Measures of Possibility: Emily Dickinson's Manuscripts

by Domhnall Mitchell

Debates about editorial proprieties have been at the center of Emily Dickinson scholarship since the 1981 publication of the two-volume Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, edited by Ralph W. Franklin. Many critics have since investigated the possibility that autograph poems might have primacy over their printed versions, and it has been suggested that to read Dickinson in any standard typographic edition is effectively to read her in translation, at one remove from her actual practices. More specifically, it has been claimed that line arrangements, the shape of words and letters, and the particular angle of dashes are all potentially integral to any given poem's meaning, making a graphic contribution to its contents.

In Measures of Possibility, Domhnall Mitchell sets out to test the hypothesis of Dickinson's textual radicalism, and its consequences for readers, students, and teachers, by looking closely at features such as spacing, the physical direction of the writing, and letter-shapes in handwritten lyric and epistolary texts. Through systematic contextualization and cross-referencing, Mitchell provides the reader with a critical apparatus by which to measure the extent to which contemporary approaches to Dickinson's autograph procedures can reasonably be formulated as corresponding to the poet's own purposes.

448 pages, Paperback

First published August 30, 2005

Reviews

[Nicole · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't have much patience for this one. It reminds me of an accountant's take on Dickinson because his method is so methodical.