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New Edition of Dickinson Poetry Frustrated by Rights Dispute

November 17, 1995

Anyone who wants to publish an edition of Emily Dickinson’s poetry will have plenty of work. Besides her near-inscrutable handwriting, Dickinson had an idiosyncratic system of punctuation. She would often cross out one word and substitute another. She also used unusual lineations, which often were “corrected” by editors. For these reasons, some scholars have argued that her poetry cannot be rendered in conventional print forms; that only the holographs, or handwritten originals, are accurate.

Phillip Stambovsky, a professor of English at Albertus Magnus College, does not go that far, although he argues that this open-ended poetic process was a distinctive characteristic of Dickinson’s genius. But widely available editions of her poetry are significantly less accurate than they could be, he says.

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Anyone who wants to publish an edition of Emily Dickinson’s poetry will have plenty of work. Besides her near-inscrutable handwriting, Dickinson had an idiosyncratic system of punctuation. She would often cross out one word and substitute another. She also used unusual lineations, which often were “corrected” by editors. For these reasons, some scholars have argued that her poetry cannot be rendered in conventional print forms; that only the holographs, or handwritten originals, are accurate.

Phillip Stambovsky, a professor of English at Albertus Magnus College, does not go that far, although he argues that this open-ended poetic process was a distinctive characteristic of Dickinson’s genius. But widely available editions of her poetry are significantly less accurate than they could be, he says.

Many editors have approached Dickinson’s work as fully realized, “finished” products. “When we compare Dickinson’s holographs with the verse’s layout in the familiar printed collections we find sometimes glaring discrepancies between what’s to be seen on the manuscript pages and the typographic products that attest to the ‘corrective’ vision of editors who place a premium on ‘finished’ poetic work,” he wrote in a manuscript in progress, Poetic Work of Emily Dickinson: A Reader’s Text.

Mr. Stambovsky has collected 200 Dickinson poems, including variants and her unusual punctuation, in an edition intended for introductory courses in poetry. “The idea is to be faithful as possible typographically to the poem on the page, which is not the same thing as attempting to reproduce the holographic pages in type -- an impossibility,” he wrote.

Mr. Stambovsky’s book project was under contract with the University of North Carolina Press -- but the press has decided not to go forward with it, because Harvard University will not authorize the use of Dickinson’s poems.

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As the owner of both the property rights and the literary rights to the Dickinson collection, Harvard reviews all requests to view the original material held at its Houghton Library, while Harvard University Press approves requests involving published work.

Harvard’s press also happens to be in the process of preparing a new variorum text, edited by Ralph Franklin, which should be available in two years or so. According to Melinda T. Koyanis, the press’s copyright-and-permissions manager, Harvard could not authorize Mr. Stambovsky’s project, because of the nature of the work and its audience. “It is our position that authorizing such an anthology based on one person’s variant typographic interpretation of the poetry, aimed at a general reader, was not in the best interest of preserving or presenting the integrity of the Dickinson work,” she says.

As to whether Harvard turned down the project in part because of its own variorum edition under way, Ms. Koyanis says: “That in itself would not be incentive to decline permission. It was the fact of having another variant of the typography. The question is, How many competing versions do you want?”

Harvard receives hundreds of requests for the Dickinson material each year, she adds, and “generally we have a very generous policy.”

Mr. Stambovsky says any typographic rendering of Dickinson’s verse is an interpretation, not a reproduction. He believes that Harvard has no legal basis for limiting interpretations of the poetry, and he hopes to find a press willing to publish the book. The book is now under consideration by Yale University Press and the University of Massachusetts Press.

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“If more scholars got into this conversation, perhaps something could be done about how permissions are granted,” he says.

We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
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