Brenda Wineapple - Blog

Transcript of Brenda Wineapple

Brenda Wineapple:The difficulty with Dickinson's poetry is that she didn't publish. And what that means is she didn't choose the so-called authoritative poem. In other words, "This is the poem I want in the public. This is the finished version." And once she said, "'It is finished' can never be said of us." And that was true of her poetry. So her poetry is in a state of process. And she may have three or four versions of the same poem, so every editor has to make choices about which version to use. And in the 1890s, what Higginson was doing was, as he said, "readying the public for her." Here was a man who fought against the status quo, and knew people just really don't like things that are unusual. So he made the horrible error of giving the poems titles -- Dickinson didn't use titles -- taking some of the dashes out, and putting in commas. In other words, regularizing them for the public so that they would go down a little more smoothly. It's as if he sugar-coated them, in a way, to make them palatable. And he did, and that worked. But, of course, by the 20th century, he's seen as a fool for doing that. What's forgotten is that he only did that as a means to an end. And in the second volume, he told Mabel Todd, he said, "Now that the public ear is open, let us alter as little as possible." And she really didn't want to. So it's a complicated story. And, of course, he's the one who bore the brunt of being a silly man because Mabel Todd outlived him and she became a Dickinson promoter. When people said, "What happened? Why were these poems changed?" She said, "Oh, Thomas Higginson did it." You know, and they both did it in a sense. So that's what happened. But even now, there are many more editions of her work. And each editor has to make certain choices about which poems they're going to put in print. So each editor, in a sense, is tampering. You have to do it with Dickinson. It's like translating, in a way. The translator is trying to be close to the original writer's language and intent. But often translators each one has a different coloration, a different hue, a different outlook even, that influences the choice of which word one would use. And it's very similar in that way. And so we think now we're closer to whatever her intentions were. But those intentions, you know, are multiple and not finite, at all. So it's very interesting. So each editor, as I said, faces that problem as a translator would.