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The use of a high-speed, electronic, data-processing machine—more commonly known as a computer—to make a concordance was described by Professor Stephen M. Parrish, the general editor of The Cornell Concordances, in the 1962 volume of Studies in Bibliography.[1] Drawing on his pioneering work in preparing computer concordances to the poetry of Matthew Arnold and William Butler Yeats, Parrish lucidly set forth the particular uses of such concordances as well as the processes involved in making them. He also anticipated and, it is to be hoped, relieved the fears of literary scholars who tend to confuse electronic means and humanistic ends. The third poet scheduled for publication in The Cornell Concordances is Emily Dickinson. Deo in machina volente, a concordance of her complete poems will appear in 1964. In preparing this concordance I have encountered a number of editorial problems, some of which did not arise with the Arnold and Yeats concordances; these problems have to do with the variorum nature of the definitive text, the punctuation and spelling in the poems, the absence of titles, the limitations of IBM type and formats, and the selection of "nonsignificant" words to be omitted from the concordance. The purpose of this paper is to discuss these problems along with the procedures of preparing the poetry for the computer in the hope of shedding some light on the editing of future computer concordances and on the uses of such a concordance for the study of Emily Dickinson's art. But before confronting Emily Dickinson with the machine, it is necessary to explain the background and special features of the definitive text of her poetry on which the concordance was based.
Unless the maker of a concordance attempts the extraordinary task of re-editing a text in and through his concordance, his work will be only as good as the editions on which it is based. The history of Emily Dickinson's poetry is a case in point. The state of her manuscripts, the "creative editing" of her first editors, and the feud between the poet's editors and relatives combined to produce a remarkable chaos in the editions of her poetry. Despite this chaos, a combination word-index and concordance[2] to Emily Dickinson's poetry was done by Louise Kline Kelly as a doctoral dissertation in 1951.[3] In a listing confined to nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, Dr. Kelly gives the line-contexts of only those words occuring less than ten times in Emily Dickinson's poetry; words occurring more frequently are simply given a list of references to where the word may be found. Because practically none of Emily Dickinson's poems have titles, these references had to be to the page and line numbers of particular volumes rather than to the poems themselves. And of the five volumes of Emily Dickinson's poetry, only the last—Bolts of Melody—adhered with fidelity to the original manuscripts.
Dr. Kelly's dissertation was used by Thomas H. Johnson in preparing the three-volume variorum text, The Poems of Emily Dickinson,[4] which finally ordered the manuscripts and editions of her poetry. But with its addition of forty-one new poems, its arrangement of the poems, and its inclusion of their numerous authorial variants, Johnson's edition rendered Dr. Kelly's concordance obsolete; it can be used only with the older inaccurate editions, just one of which attempts to record important manuscript variants. Yet as various acknowledgments testify, Dr. Kelly's work has been of invaluable aid to scholars and critics, and she has put users of Johnson's edition and of the concordance based on it considerably in her debt.
The nature of Johnson's The Poems of Emily Dickinson and the problems it poses for a concordance can best be appreciated by reviewing the states of the manuscripts from which the edition was constructed. Holographs exist for all but 119 of the 1775 poems in the edition, and these manuscripts according to Johnson's analysis exist in one or more of three stages of composition: there are fair copies which Emily Dickinson appears to have finished, there are semifinal drafts which also appear to be finished except for alternative choices of words written between the lines or at the sides or bottoms of the manuscripts, and finally there are worksheet drafts which range from rough jottings to elaborately reworked drafts. Many of Emily Dickinson's poems are to be found in more than one manuscript state, and a number of them exist in slightly different fair copies. The problem of arranging all these manuscripts, grouping versions of the same poem together, and then selecting the main text for each poem was perhaps the editor's most challenging task. In his introduction to The Poems of Emily Dickinson Johnson wrote that the purpose of the edition was "to establish an accurate text of the poems and to give them as far as possible a chronology."[5] As a basis for an accurate chronology Johnson used Theodora Van Wagenen Ward's analysis of Emily Dickinson's changing handwriting.[6] Once a chronology was established and the manuscripts of each poem grouped together, the poems were assigned numbers according to their chronological sequence. The major problem in grouping and numbering the poems was the selection, from among the poems that existed in more than one manuscript, of texts to be given what Johnson calls "principal representation"[7] in large type under the given poem numbers. In order to maintain the chronological order of the poems, Johnson chose, wherever possible, the earliest fair copy of each poem;[8] other versions were given in smaller type below the main text. This decision has resulted in some misunderstanding and misuse of Johnson's edition because the text selected for principal representation is not necessarily the best version of the poem. A later fair copy or an earlier semifinal draft may contain variants that are poetically better than the readings in the earliest fair copy; or the alternative words written at the bottom of a semifinal draft may be preferable to those in the body of the poem.[9] Subsequent users of
Next to the ordering of manuscripts, the most difficult problem in editing Emily Dickinson's poetry must have been the transcribing of her manuscripts into print. When Emily Dickinson's first editors transcribed—perhaps translated is the better term here—the notation of her manuscripts into forms that could be found in a printer's font, the poet's sister Lavinia Dickinson remarked on the result that "The rules of printing are new to me & seem in many cases to destroy the grace of the thought but of course this can't be helped, I suppose."[11] Although Lavinia seems not to have been the reader that her sister was, this comment might well have come from Emily Dickinson herself, had she permitted the printing of her work. But because she remained essentially a private poet, she could indulge her whim—and this she did, particularly in capitalization and punctuation. She not only capitalized with Germanic abandon, she also used several sizes of letters in between capitals and small letters. In punctuation her favorite mark was, of course, the dash, and she used it in a variety of places and in a variety of ways that ranged from slightly elongated commas to what can only be called short lines. Critics who have speculated on the function of these marks usually agree about their importance but disagree about their purpose. It was inevitable that Johnson's transcriptions of Emily Dickinson's capitalization and punctuation would be criticized,[12] but apart from minor errors it seems clear that the only alternative to the impressive accuracy of his transcriptions would be a facsimile edition. Apart from the small detail that it would be impossible to base a concordance on such an edition, a facsimile edition would merely postpone
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