University of Virginia Library

The Emily Dickinson Fascicles
by
R. W. Franklin

The manuscript books Emily Dickinson constructed of her poems, known to us as fascicles or packets, have had so long a history of physical disruption and piecemeal publication that nearly a century after her death we are just coming to understand them. To Lavinia Dickinson, who discovered them after her sister's death, and to the early editors (1890-1945), they were only a source for poems, organized in other ways for publication. Thomas H. Johnson was the first to attempt to account for them, and in the variorum edition (1955) his notes recorded packet numbers for poems.[1] He had rearranged many of the fascicles that by then were in disarray, but the reordering was incomplete, and the edition, arranged differently, obscured actual order. Although in 1967, in The Editing of Emily Dickinson, I addressed the question of which sheets belonged to each fascicle, several problems remained unresolved. Shortsightedly, I did not attempt to establish the sequence within fascicles, and, to be sure, the following year Ruth Miller introduced us to new ways of thinking about them—as artistic gatherings in which not only the set of sheets but their sequence is of critical importance.[2] Despite Thomas Johnson's work, my own, and that of Ruth Miller, until recently we have had no satisfactory lists of the poems as Dickinson bound them and no edition that presented them in a manner convenient for fascicle study. Badly hampered, interest in these manuscript books nevertheless has continued.[3]

The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, which I recently edited, may be considered the fascicles' first edition.[4] They were restored as far

as possible to original order, arranged chronologically, and, through facsimile reproduction, presented much as Lavinia Dickinson found them on that day in May 1886. The present essay will consider several aspects important to an understanding of these manuscript books. The essay begins by examining, rather than assuming, the authenticity of the fascicles and by explaining the way Dickinson constructed them. The initial section also describes their essential bibliographical characteristics and accounts for their number and numbering. After a brief review of the methods used in reconstructing the Dickinson arrangement, two major aspects are discussed at length: the chronology of poems and of manuscripts; and Dickinson's purposes, practical and aesthetic, in organizing her poems into manuscript books. The fascicles, it may be asserted, are central to understanding Dickinson's habits of composition and organization. Their implications for biography and criticism are pervasive.

Authenticity, Construction, and Extent

One may wonder whether the fascicles were Emily Dickinson's. The authenticity of the handwriting is really not in question, but one may ask, with good reason, given the extraordinary manuscript history that followed the poet's death, whether the bound structures were hers—or an editorial construction. Since Dickinson left no statement that establishes their authenticity, her record must be the fascicles themselves.[5] Within each unit, uniformity of paper obtains or, in lieu of that, similarity of embossed design or other characteristics. Because of the quantity of sheets involved (over two hundred in bound volumes; nearly one hundred unbound) and the complexity of matching them appropriately, an editor is not likely to have assembled them. The complexity derives in part from Dickinson's patterns of copying in which certain pieces must be next to others. At times, for example, she used a separate leaf to finish a poem when she ran out of space on the sheet she was using. Such division of poems would have required her binding to maintain the proper association of the pieces.

Authenticity is corroborated by others who saw the manuscripts in the first years after Dickinson's death.[6] Mabel Loomis Todd, who copied

bound volumes in the late 1880s and indexed them in 1891, referred to "volumes" several times in her diary during this time, with explicit attribution in 1891: "David and I at work the entire morning on indexing Emily's original manuscripts—four hours, and did fourteen of her little tied up volumes."[7] In the preface to the second series of poems (1891), she explained that, when found, "most of the poems had been carefully copied on sheets of note-paper, and tied in little fascicules, each of six or eight sheets."[8] A few years later, during a lawsuit between Lavinia Dickinson and the Todds, the witnesses disagreed about many things relating to this poet, but the authenticity of the little volumes, attested to in several sworn statements, was never contradicted.[9]

In preparing a fascicle Emily Dickinson first copied poems onto sheets of stationery. The copying occurred before assembly or binding. Bibliographically, the fascicles may be described as folio in 2's in format, for the sheets, folded by the manufacturer to form two leaves, remained independent, not inserted inside each other. In an important sense, Dickinson's unit was the sheet. No doubt, as we have seen, she intended to bind these manuscripts—on several occasions running a poem over onto a separate leaf (twice onto the next full sheet). Such leaves (and sheets) required binding to maintain the association, as did a slip bound, not pinned, in place in one early fascicle. But whether she bound slips or pinned them, they were only an extension of a particular sheet. So also were the leaves used for overflow. Although of full size and physically separate, they carried only the additional lines, with the remainder of the recto and all of the verso blank. Even though the fascicle would be bound, the next poem began on another sheet.

To bind, Dickinson arranged several copied sheets, one atop another, with the single leaves included in the appropriate places.[10] She stab-bound the stacked sheets, punching two holes through their sides, from

front to back, and threading them once through with string, which she tied on the front. "Sewing" may not be a good term for what she did. It suggests an in-and-out motion, with the thread or string carried in a needle, whereas Dickinson made two holes from the same direction, inserted string through them, and tied it.

This procedure completed preparation of a fascicle. The poet did not provide her manuscript books with title pages, or even titles, did not put her name on them, and did not label, number, or otherwise identify them. They are without pagination or signature markings for binding. The poems are not alphabetical, and there are no contents lists, indexes, or other means of finding a specific one. It would appear that she did not maintain them in an order and that browsing was the chief means of dealing with them. There is, in addition, no indication that they were intended, as the name fascicle implies, to be installments of a larger book, issued, as it were, in parts. Because they form a nearly complete record of Dickinson's poetic activity for the years continuously covered by them, they might be seen as de facto installments of the larger work that is her opus for those years, but the term fascicle, of course, was not hers: Mabel Todd introduced it in Poems (1891). Given the variation among the fascicles, there is no physical indication, even in the recurrence of papers, that they were so intended. The fascicles are, simply, poems copied onto sheets of stationery and, without elaboration, bound together: individual manuscript books of simple construction.

In all, Lavinia Dickinson found forty fascicles and enough unbound sheets for several others. The manuscripts also included some miscellaneous semifinal and fair copies and what Mabel Todd called "scraps" —drafts of poems on odds and ends of paper. There has been a lingering concern that there were more fascicles than the forty that have survived, a concern arising from irregularities in the Todd numbering of the manuscripts: 1-38, 40, 80-112. The gaps, especially the large one between 40 and 80, have seemed to suggest missing manuscripts. Yet the notebook survives in which in 1891 Todd indexed all the poems she knew about (still unpublished) in her numbers through 98. There were no entries for 39, 41-79, or, for that matter, 96.[11] We may be confident that the numbering does not represent lost manuscripts, but the irregularity has not heretofore been explained.

The explanation, while complex, is also simple: Mabel Todd created two sequences of numbers—one below 40, the other above 80—with some of the manuscripts in the higher sequence coming from the lower one.

There appears originally to have been a single sequence for the bound fascicles, 1-40, marked perhaps on envelopes but not on manuscripts (not marked until 1891). The forty were in Lavinia Dickinson's possession. From them, as has been demonstrated elsewhere,[12] number 39 became 80 and was transferred to Mabel Todd's possession, leaving a permanent gap at 39. In similar fashion, Todd had earlier organized manuscripts into a sequence beginning at 81. So 39, one of the bound fascicles, became 80 and sat next to five other bound fascicles, 81-85, that she had already transferred. These had previously been numbers 14, 33, 35, 36, and 38. Unlike 39, these transfers had come when it was still convenient to fill the gaps with loose manuscripts: in 14 she gathered fascicle sheets that had become dislocated from their bindings, and in the other four she grouped fascicle sheets that had never been bound and a few other loose manuscripts.[13] These replacements may have been organized at the same time as the packets of loose manuscripts in her own possession, for the organization was the same—by decade, with the 1860s (33, 35; 86-92) preceding the 1870s (36, 38; 93-95).

What the irregularities in the Todd numbering represent is not lost manuscripts but the process of creating a separate collection whose numbering, by doubling the tens digit, was also separate.[14] In The Editing of Emily Dickinson I had been puzzled: "It is difficult to explain why the gap between 40 and 80, already there in 1891, should mark the division in manuscripts between those Lavinia had and those Mrs. Todd retained, since the split between the women did not come until 1896. But that is the way the manuscripts divided" (p. 37). The gap between 40 and 80 marked the division of manuscripts because Mabel Todd created it to do so. In 1891, four years before Austin Dickinson's death and five before Lavinia Dickinson filed suit to recover a piece of land, at a time when the two women were on good terms, Mabel Todd created a second collection and considered it to belong in her possession. Her unpublished diary for August 3, 1891, the year when she indexed the manuscripts, distinguished between collections: "I worked on the Index until I finished everything of Vinnie's except the Scraps, & Everything so far copied." There followed another week of indexing—as well as

further copying and classifying of poems—before she could record on August 10 that the index was done (Bingham, p. 155, n. 7). And in the index itself, which was the record of a thousand still unpublished poems, Mabel Todd wrote, "V. has 495 still unpublished."[15] The quarrel that erupted in 1896 between the Dickinsons and the Todds sealed a division of the manuscripts that had existed for five years.

One may wonder why Mabel Todd's original estimate for the number of poems, exclusive of "scraps," was seven hundred, when there are several hundred more, and why, although we know of only forty fascicles, she spoke of "over sixty little manuscript volumes." The estimate of seven hundred was recorded in her journal, November 30, 1890, shortly after the publication of the first series of poems (Bingham, pp. 401-405). The number was probably accurate, for it was based on only one box of manuscripts, containing bound fascicles and some unbound sheets. In her journal she described this as "the first box submitted to me" and referred to a second that contained "scraps." The contents of the first box may be inferred from the Todd transcript patterns and from various lists that indicate poems known to her before she wrote this journal entry in November 1890.[16] The quantity implied by these records is about the same as the Todd estimate.

Of the second box she wrote: "In addition to the original seven hundred, I have also about three hundred more in scraps—written on the backs of envelopes and bits here and there which are wonderful."[17] More manuscripts were to come. On February 1, 1891, her diary records that she was "looking over further MSS of Emily's" (Bingham, p. 106, n. 5). The next day she "found 'The Snake'" ("A narrow Fellow in the Grass"), a poem appearing on one of Dickinson's unbound fascicle sheets.[18] These "further MSS" must have been a third set, given Todd's explicit descriptions of the "scraps" in the second box and the completed

transcription of the first. She transcribed these later manuscripts, perhaps a small group of unbound fascicle sheets, during 1891, not during the initial copying in 1887-1889. They were not part of the initial seven hundred.[19] As of May 1891 she spoke of a total of only eight hundred poems, exclusive of "scraps," but about June she apparently received another group (her journal reports her to have "looked over some more of Emily's poems.")[20] These she hurried to copy before completion of the index in early August. She was to receive yet more manuscripts—in her words to T. W. Higginson (August 24, 1891): "a fresh box of Emily's 'scraps'" (Bingham, p. 160). These were more of a class of manuscripts that on August 3, in the diary entry we have seen, was regarded as "Vinnie's" but that, in time, ended up in Todd's possession.

When Mabel Todd stopped working on the poems, her numbers stood as 1-38, 40, 80-95, 97-98, with additional envelopes unnumbered.[21] In all, over sixty units. During the lawsuit she referred to them as "over sixty little manuscript volumes."[22] Like other testimony in this suit, hers was not always accurate. In this instance she generalized loosely, citing the part for the whole. There were only forty fascicles that Dickinson had bound, but, in addition, there were more than twenty editorial groups that included unbound fascicle sheets, worksheets, and miscellaneous copies.

Reconstruction

From these manuscripts, the facsimile edition reproduces 1147 poems: 814 of them in bound gatherings, 333 on unbound fascicle sheets. Although no fascicles are missing, a few manuscripts are missing

from them,[23] and a leaf was removed by Emily Dickinson from an unbound fascicle sheet. Known to be missing are five leaves and parts of a sixth, together containing part or all of eleven poems. (Typeset texts are included for these in lieu of facsimiles.) The manuscripts missing from the fascicles may yet reappear, but the unbound leaf probably will not. The poem on it, "Now I knew I lost her" (1219), was completed on the leaf remaining. Since Dickinson canceled the final lines, one may conclude that she removed the first leaf, comprised only of the earlier lines of this poem, and discarded it.[24]

In reconstructing the fascicles I studied the holographs, especially characteristics of handwriting, paper, and binding, and a variety of secondary materials—nineteenth-century transcripts of the poems, the type-writers and papers used, and the diaries, journals, and correspondence of the early editors. The notebook in which in 1891 Mabel Todd recorded the first lines of poems and their packet location was valuable in restoring groupings that suffered later dislocation. A few fascicles were already disordered by 1891, and for these the transcripts, made up to four years earlier than the notebook, were particularly helpful. Some distribution problems remained unresolved at the time The Editing of Emily Dickinson was published in 1967, notably the inclusion or exclusion of the sheets comprising packets 10 and 14 at the Houghton Library. Further research resolved these problems and corrected some related misjudgments. The changes have been reported in a series of articles.[25]

The Editing of Emily Dickinson did not address the sequence within a fascicle.[26] Evidence to do so does exist, and for the facsimile edition the internal order of sheets, and thus of poems, was established for each bound fascicle. (The facsimiles appear in this order, independent of the manuscript arrangement in libraries.) The most important secondary evidence was an eight-page list, now in the Amherst College Library, that Mabel Todd prepared in 1889. The list is without heading or explanation, and its purpose is not known, but Todd made it from transcripts in their fascicle order or, alternatively, in reversed order. Considerable evidence exists in the manuscripts themselves. Soiling on first and last pages, for example, often identifies the first and last sheets of a group. Various links between sheets are provided by stains and their offsets onto facing pages, matching smudge patterns, pin impressions, and manufacturing defects like paper wrinkles. Special attention was given to puncture patterns of the binding holes and to stress effects caused by opening a fascicle against the tension of a stabbed binding, for they vary within fascicles: initial sheets differ from subsequent ones in amount of curvature along the fold edge and in the direction and extent of damage to the binding holes. Usually the evidence establishing internal order was substantial, with the Todd list corroborating the physical record of the manuscripts.

Further study of the Todd transcript patterns, scrambled for the packets of unbound sheets, showed Mabel Todd to have assembled these packets after she had copied the manuscripts. The patterns are scrambled because she mixed manuscripts from the first box, transcribed in 1887-1889, with manuscripts from later groups, transcribed in 1891. In arranging them by decade, the 1860s distinct from the 1870s, she also grouped manuscripts copied at different times. Her transcripts, through false starts or parts of two poems on a single transcript, link sheets that Todd subsequently put in different packets. The eight-page list she prepared in 1889, before she assembled the packets of unbound manuscripts, has several of the loose manuscripts on it, and they are separated, although later gathered. Sheets from packet 35, for example, of the same paper but with different transcript patterns, appear at different places on the list. This specific example and, in general, the relation of

transcripts to holographs show the unbound manuscripts to have been disordered when Todd copied them. Packets 33, 35, 36, 38, and 86 onward were editorial groups, not Emily Dickinson's.[27]

In the facsimile edition the unbound fascicle sheets are called sets to distinguish them from the fascicles. They are gathered according to paper and date, a principle prevailing in the fascicles, though in instances Dickinson mixed papers and dates. As of 1862 her practice became regular, and the uniformity carried over into the unbound sheets that followed. She continued to work with large batches of stationery through about 1866, when she stopped copying fascicle sheets for several years. In the sets a number of stains and pin impressions connect sheets that Todd had put into separate editorial groupings.

Within each set no sequence belonging to the poet has been established, or is likely to be. Because she no longer bound the sheets, the physical evidence is insufficient to arrange them in a specific order. (The lack of binding would suggest that none was intended.) The facsimile arrangement is generally by variorum date and, within that, where stains and pin impressions establish links, certain sheets appear together. In one set, where the stain moves progressively through ten sheets, they are arranged in the order of the stain without regard to variorum date.

Chronology

The chronology of Emily Dickinson's poems may always be troublesome. Since she did not date her manuscripts, it is necessary to base the dating of her poems, to an important degree, on developments in her handwriting. Bench marks for the handwriting must be established from documents outside her poetry, principally from letters, which, although also without a date, may be assigned one because of postmarks or internal evidence of verifiable historical fact. The poems, in contrast, rarely have a historical content that aids dating. There are pitfalls in this method, to be sure. Handwriting may vary with mood and writing implement and with audience, public or private. When an important feature is proportional only—the number of open e's compared to closed ones—single documents may not offer sufficient evidence to conclude with certainty. It is understandable that some imprecision will inhere in even systematic attempts at dating.

In the variorum chronology, based on the only comprehensive study

so far of the handwriting, there are examples of fascicles which, because their sheets were separated, were assigned to more than one year: 1858 and 1859; 1861 and 1862; 1862 and 1863. Problems with the variorum dating are more frequent after Dickinson stopped binding fascicle sheets about 1864. The unbound sheets were dated while in the artificial groups Mabel Todd had assembled, and variant dates, 1864-1866, were assigned to sets of matching sheets of stationery, identical in characteristics of copying and at times linked by stains and pin impressions. By the 1870s the variorum dating of unbound fascicle sheets can be erratic, with dates several years apart assigned to the poems on a single sheet. One sheet has three such dates, in chronology the reverse of their sequence on the sheet: about 1877, early 1876, and about 1873. My research for the facsimile edition, however, suggests that the variorum dating may be accurate in outline, especially before 1864, and I used this dating developed by Thomas Johnson and Theodora Ward, noting discrepancies and, after 1864, recording a range of dates for manuscripts in the sets.

The fascicles do provide evidence other than handwriting for putting them in sequence. Formal aspects of these manuscript books developed over several years. Among them are the presence and display of alternative readings, underlining and quotation marks, variation in overflow technique, the number of sheets per fascicle, and the use of single leaves. For example, when she began, Emily Dickinson allowed only completed poems into the fascicles. The first unresolved reading does not appear for about a year, and there are only about a half dozen in the first ten fascicles, through about 1860. About 1861, and continuing thereafter, alternative readings became abundant: Dickinson had moved fascicle copying earlier into her poetic process. She copied poems with many alternates, some with so many that Thomas Johnson called them worksheets in effect.

Her method of recording these alternates changed. As they became frequent, she first entered them somewhere near the words to which they related, but without other indication of connection. Then she began to use crosses to indicate the relationship, later dropping the alternates, like footnotes, to the end of the poem following the line she usually drew to indicate termination. Later such footnotes were written before the drawn line. Another formal feature is the use of a single leaf left from an earlier paper type. In several instances the matching leaf is among the earlier fascicles.

In The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson I relinquished the Todd numbering and arranged the units chronologically with a new numbering, Fascicles 1-40, Sets 1-15. The sequence is open to refinement,

notably in the later sets where the variorum dating is erratic, the quantities small, and formal differences less pronounced. In the fascicles themselves, it may be too precise to say that 18 preceded 19, both of which have similar characteristics of paper, display of alternates, and other formal aspects. They must be from about the same time. It may not be too precise, however, to say that Fascicle 17, of different paper and somewhat different characteristics, preceded both 18 and 19, one of which includes a single leaf of 17's paper type.

Let us suppose, for a moment, that the forty fascicles and the fifteen sets were sequenced precisely as Dickinson assembled and bound them or, for the sets, just copied them. In the sequence we still would have to identify, say, where 1859 began or 1862 ended. That determination, in large degree, depends upon the uncertain analysis of handwriting. But even if the sequence were correct and the years were precisely calibrated across it, a dating problem would remain, one of central concern to the study of Emily Dickinson and her poetry: the relation of fascicle copying to the composition of poems. Today few worksheets survive for fascicle poems because she usually destroyed the earlier versions. The crucial question is, How close was the fascicle copying to the point of composition?

There are indications that it was often close. Some worksheets that have survived are dated by the variorum as about the same time as the fascicle copy, and there is often a pattern of copies sent to friends at about the same time. That she moved fascicle copying earlier into her poetic process, so that alternates abound as if in a worksheet, might also suggest that the two states were close. Dickinson scholarship has generally assumed they were, though some scholars have questioned the assumption as well as the dating of specific poems.[28]

Certainly some lag is to be expected. Dickinson did not compose onto the fascicle sheets. Even those whose compositional state might be called "worksheet" do not have the physical appearance of one, for, like other fascicle sheets, they were copied with care sometime after the initial act of composition. Seventeen poems were copied twice, ten of them into fascicles or sets of different years. At times the repetition might be ascribed to substantial variation between the two entries: she was still at work on the poem. In other instances there is little or no textual difference despite a lapse of years. Two examples are poems 174 and 259, each copied twice, two years apart but with little or no change.

They suggest that Dickinson worked out of a pool of manuscripts— rather than, at the other extreme, poem after poem onto fascicle sheets —and that the pool included manuscripts from several years.

This inference is supported by a few other poems known to have been in existence years before they were entered into the fascicles. In 1853 Emily Dickinson sent "On this wondrous sea" (4) to Susan Gilbert, then in Manchester, N. H.; five years later she copied it into the first fascicle she constructed. About 1861 she sent a stanza from "It will be Summer—eventually" (342) to Samuel Bowles; the next year she entered the full poem into a fascicle, the particular stanza differing slightly. In 1861 she sent "A Burdock—clawed my Gown" (229) to her brother Austin as political commentary; three years later she copied it with a few changes onto a manuscript in Set 6.

If we had the destroyed versions of Dickinson's poems, we could trace in complete detail the compositional history of the fascicles and, thus, her poetic development. The evidence remaining suggests that the pool of manuscripts was mixed in date, with some close to the time of fascicle construction but others up to several years old. At her death a few manuscripts from these early years, still not copied onto fascicle sheets, remained in her possession: one each from 1859, 1860, and 1861; about six from 1862; a dozen or so from 1864-1866. They are like sediment at the bottom of the pool.

Emily Dickinson's activity relating to the fascicles, 1858-1864, is tabulated in Fig. 1. For each year it shows the number of poems she copied onto fascicle sheets, the number of leaves copied, and the number of fascicles bound.[29] A graph of this activity is provided in Fig. 2.

The number of poems for 1862 is extraordinary. Twenty of the forty fascicles may be assigned to that year alone. Do the fascicles and leaves increase because Dickinson's productivity suddenly increased and she was working hard at fascicle construction to keep up? Or is there a misleading increase in poems because of an increase in copying and binding? There is some difficulty in accepting that even a facile poet suddenly wrote, on the average, a poem a day, not only writing poems but also copying them onto fascicle sheets, and that neither before nor after is there any activity similar in scope.

If the number of poems in 1862 reflects an increase in copying, as distinct from composition, it would suggest that, although Dickinson had been copying fascicle sheets since 1858, there was a new resolve in 1862 to organize her poetry. This activity coincided with her correspondence with Higginson setting up the scholar-preceptor relationship.

Fig. 1: Fascicle Activity, 1858-1864

       

	1858	1859	1860	1861	1862	1863	1864
Poems copied	57	92	67	78	378	134	27
Leaves copied	21	36	29	47	236	79	16
Fascicles bound	2	5	2	4	20	6	1

It also coincided with a new regularity in fascicle construction. Earlier she had organized them in a desultory fashion, mixing papers and dates by using sheets copied previously. In 1858, for example, she made two fascicles and left two additional sheets copied but unbound until 1859, when she bound them with two sheets from the later year. There was a spurt of copying in 1859, and she used a large batch of paper for it. During 1860 she again bound only two fascicles, again leaving additional sheets to be bound with later ones in 1861, when most of the fascicles were mixed in paper and many in date. This pattern could indicate, not insufficient poems, but a slowness in bringing poems to completion (there were no alternative readings in the earliest fascicles and only a few in the next ones) and an indifference as to when fascicles were completed.

If so, by 1862 Emily Dickinson could have had a significant number of poems in her pool and, in that year, perhaps spurred on by the correspondence with Higginson, set in vigorously to organizing them, now letting poems enter the fascicles trailing many alternates. She knew that she would be working in high volume, for she used large batches of stationery, only three or four kinds for most of the activity of 1862. After using four sheets per fascicle in the early ones, followed by an erratic increase, she now settled into a norm of six sheets each. Except for the single leaves used for completion of a poem, she no longer mixed paper types, for she stopped leaving sheets copied but unbound. She did not return to this practice until she approached 1863. As she neared the end of this round of copying and binding, she also returned to smaller groups of stationery: fascicles 38, 39, and 40 have individual paper types unique in the fascicles.

A similar "backlog" of poems may have developed between the end of fascicle binding in 1864 and the copying of the unbound sets that followed (Sets 5-7). During most of 1864 and 1865 Dickinson was in Cambridge under the care of a physician for her eyes. He forbade her to use pen and ink, and she appears to have followed his advice. Her datable documents during this time are in pencil.[30] These sets, however, are in ink and may not have been copied until near the end of the period (1864-1866). Handwriting characteristics appear to bear this out, especially change in the word the which, having been stable for some time, is altered as of Set 5. When she did copy the poems of 1864 and 1865, she obtained large quantities of paper again, using only three kinds before again stopping for several years.

For the sheets copied in the early 1870s, there were no large batches of stationery, sometimes only one sheet of a kind. Some sheets are tablet style, carrying but one poem each. Dickinson's copying appears to have been desultory, as it was before 1862, but she managed to transcribe over sixty poems in the early seventies. Although not copied until then, some of them may have been written during the interval 1867-1870, when there is a decline in datable poems similar to that in 1860-1861 (Poems [1955], III, 1201).

This interpretation of the relation of composition to fascicle copying is not a conclusion, but a hypothesis for explaining the shape of Dickinson's poetic activity. So far, it fits the evidence, some of which points to

fascicle entry close to the time of composition, some to later entry. The exact balance of the two, and how it may apply to specific poems, is not yet known.

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.

Notes