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Emily Dickinson and the Machine
by
S. P. Rosenbaum
[*]
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
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
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
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:
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:
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:
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
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
III
Before the variants were edited into the lines of the main texts in Johnson's edition, certain corrections had to be made in the edition itself. As Jay Leyda notes in his valuable review,[25] the thoroughness of the edition throws the smallest errors into sharp relief. Because these errors and other new discoveries affecting Johnson's edition are not widely known, it is perhaps worthwhile to detail here the modifications made in The Poems of Emily Dickinson for the concordance. The edition actually used for the concordance was not the 1955 first printing of the first edition, but the 1958 second printing. The differences—with one important exception—are to be found in such minor alterations as the change of "Appendixes" to the less grammatically controversial "Appendix" and the printing right side up of a line of type that appears upside down in the first printing. The important exception is the list entitled "Corrections" that is hidden away on the verso of the appendix title page of the second printing. The substantive changes in the poetry itself to be found in this list are the corrections of "teases"
In his review of Johnson's edition, Leyda also noted that the number of poems in Emily Dickinson's canon was less that the 1775 given by Johnson because in three instances, poems numbered separately are actually versions of other poems.[29] After writing his review Leyda discovered that the last poem in the canon was a stanza from a variant version of #1068 ("Further in Summer than the Birds").[30] These important modifications of Johnson's edition are noted in the preface to the concordance, but Johnson's original numbering was not changed because of the possible confusions that would result for the reader if all the numbers after #331 were changed. The principle followed in emending Johnson's text was to adopt substantive corrections involving the addition or deletion of words in the poems, but not to include corrections of the ordering of words or the numbering of poems.
Another editorial problem related to Johnson's numbering of the poems was the difficulty of identifying the poems merely by their
The following excerpt from the concordance illustrates the manner in which the shortened first lines were used to identify the lines of the poems. It also shows how brackets and the "V" were used to handle variants in the concordance.
INDEX WORD | TEXT | FIRST LINE | POEM | LINE |
DRUM | ||||
AND BRING THE FIFE, AND TRUMPET, AND BEAT UPON THE DRUM-- | AWAKE YE MUSES NINE, | 1 | 39 | |
A SERVICE, LIKE A DRUM--.............. | I FELT A FUNERAL, IN MY | 280 | 6 | |
FIRM TO THE DRUM--.................. | UNTO LIKE STORY—TROUBLE | 295 | 18 | |
THE EARTH HAS SEEMED TO ME A DRUM,.... | WHEN I HAVE SEEN THE SUN | 888 | 7 | |
SUBSEQUENT A DRUM—................. | THE POPULAR HEART IS A | 1226 | 2 | |
BEFORE THE QUICK [RIPE / PEAL / DRUM / DRUMS / BELLS / BOMB /... | ONE JOY OF SO MUCH | 1420 | 6 | |
AS IF A DRUM [THE DRUMS] WENT ON AND ON. | THE PANG IS MORE | 1530 | V | |
DRUMMER | ||||
THAT LIT THE DRUMMER FROM THE CAMP... | GOOD NIGHT! WHICH PUT | 259 | 11 | |
DRUMS | ||||
IT IS AS IF A HUNDRED DRUMS............ | I HAVE A KING, WHO DOES | 103 | 8 | |
OF THEIR UNTHINKING DRUMS--.......... | I DREADED THAT FIRST | 348 | 28 | |
DRUMS OFF THE PHANTOM BATTLEMENTS... | OVER AND OVER, LIKE A | 367 | 3 | |
ARE DRUMS TOO NEAR—................. | INCONCEIVABLY SOLEMN! | 582 | 15 | |
THE DRUMS TO HEAR--................. | INCONCEIVABLY SOLEMN! | 582 | V15 | |
AS COOL [DISTINCT] AS SATYR'S DRUMS—..... | DID YOU EVER STAND IN A | 590 | 14 |
One very important feature of the format of the concordance is the arrangement of lines under an index word. As the excerpt reveals, the lines are arranged according to Johnson's numbering of the poems, and this means that they appear in approximate chronological order. A table keying the poem numbers to their assigned dates of composition in Johnson's edition will appear in the preface to the concordance,
The last major editorial decision that had to be faced before giving Emily Dickinson to the machine concerned the kinds of words to be omitted from the concordance. For reasons primarily of cost it is not feasible to index every occurrence of non-essential words such as "a" and "the". To list every occurrence of these two particular words in Emily Dickinson's poetry would involve the addition of 2,680 and 6,134 lines respectively to the concordance—an increase of approximately ten per cent in the bulk of the concordance. The number of these kinds of words omitted from the concordance is quite small, compared to the number customarily omitted from manual concordances; the only consideration here was space, whereas the sheer labor involved in a hand concordance makes it desirable to omit as many words as possible. The following is a list of the principal words omitted from the indexing of the concordance; in addition, all forms of these words—plurals, contractions, etc.—were also omitted:
Some recent studies have shown, however, that these so-called "non-significant" words omitted from the concordance are actually very important in analyses of style.[33] But for those who need these words
IV
In order to explain the remaining editorial problems that arise when the poetry of Emily Dickinson is finally confronted by the machine, it is necessary to outline the processes by which a computer can be used to make a concordance. After the text has been edited for the computer, the first step in transmitting it to the machine is to have the poetry punched, a line at a time, on IBM cards. Also punched with each line are identifying poem and line numbers. These cards are the basic data of the concordance, each card with its line providing the context for any indexed word within it. Because the concordance will be only as accurate as the cards, the punching of Emily Dickinson's poetry was, in effect, done twice. The first operator of the machine that punches the cards reproduces the text by "typing" it, but instead of printing the letters, the machine punches holes in the IBM cards. Another operator then repeats this procedure with the same cards on what is called a "verifier". The verifier checks electromagnetically to see that the holes already punched in a given card are the same as the operator of the verifier indicates through his keyboard that there should be. Any discrepancy between the two operators' work is caught by the verifier and has to be corrected—or the card marked as defective—before the operator of the verifier can proceed. The only errors, then, that can survive this operation are identical mistakes made by the two operators. In order to check on these, all the cards were run through the printer—a machine that prints out the contents of the cards—and proofread against the text. Some idea of the accuracy obtainable through this method of punching and verifying—a method much more accurate than the ordinary routines of printing and proofreading—can be seen in the fact that only six errors were discovered in a text of over 100,000 words. Three of these mistakes, incidentally, were due to the editor's handwriting; the other three were identical mistakes made by the two operators. The total amount of time needed for punching and verifying was about 200 hours.
After the complete text of Emily Dickinson's poems was punched, an additional 1,775 cards consisting of the shortened first-line titles of her poems were punched. Each of these cards was placed before the cards containing the lines of the poem for which it was the identifying title, and then the entire deck of cards—some 25,000 of them—was transferred onto magnetic tape. Emily Dickinson was now ready for the machine.
The following summary of what happens when the text is fed into the computer is based on the explanation given by the concordance's programmer, Mr. James A. Painter, in his preface to the Yeats concordance.[35] The program—the instructions written by the programmer to tell the machine what to do and when to do it—consists of four phases: input, sorting, output, and correction. During the input phase of the program, the computer first scans the magnetic tape and breaks each line of poetry into its component words, attaching to each word the complete line from which it comes as well as the line's identifying poem title and poem and line numbers. These words are then checked against a list of words to be omitted that was previously stored in the magnetic-core "memory" of the computer. The machine then transfers the words to be indexed, together with their lines, titles, and numbers, to a new series of tapes called "word blocks". In the sorting phase of the program each word block is alphabetized,[36] and then the individual word blocks are merged and alphabetized with one another. The amount of time taken by the input and sorting parts of the program was around ten hours: six for indexing and four for checking. In the third, or output, phrase of the program, the results of the final tape—which now contained all the words together with their contexts in alphabetical order—are listed by an IBM printer. Such features of the format as indentation of the entries after an index word or the use of spaced dots to separate these entries from their titles were also automatically done by the printer. The amount of time needed to print out the whole concordance was approximately ten hours, printers being among the slowest of a computer's auxiliary equipment.
In the final phrase of the program, editorial corrections involving the addition, replacement, or deletion of words and lines were made from this printing out of the tape. But before they could be made, two final editorial problems had to be met: the discrimination of homographs and the use of cross-references. Because the user of a concordance can distinguish homographs for himself from the contexts of their lines, the only homographs that had to be separated were those involving omitted words. The nouns "art", "will", "might", and "may", the verb "wilt" and the adjective "wont" turned out to be the only homographs included with omitted words; they were all separated from the non-essential verbs of the same spelling and retained in the concordance. The problem of cross references is particularly troublesome with Emily Dickinson's poetry because of her erratic spelling. Painter had worked out for the other computer-concordances a program for automatically cross referencing hyphenated compounds, but this was of little help because Emily Dickinson rarely used a hyphen. Her non-hyphenated compounds were cross-referenced by the editor when the compounds were unusual enough so that a user in search of all occurrences of a word could not be expected to anticipate it. "Ashine", for example, was cross-reference from "shine" but there is no reference from "stir" to "astir". Misspellings and uncommon variant spellings were cross referenced, but only when they were not either alphabetically adjacent to each other or separated merely by different forms of the same word. Thus "woe", which comes right after "wo" in the concordance, was not cross referenced, but "conceive" and "concieve" were. Much of the cross referencing was only one way, from the usual to the unusual; "eye" is cross referenced to "e'e", but not vice versa. In cases where more than one spelling appears in the text, the cross referencing was done both ways, lest the user suppose Emily Dickinson was a consistent misspeller. There is, of course, no end to cross referencing, but for the user who wants to be certain he has all the forms of a given word, there is a record of the poet's vocabulary included as an appendix of word-frequencies at the end of the concordance. Here all the words in the concordance are listed according to their frequencies.[37]
After the corrections and the cross references have been decided upon, they are punched onto cards, transferred to tape, and then fed into the computer to modify the final tape of the concordance. The results of the final tape are listed by the printer and its special print wheels. Ideally, the total time involved from the first punching of cards
V
If, as Dr. Johnson maintained with unimpeachable authority, the making of dictionaries is "dull work," it would seem to follow that the making of concordances is deadly dull work. With an electronic computer, much of the dullness can be left to the machine to endure. The problems remaining for the maker of the concordance, while numerous, complex, and often undeniably irritating, are really not dull. For some, however, they may appear to be trivial problems; whether or not they are depends largely upon the ends that their solutions serve—upon, in other words, the uses of a computer concordance to the works of Emily Dickinson. Most people who know what a concordance is assume that its primary function is to locate poems or parts of poems that the user has forgotten. In the case of Emily Dickinson's poetry this service is not quite as insignificant as it might be for other poets because of the history of the publication of her manuscripts. As a tool, then, for restoring lines and stanzas, appearing elsewhere as complete poems, to the poems from which they were originally taken, the concordance is useful. Yet this function hardly justifies the human and inhuman labor and expense involved in preparing a computer concordance. A much more important value appears in the fact that a concordance to Emily Dickinson's poems is an index to the words, and consequently the images and ideas, of her art.[38] And unless the words that present these images and ideas are given in their contexts—contexts which include the poet's alternative choices for these words—they remain, as one critic has put it, "inert".[39] Through the inclusion of variants and through the chronological order of the entries under a word, the concordance could be indispensable for studies of Emily Dickinson's poetic development. The concordance is also potentially valuable, if used in the right ways, for biographical and canonical
It must be admitted, however, that one use of a concordance has been inevitably lost by collaborating with a computer. This function was eloquently described by F. S. Ellis in the preface to his lexical concordance of Shelley published in 1892:
Notes
This paper is based on the preface to my forthcoming A Concordance to the Poems of Emily Dickinson (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press).
"Problems in the Making of Computer Concordances," XV, 1-14. See also the next paper in this volume (pp. 15-31) "Electronic Computers and Elizabethan Texts" by Ephim G. Fogel.
The distinction between a word-index and a concordance is often blurred—as in the definition of a concordance given by Webster's Third New International Dictionary: "an alphabetical verbal index showing the places in the text of a book or in the works of an author where each principal word may be found often with its immediate context. . . ." The last part of the definition equivocates on the key issues; the definition also fails to note the existence of concordances to languages. For a clear distinction between word-indexes and concordances see Roberto Busa's introduction to Varia Specimina Concordantiarum of Aquinas's liturgical hymns (Milan, 1951). According to Father Busa a word-index is "a list which gives for each entry the numerical listing of quotations only" whereas "when under each word all the lines that contain this word are transcribed, one by one, we have the 'concordance'" (p. 8).
The most famous example of this is to be found in "I taste a liquor never brewed—" (poem #214) in which the variant last line, "Leaning against the—Sun—" adds a perfectly appropriate concluding image that is absent from the original line, "From Manzanilla come!" which, in effect, adds only a rum name.
Johnson's own one-volume edition, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (1960), unfortunately also does this. In his preface Johnson says he has adopted only those variants underlined by the poet, but his practice here is inconsistent.
Edith Perry Stamm, for example, in her article "Emily Dickinson: Poetry and Punctuation," Saturday Review, March 30, 1963, pp. 26-27, 74, criticizes Johnson for not recognizing that the dashes are elocution marks to guide the reciter of the poems. Her theory is easily disposed of simply by trying to read facsimiles of the poems according to these supposed marks.
As a supplement to Johnson's edition a facsimile edition of at least the best poems would be welcome. With the current techniques of electroprinting, however, the individual student of Emily Dickinson can make a good beginning for himself by reproducing the facsimiles in Johnson's edition, in Bolts of Melody, and in Charles R. Anderson's Emily Dickinson's Poetry (N.Y. 1960).
The ordinary print wheels used by the IBM "printer" consist only of periods, parentheses, hyphens, and commas for punctuation marks. The Arnold concordance, which was printed before the costly print wheels could be purchased, was done without punctuation, but the Yeats concordance is fully punctuated.
But variant spellings that perhaps indicated different words—"straight" and "strait", for example—were included.
Three exceptions were made in applying this principle. Published variants for poems #59 and #160 were included because they appear to derive from manuscripts now lost. And the published second stanza of #57 was retained because it poetically complements the stanza of a poem whose manuscript had been torn off at the top. Poems in Emily Dickinson's canon that exist only in their published forms were, of course, included as such.
Johnson often notes in his edition the nature and location of variants in another version of the poem—but not always. Consequently it was necessary in preparing the concordance to collate all variant versions with the main text.
This classification of variants had to ignore whether the variants were from single worksheet or semifinal drafts; from worksheet, semifinal, and fair copies of the same poem; or from differing fair copies, semifinal drafts, and worksheet drafts. To indicate the provenance of each variant in the concordance would have entailed a bewildering system of signs; the only sensible alternative seemed to be to combine them, regardless of their sources, and to refer the user of the concordance to Johnson's edition for their origins.
One result of combining variants was that words repeated in different manuscripts were not repeated as such in the concordance. The concordance could not represent within the limits of a single line the stages of composition beyond the including of different variants after the word used in the earliest finished version. Thus, for example, in poem #329 ("So glad we are—a Stranger'd deem") there are two manuscripts, the fair copy represented in large type and a semifinal draft from which it was redacted. In the semifinal draft the last line of the poem, "Could not decide between—", is given as "Could not discern between—" and then variant choices for "discern" are listed as "conclude" and "decide". In giving this line in the concordance as COULD NOT DECIDE [DISCERN / CONCLUDE] BETWEEN it seemed unnecessary to repeat "decide" in the brackets to indicate that the word had also been a variant choice at one stage of the poem's composition.
An example of a variant in lining not handled in the concordance also occurs in this line—or in these lines, to be exact. In the worksheet draft of the poem the line is given as two lines: "I perish to behold" and "Another such a might". If the lining of the worksheet draft were kept in the fair copy, the variants would have been handled as variant lines. But as the concordance has to follow the lining of the main texts in Johnson's edition, what was a variant line in an earlier draft is a variant phrase in the fair copy and in the concordance.
The eccentricities of Emily Dickinson's punctuation were, of course, followed in the concordance.
See, for example, poem #533 ("Two Butterflies went out at Noon—") where a fair copy was later turned into a worksheet draft. Johnson's own ordering and lining of the variants in this manuscript have been questioned by William H. Matchett, PMLA, LXXVII (1962), 436-441. See also poem #1591, a worksheet draft so rough that Johnson attempted no reconstruction; in preparing it for the concordance, all that could be done was to group together the phrases that appeared to be variants of one another.
Nine of these poems—216, 433, 494, 824, 1213, 1282, 1357, 1358, and 1627—are labelled as versions I and II or earlier and later versions; poem #148 simply has an "or" separating the two versions given in a single manuscript. Johnson's editorial practice in giving double versions of these poems seems inconsistent, for in some of them he seems to have abandoned his procedure of giving principal representation to the earliest version of the best manuscript. In other cases, the minor differences between the double versions hardly make the distinction worthwhile, unless it was also to be applied to more radical differences between two or more versions of a poem given only a single representation in the edition. There was, at any rate, no way of including the double versions as such in the concordance without modifying in some way Johnson's numbering of the poems in the canon.
The list of corrections also adds dashes at the end of #290, l. 4 and #299, l. 4 of the copy sent to Susan Dickinson.
There are also some very minor errors in the line numbering used to key variants to poems. These errors and their corrections are as follows:
- # 532, for 20] read 19]
- # 577, " 25] " 26]
- " " 26] " 27]
- " " 27] " 28]
- " " 28] " 29]
- #1479 " 7-8] " 7-8
- #1508 " 15] " 11]
- #1646 " 6. " 5.
#331 is an early variant of #342, #992 is an adaptation of #937, and #1616 is a slight adaptation of #1525. See NEQ, pp. 242-243.
The version found by Leyda is given in Anderson's Emily Dickinson's Poetry, pp. 324-325; it has one new variant—"candles" for the "candle" given in the Norcross transcript—and this new variant was included in the concordance.
Johnson's list of these in Poems, III, 1206, gives only twenty-four, but his edition shows additional titles for #1 (Valentine Week") and #1545 ("Diagnosis of the Bible, by a Boy—").
The table will also incorporate the changes in order and date made after the text of the poems went to press and given by Johnson in his preface, Poems, I, lxv.
See, for example, Frederick Mosteller's and David L. Wallace's use of "while", "whilst", "upon", and "enough" in analyzing the authorship of the Federalist papers, "Notes on an Authorship Problem," Symposium of Digital Computers, Annals of the Computation Laboratory of Harvard University, XXXI (1962), 163-197.
It should be possible, for instance, to instruct a computer to search the tape and print out all of Emily Dickinson's variant words and lines together with their poem numbers and consequently their approximate dates. Such information could be of considerable value in studying the composition of her poems.
The computer is really working with numbers in binary arithmetric rather than letters, and the words are alphabetized by comparing the numbers of the letters of a word with another word, arranging the two words in numerical order, and then proceeding to another word. If this operation suggests the way an idiot might alphabetize something, it is important to remember that the computer is a highspeed idiot, capable of comparing some 42,000 numbers a second.
Even used merely as a word-index, the value of the concordance extends far beyond the limited but useful "subject" index at the end of Johnson's edition. There are ways, however, in which Johnson's index complements the concordance.
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