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In The Poems of John Keats (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), Jack Stillinger makes ten kinds of "silent" (i.e., unrecorded) emendation to his copy-texts in order to "standardize the presentational features" of his edition (p. 683). Although most of these categories of emendation indeed concern only presentation, the fourth seems more significant: "Verse paragraphs are separated by line spaces, and all except the first in a series are indented; line spaces between parts of a sonnet are ignored, and indentions in sonnets and other stanzaic forms are regularized to conventional usage" (p. 683). Implicit in this statement is the questionable assumption that line indentation is no more essential a feature of lyric-poetic texts than, for example, typographical design. I would like to suggest that this underlying assumption makes silent emendation four the source of three weaknesses in Stillinger's commanding edition. First, this policy leads the edition away from Stillinger's fundamental editorial goal, fidelity to "final authorial intentions"
Unable to collate Stillinger's edition with his copy-texts for all 148 poems in the corpus, I have restricted my discussion to the forty-five works from the three volumes that appeared during Keats's lifetime: Poems of 1817, Endymion (1818), and Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820).[2] For all forty-five works, Stillinger uses the first edition as copy-text, arguing convincingly that Keats experienced with his publishers a "spirit of collaboration" that represented his "final intentions."[3] This paper will begin by describing all of Stillinger's silent emendations of line indentation in these works. It will conclude by more fully presenting my reservations about this aspect of editorial policy.
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