University of Virginia Library

II

Emily Dickinson's capitalization proved to be no problem at all in editing her poetry for a computer because IBM type is all upper case, and her punctuation provided only minor difficulties. The special print wheels that were purchased for The Cornell Concordances equipped the IBM printing machine that would produce the final pages of a concordance with all the punctuation marks in Johnson's edition.[14] Three minor changes in the definitive text were required in fitting Emily Dickinson's punctuation to the machine, however. First, the brackets that Johnson occasionally used to indicate his insertion of a letter or reconstruction of a word in a torn manuscript were silently dropped because brackets were needed for other purposes in the concordance. Secondly, the numbers that Emily Dickinson used twice in her poetry had to be changed from figures to words because the punctuation in her poetry had to be coded by numbers in order to prepare it for the computer. Finally, the eight occasions on which Emily Dickinson used single quotation marks—none of which followed double quotation marks—had to be changed to the double quotation marks usually used in her poetry; this was necessary because the computer's processes of alphabetizing treated single quotation marks as if they were apostrophes and apostrophes as if they were letters. Thus the computer would have alphabetized separately any word preceded by a single quotation mark.

If Emily Dickinson's punctuation offered no interestingly difficult problems, the variorum nature of The Poems of Emily Dickinson did. Johnson's edition included not only variants inserted in the manuscripts by the poet, but also variants to be found in differing manuscript versions of the same poem, variants in transcriptions of the poems

made by friends, relatives, and editors, and finally variants in the published versions of her poems. The extent of these variants ranges from single words or phrases through lines and stanzas to what can only be called variant versions of complete poems. The inclusion of all of them is the most valuable feature of Johnson's edition, and a concordance that was to utilize them would have to be a variorum concordance. It is important to remember that Emily Dickinson was a private poet, that her poetry was not "finished" and the final choices between variants not made. To ignore the variants and make a concordance only of the earliest versions of the poems would seriously misrepresent the text of the poems that Johnson established and severely limit the value of the concordance. Yet not all kinds of the variants given in The Poems of Emily Dickinson were worth including in the concordance. Since the concordance is to the poet's words, variants only in spelling,[15] punctuation, and word-order were excluded; but when any of these types of variants accompanied a variant wording, they were retained in the concordance. Variants in line and stanza order were omitted because there was no way of representing them in the single lines that are the units of a concordance. Also excluded were published variants in poems for which there were manuscripts or reliable transcripts. Johnson's inclusion of all published variants makes a fascinating record of editorial corruption, but there was no point in perpetuating these corruptions in a concordance.[16] Variants deriving from transcripts of poems which also exist in holograph manuscripts yielded a thornier group of problems. The sources of these transcripts and their varying degrees of reliability are matters too involved to summarize here. Suffice it to say that variants in transcripts noted by Johnson as probably deriving from manuscripts now lost were included.

Determining what variants to include was of little help in the much more difficult problem of deciding how they were to be included. In The Poems of Emily Dickinson the variants are given either in the separate versions[17] listed after the principally represented text or at the

end of the poems in which variants appear as alternative choices in manuscript. The principal editorial problem was how to present these separately noted variants in the individual lines of poetry. The simplest solution would have been to treat all variants as if they were variant lines. This could be done by filling out the variant word or phrase with the parts of the line that were invariant and then marking the line with the letter "V", next to the line number, as an indication of a variant line. This procedure, while obviously the way to handle variants that were complete lines, had serious disadvantages when used with parts of lines. To produce a variant line when there was in fact only a variant word is a somewhat misleading representation of the text that would increase the automatic word-frequency counts to be made by the computer and included as an appendix to the concordance. Given the number of Emily Dickinson's variants, the changes in frequencies could be extensive. Such a solution would also fail to show a very important aspect of the variant's context: the word or words for which the variant was introduced. A single method for handling all variants was abandoned, therefore, and the kinds of variants were treated in different ways according to whether they were single words, phrases, stanzas, or versions of an entire poem.[18]

Variant words, then, were included in the concordance by enclosing them in brackets and inserting them into the line of the principal text after the word for which they were variant. When more than one variant was given for a word, the alternative variants were separated from each other within the brackets by a slash mark. Thus Emily Dickinson's description of despair in the next to last line of poem #640 ("I cannot live with You—"), together with the two variants written in the manuscript for the last word in the line, appears as follows in the concordance:

Here as elsewhere in the concordance the word or words that the variants replace can usually be determined simply by noting the number of syllables in the variant and in the words preceding the bracketed insertion. By including variant words in this manner it was possible for the concordance to juxtapose different variants with the words for which they were variants and—most important—to index the variant as well as the invariant words.[19]

Editing variant phrases for inclusion within the line, alongside the phrases for which they were variants, proved to be the most difficult problem in preparing Emily Dickinson for the machine. Variant phrases cannot be treated merely as variant words because frequently the phrases cannot be matched, word for word, with the phrases in the main text. Even if they could be always matched, breaking up the phrases would mean ignoring the unity—and hence often the meaning—of the phrases. Sometimes it was impossible to do otherwise. But in many instances the words of a variant phrase could be kept together. The variants, for example, to the phrase "so eminent a sight" (poem #1265, line 4) in a worksheet draft are "Another such a might", "So adequate", and "So competent a sight". To treat these phrases merely as variant words would obscure the relationships between the adjectives and nouns—and thus partly defeat one of the principal purposes of a concordance which is to provide the contexts of the indexed words. By keeping the words of the phrases together and by separating alternate variants with slash marks, it is possible to indicate which adjectives go with which nouns. The line, then, as it was edited for the concordance, appears as follows:

In this line, as in most of the others where variant phrases were worked in, it is again possible to see how far back in the line the phrase refers by counting syllables. When the variant phrase differs in the number of syllables from the phrase in the main text, the sense of the phrase usually makes clear what it is a variant of. When on occasion even this does not occur, the user of the concordance must have recourse to Johnson's edition which, in any case, should never be very far away from the concordance.

Sometimes the editing of variant phrases for insertion into the lines of a principal text involved the deletion of words in the main text that were repeated in the variant, or the repetition of words in the main text that were omitted from the variant phrase, as in #1265. In poem #1448, for example, the two variant phrases for "Intent upon it's[21] own career" are "Intent upon it's mission quaint" and "circuit quaint". In fitting these words into the line, the first three words of the first variant phrase were not repeated in the variant after appearing in the main text. In the concordance the line reads as follows:

And in poem #1343, line 2, Emily Dickinson wrote as variants for the phrase "Was all that saved", first "alone sustained—" and then simply "upheld—". Johnson, to make the variant clearer, uses a bracketed "Alone" with "upheld"; here as elsewhere this clarification of variants was followed, and the line appears in the concordance as, It should be stressed, however, that this editing procedure does not involve adding or removing words from Emily Dickinson's poetry, but simply filling out elliptical phrases with words from the main text or removing repetitions that were used to indicate the place of a variant phrase in a line. Even with these procedures, it was not always possible to avoid all repetition, as is seen in the example from poem #1343. Nor was it always possible to keep the different words of a variant phrase together. Sometimes the various combinations requiring insertion were too complex to be fitted together as one or more variant phrases; in these cases the phrases were treated as separate words or combined into separate variant lines. The texts that involved this kind of editing were almost always worksheet drafts whose definitive reconstruction is impossible for an editor, let alone a concordance-maker.[22] Sometimes the inclusion of a variant phrase would have meant the repeating of nearly an entire line in order to keep the words of a variant phrase together. In these cases it seemed advisable to separate the words rather than swell the bulk of the concordance and the totals of the word-frequencies. When a variant phrase was in effect a variant line—when, in other words, it lacked only a word or two of being a completely different line—it was treated as an independent variant line and the missing words were supplied from the original line for which the phrase was a variant.

In addition, then, to bracketed variant words and variant phrases, a variorum concordance to Johnson's edition had to make use of variant lines. A given variant was handled as a variant line when all, or nearly all, the words in the line differed from the corresponding line in the principally represented text—or when complicated variant phrases could not be fitted into the lines of the main text. Two different kinds of variant line were used: numbered and unnumbered. Numbered variant lines consist of lines clearly variant to a given line in the main text; the number of the variant line is the same as that of the line for which it was variant, the only difference in the identification of the two lines being a "V" alongside the number of the variant line. Unnumbered variant lines—lines marked with a "V" but given no line number—were used for unplaced variant lines to a poem and for lines and stanzas of poems that were not included in the text chosen for principal representation by Johnson. In poem #1393 ("Lay this Laurel on the One"), for instance, a draft of the poem has an opening four-line stanza that Emily Dickinson omitted from the fair copy that was sent in a letter. In the concordance each line of the omitted stanza is given as an unnumbered variant line. The distinction, in short, between numbered and unnumbered variant lines in the concordance is difference between alternative and additional lines of a poem.

The Poems of Emily Dickinson includes not only variant words, phrases, lines, and stanzas, but also what amount to variant poems. For

ten poems in Johnson's edition the main texts are given as double versions of the same poem; since these constitute two poems under one number, it was necessary to combine them in some way for the concordance.[23] This was done either by listing certain words of one version as variants to the other—as in poems #494, #1213, and #1282 where the differences are quite minor—or through the use of numbered and unnumbered variant lines. How this was done can be seen in the way the most famous double-version poem—#216 ("Safe in their Alabaster Chambers—")—was handled in the concordance. The 1859 version of this poem was taken as the main text in the concordance, and the lines of both the 1861 fair copy and its worksheet draft were treated as variants to the 1859 version. The additional lines and stanzas of the 1861 manuscripts were clearly not variant to specific lines of 1859 manuscript, hence they had to be listed as unnumbered additional variant lines. And just as the arrangement in Johnson's edition does not imply any evaluation of the quality or authority of the two versions, so in the concordance the unnumbered variant lines are not any less significant or valuable than the numbered ones.

Other editorial problems involved in making a variorum concordance to Johnson's edition centered around the punctuation of variant words and phrases. When the manuscript punctuation of single-word variants differs from the main text, the difference is usually a dash following the variant. These were not reproduced in the concordance because Emily Dickinson seems to have used the mark mainly to separate alternative variants. The punctuation of variant phrases was followed exactly in the concordance because of the greater potential significance of punctuation in the meaning of phrases. When the final punctuation of the phrase was identical with that in the main text, it is given after the bracketed variant phrase or phrases—thus indicating that the punctuation is the same for both readings. When the terminal punctuation of variant phrases differed from that in the main text, the variant punctuation follows the variant phrase in the brackets, and the

final punctuation of the principal-text phrase precedes the bracketed insertion of variants. Two types of variant "punctuation" had, nevertheless, to be omitted from the concordance. Even with the special printwheels made for the Cornell concordances, it was impractical if not impossible to write a program and set up an IBM printer to print lines either under or through words. Thus all cancels and italics in the manuscripts had to be dropped. This is not a particularly serious sacrifice with the cancels because they are so infrequent in Emily Dickinson's manuscripts. Less than one per cent of the more than 100,000 words in her manuscripts are crossed out. There are even fewer instances of underlined variants, yet these have greater significance because Emily Dickinson appears to have indicated to herself—at the time of composition or revision—the alternative choices she preferred by underlining them. Yet Johnson notes instances where later fair copies of poems did not adopt the underlined variants to be found in earlier semifinal or worksheet drafts of a poem, and he concludes that "the mood of the moment played itspart."[24] The inability of the computer and its peripheral equipment to convey the results of these moods is one of the small but unfortunate sacrifices involved in combining Emily Dickinson and the machine.