Reading one of Emily Dickinson’s poems and the accompanying poem guide, I had to understand more about her peculiarities, including spelling, odd capital letters and punctuation. As Emily Dickinson was not published during her lifetime, publishers were either at liberty, at a loss, or both, as to what to do with her alleged errors. It seems that early drafts were corrected, but then scholars began to ponder and compare her poems. It all hangs together in this question from the article’s author: “Does this fact argue that she was so careless that it didn’t concern her that a spelling was uncommon, even when she knew it was, or does it argue that she liked her bad spellings, and wanted to keep them, even in the case of a particular word that she had since begun to spell correctly?”. There will be no answer to these questions, but I vote for leaving the peculiarities and learning to find the meaning behind them, where possible. Very enriching article.
“On this habitual reediting, or rather refusal to edit, Richard Howard has remarked: “She was not finicky, I think, but instead obsessed with an infinity which had to be unfinished.” It is therefore entirely within the character of Emily Dickinson’s work that when misspellings occur, whether by accident or design, the poet lets them stand, along with the other acts of incompletion, of process, of evanescence, even of decay. For in dilapidation there is movement: crumbling, slippage. And where there is something wrong, there is the need to begin again; there is an immanence of change.”
Reference
The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America. Vol. 75, No. 4 (Fourth Quarter, 1981), pp. 419-435. www.jstor.org/stable/24302602.