[Tim McGrath]

Dickinson scholarship is dominated by what I call the originalists, who feel that her poems were bastardized by Mabel Loomis Todd. I am grateful that we have the efforts of Franklin and Thomas Johnson, who worked as preservationists, allowing us to see the poems as Dickinson left them. But I still think of Ms. Todd as her first and best editor. She rescued the poems from oblivion and revised those that, in my opinion, were desperately in need of revision. The caps, the dashes, the off-rhymes are, to me, distractions, flaws that interfere with my enjoyment of the poems. The naked poems were as eccentric as the poet herself, but the eccentricities may have been due to carelessness, the curse of the prolific, rather than some modernist tendency attributed to her.

RC, I agree with you that the stanzas of most poems should be allowed to be free standing, but neither Loomis or Bartleby's eliminated the spaces. I don't have Franklin's variorum edition, but Johnson shows that this poem was left to us as a single stanza. Julie Steiner links to photocopies of the original versions, which indicate that Dickinson wrote the poem as a unit, although she had constraints of space and her handwriting seems to be hasty if not buccaneering.