownell's "editing," much of the ambiguity has been smothered, making the poem seem a sentimental, conventional representation of a 19th-century marriage:
I'M wife; I've finished that,
That other state;
I'm Czar, I'm woman now:
It's safer so.
How odd the little girl's life looks
Behind this soft eclipse!
I think that earth seems so
To those in heaven now.
This being comfort, then
That other kind was pain;
But why compare?
I'm wife! stop there!
Brownell seems to think this poem is about wifedom's superiority to the "little girl's life." We now know that "those in heaven" ("folk in heaven" is just too bewildering and interesting a juxtaposition) are "now" thinking of how earth "seems" (they do not, for whatever reason, "feel" this difference anymore). What's more, "woman" and "wife" are not fluid, socially-determined, or mental states of being. One is "comfort," while the "other kind" is "pain." In Brownell's version, the reader is indeed left wondering "why compare?" Why read Dickinson at all? What's a woman writer for, anyway, if she's not writing something easy and sentimental? Why is this person editing Dickinson when they clearly don't know anything about Dickinson's work? Dickinson's word choice, syntax, sound, and punctuation were deliberate, thought-out, and necessary - to change them changes the poem. Why are we still discussing this in 2011? And then there's the fact that Brownell titles the poems and sections them off as "Love" (of whom?), "Life," "Time and Eternity," and other similarly breezy titles.
So, anyway, yes, I think this kind of editing is a sexist and disappointing act, and it is shameful that there are no notations indicating that the poems were even edited. Someone who is not versed in Dickinson would likely think that these are the original poems. They aren't. They are edited without the poet's approval and without basic education about her writing, without editorial explanation or scholarship.
Brownell's pastiche was my first encounter with Dickinson's poetry in middle school. Unsurprisingly, it led me to conclude that Dickinson was boring and overhyped. I was lucky to continue studying literature and to return to Dickinson in a better edition. It infuriates me that this edition had so flippantly cheated me of what should have been a revelatory experience.
Anyone will immediately notice Dickinson's genius in a decently compiled version. Again, I recommend Thomas H. Johnson's edition (published by Back Bay Books), which is a complete collection of Dickinson that is much more carefully edited.
Brownell is not an acceptable anthologizer of poetry, nor does she seem professionally qualified to edit Dickinson. She normalizes Dickinson's punctuation, de-capitalizes nouns and verbs, eliminates dashes, changes the fascinating slant rhymes to true rhymes, and wholly replaces words. By doing so, Brownell has done more than imply that she knows what Dickinson wants to say better than Dickinson does. She has continued the long and frustrating tradition of simplifying Dickinson's work, making it seem pious, sentimental, and more-or-less straightforward. It's obvious that for Brownell, Dickinson's poetry is cutesy and conventional, with no hint of linguistic experimentation or mental agility.
For example, here's one of Dickinson's most complicated (and kick-ass) poems:
I'm "wife" - I've finished that -
That other state -
I'm Czar - I'm "Woman" now -
It's safer so -
How odd the Girl's life looks
Behind this soft Eclipse -
I think that Earth feels so
To folks in Heaven - now -
This being comfort - then
That other kind - was pain -
But why compare?
I'm "Wife"! Stop there!
With the exception of two exclamation points and the question mark in the last stanza, Dickinson has no normalized punctuation. Instead, she uses her trademark dashes - perhaps to indicate a change in rhythm, to allude to a missing word, or to call into question the relations of the phrases on either side of the dash. A good example of this ambiguity are the lines, "To folks in Heaven - now -/ This being comfort - then/ That other kind." With "now" separated by the pause, it's impossible to say for sure to what words it is referring. Is it to the "folks in Heaven" or to "This being comfort"? Why is "then" not followed by a similar dash? Does it describe "comfort" as the past tense, or "That other kind" as the logical next step after comfort? If the latter (to which the grammar seems to gesture), why does the line syntactically match the previous line as if to suggest a similar relationship? As readers, we cannot know why Dickinson has made these lines so ambiguous. Dickinson was fascinated with the unknowable, the mysterious, and the hidden, and a "meaning" of a poem to her would not necessarily be something stable or finite. In this poem, the pauses in part emphasize that logic. They are not sure what Earth or Heaven "feels" like, and the boundary between "pain" and "comfort" in the context of marriage (or religion, or several other subjects) is troubled, a sensation doubled by the stare quotes around the words "'Wife'" and "'Woman.'" The speaker calls into question the definition of either of these words and, before she can reach a conclusion about them, she "Stop[s] there!" She leaves the reader in the lurch, unsure of the benefits of marriage or of the speaker's gender or sexuality in the context of the poem.
If we couple the accurate version of the poem with Brownell's "editing," much of the ambiguity has been smothered, making the poem seem a sentimental, conventional representation of a 19th-century marriage:
I'M wife; I've finished that,
That other state;
I'm Czar, I'm woman now:
It's safer so.
How odd the little girl's life looks
Behind this soft eclipse!
I think that earth seems so
To those in heaven now.
This being comfort, then
That other kind was pain;
But why compare?
I'm wife! stop there!
Brownell seems to think this poem is about wifedom's superiority to the "little girl's life." We now know that "those in heaven" ("folk in heaven" is just too bewildering and interesting a juxtaposition) are "now" thinking of how earth "seems" (they do not, for whatever reason, "feel" this difference anymore). What's more, "woman" and "wife" are not fluid, socially-determined, or mental states of being. One is "comfort," while the "other kind" is "pain." In Brownell's version, the reader is indeed left wondering "why compare?" Why read Dickinson at all? What's a woman writer for, anyway, if she's not writing something easy and sentimental? Why is this person editing Dickinson when they clearly don't know anything about Dickinson's work? Dickinson's word choice, syntax, sound, and punctuation were deliberate, thought-out, and necessary - to change them changes the poem. Why are we still discussing this in 2011? And then there's the fact that Brownell titles the poems and sections them off as "Love" (of whom?), "Life," "Time and Eternity," and other similarly breezy titles.
So, anyway, yes, I think this kind of editing is a sexist and disappointing act, and it is shameful that there are no notations indicating that the poems were even edited. Someone who is not versed in Dickinson would likely think that these are the original poems. They aren't. They are edited without the poet's approval and without basic education about her writing, without editorial explanation or scholarship.
Brownell's pastiche was my first encounter with Dickinson's poetry in middle school. Unsurprisingly, it led me to conclude that Dickinson was boring and overhyped. I was lucky to continue studying literature and to return to Dickinson in a better edition. It infuriates me that this edition had so flippantly cheated me of what should have been a revelatory experience.
Anyone will immediately notice Dickinson's genius in a decently compiled version. Again, I recommend Thomas H. Johnson's edition (published by Back Bay Books), which is a complete collection of Dickinson that is much more carefully edited.