University of Virginia Library

Purposes

The fascicles, although they may have served as surrogate publication for a poet who never willingly consented to print, were constructed for herself. Emily Dickinson probably felt the need for an audience out-side her domestic scene, but she did not prepare the fascicles for such an audience, nor for publication. The manuscript books record many poems in a state of incompletion, whereas when Dickinson went "public" with a copy to friends, she would produce a fair copy, all alternates resolved. Moreover, the display of alternates in the fascicles is often confusing, with no indication of the words to which they relate, or with indistinct indication. In her earliest copying, she did not even mark the division between poems. Although she developed clearer ways of recording poems, she did not return to fix those she had already done. She did return to revise poems, however, usually in pencil, turning some near completion into a state closer to a worksheet. Books of simple construction, without an apparatus to assist in finding poems, the fascicles nevertheless gave her a more orderly record of poems, whatever their state of development, a source for subsequent copies, and a place where, in browsing or in making copies, she could resume the poetic process. Whatever she may have felt about publication and however the fascicles may have satisfied a longing to record her achievement publicly, they were private documents, copied for her own uses.

The disorder that fascicle sheets forestalled may be seen in the "scraps" of the later years. When she did not copy such sheets and destroy the previous versions, her poems are found on hundreds of odds and ends—brown paper bags, magazine clippings, discarded envelopes and letters, the backs of recipes. Because as quantity increases browsing becomes an ineffective means of finding a specific item, the simple order of the fascicles must have become troublesome. About 1864 she stopped binding, although she continued to copy fascicle sheets that served the same functions as the bound units: a more orderly record of poems in whatever state of completion, a source for subsequent copies, and a place where she could re-enter the process of composition. By then she had over eight hundred poems in forty fascicles and may have found unbound sheets easier to browse. She bound no fascicle sheets thereafter.

She did, after a break, copy more of them in the 1870s, perhaps with a lingering sense that she could yet get control of her poetry in the only way, barring publication, that she had developed. A few years later

she gave herself up to the accumulating mass of manuscripts of assorted sizes, shapes, and materials.[31]

As a last concern, we may consider whether Emily Dickinson organized the fasicles and sets as artistic gatherings, careful constructs governed by theme, imagery, narrative and dramatic movement, or similar principle. Such a circumstance would enhance Dickinson's achievement by enlarging the scope of her artistry. It would give context to poems and thus help to determine their meaning. Perhaps most important, it would address a problem fundamental to Dickinson criticism—how to deal systematically with a large body of short poems.[32] Critical attempts to find coherence in Dickinson's nearly eighteen hundred poems, to avoid the fragmentation of the individual poem without also sacrificing it, have yielded conflicting conclusions.[33] As a higher level of artistry, the fascicles would reduce selection biased by a particular critical thesis. Emily Dickinson made the choices, and they would be biased only by what her intentions had been in organizing them, by her methods in doing so, and by date (for there is always a terminus ad quem to the selection).

This possibility, though attractive, is not supported by the developmental history of the fascicles. They were private documents with practical uses, gatherings of convenience for poems finished or unfinished. However inconvenient they became, they served Dickinson as her workshop put in order and, for the years they cover, are a comprehensive record, almost complete, of the poems in her possession—a condition at variance with their being forty careful selections for artistic purposes. Binding followed copying, sometimes years later mixing sheets from different years. That such sheets were copied in different years suggests that no fascicle-level order governed their preparation. In one fascicle the manuscripts were copied in 1858, 1861, and 1862, with one of them folded as if first intended for mailing. After 1864 she continued to make

fascicle sheets but was not concerned enough about preserving order to bind them.

Other aspects of their preparation argue against the fascicles as units constructed on some aesthetic principle. Dickinson used individual sheets of two leaves, not quires of leaves as in a notebook. If she had selected poems and arranged them into a meaningful order and then copied them onto fascicle sheets, the poems would have fallen across the four-page sheets without regard to spatial constraints. Instead we see her fitting poems to space. Her short poems (under eight lines), for example, would have appeared at various places on pages, but almost all were placed at the bottom to fill in after the preceding poem. Her longer poems, those taking three or four pages, would have started on any of the four pages of a Dickinson sheet if they had been part of a prior order (or, for that matter, if they had been randomly selected out of the mass before her). But almost all (19 of 22) began on the first page of a sheet, a point at which, conscious of the limits of her sheets, she knew there would be space to complete such a poem. Twice she began on the second page, once misjudging and running off the sheet onto an extra leaf. Once she began on the third page, also overrunning the limits of the sheet. None of the longer poems began on the fourth page. This pattern would not occur unless, working with the sheet as her unit, Dickinson had been fitting poems to space.[34]

Moreover, if she had been copying an ordered set of poems, one whose artistic structure were independent of the physical structure onto which transcribed, the final pages of the fascicles would not be filled so uniformly. Such a set of poems might always begin on the first page of a fascicle, but it would end on any of the four pages of the final sheet. But thirty-seven of the forty fascicles have poems on the final page. Once Dickinson stopped on the next-to-last page; in the other two instances she added a single leaf at the end. One of these was for overflow (verso always blank); the other (verso also blank) had been copied separately, addressed, and folded as if for mailing.

There are other possibilities for deliberate design in the fascicles. One is that Dickinson created a structure as she proceeded, selecting and copying a given poem before moving on to the next one. Another is that she selected a group of related poems and then fitted them to paper

—at the end of the fascicle returning the extras to her pool of manuscripts. Both processes, and combinations of them, would be subject to larger degrees of chance and to the restrictions of multiple coordinates. In each, to a degree determined by the precise assumptions of how she proceeded, the particular sequence of poems would become less important than the group as a whole. The coherence—to take a point from Marshall McLuhan—might be more global than linear. Severely linear aspects, such as precise balance, unbroken progression, orderly recurrence, and finely placed echoes and anticipations, would seem unlikely. It might be difficult, for example, to see the poet two-thirds of the way through a fascicle selecting as the next poem one that had not only the proper content for its immediate context but also the right length and, moreover, was connected in some tightly organized fashion with a poem or poems several pages earlier. The thematic, narrative, or dramatic structure discerned according to such possibilities, if any, would be looser than criticism has often assumed or perhaps would find attractive.

If the fascicles are not artistic arrangements, aesthetic order ought not appear in them, yet there are suggestions, even to the skeptical, that it does. One fascicle has a lot of flower poems;[35] imagery and theme do recur; and there are provocative sequences: "These are the days when Birds come back" (130) followed by "Besides the Autumn poets sing" (131); "They shut me up in Prose" (613) followed by "This was a Poet" (448). Even in the later sets we find "The Heart is the Capital of the Mind" (1354) in the same group with "The Mind lives on the Heart" (1355). Are these to be ascribed to chance? Perhaps not, but the capacity of the human mind to find order is large: order can be apparent even in randomness. The tune, as Dickinson reminds us, may not be in the tree but in ourselves. Certainly critical discussions of the fascicles have reached divergent conclusions, with one reader finding a single "blueprint" for them all and another reader finding no general model but a different basis for coherence in each (Miller, pp. 247-288; Sletto, p. 220). So, too, classical balance has been discerned between the opening and ending of a fascicle lacking its first two sheets,[36] narrative unity in the fascicle with those sheets,[37] and detailed design in packets 33 and 36,

two of the artificial groups Mabel Todd assembled (O'Keefe, pp. 8-11; Sletto, pp. 171-216).

The poems, of course, are not unrelated. They have a single author out of whose particular experience, interests, concerns, and techniques they have emerged. In any combination, they have more presumptive coherence than a random selection of just any poems. As Richard B. Sewall in considering the question of the fascicles has said, "One difficulty is that almost any random groupings of eighteen or twenty of ED's stronger poems can be shown to have similar coherence, so recurrent are her major themes, images, and symbolic structures" (II, 538, n. 4). Such coherence may be even more manifest in the fascicles since they limit the poems to certain portions of Dickinson's life. The fascicle with many flower poems was the first one assembled; nothing in it can be later than about 1858. Subsequent fascicles may include poems from a broader period of time, the exact span depending upon the crucial relation of fascicle copying to composition, but nothing can be later than the date of copying. Constrained by time, the fascicles may present the poems, recurrent in their concerns and strategies, in gatherings that appear to have design.