Volume 46, Number 6 · April 8, 1999
The Mystery of Emily Dickinson
By Christopher Benfey
The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition
edited by R.W. Franklin
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1654, Three volumes pp., $125.00
Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson
edited by Ellen Louise Hart, by Martha Nell Smith
Paris Press, 323 pp., $39.95
The Emily Dickinson Handbook
edited by Gudrun Grabher, by Roland Hagenbüchle, by Cristanne Miller
University of Massachusetts Press, 480 pp., $34.95
To prepare a new edition of a poet's work, a scholar may spend years in the archives, weeding out the 'corruptions' planted by previous editors and scribes, only to see his own decisions denounced by the next generation of editors. In his poem 'The Scholars,' W. B. Yeats saw a comic contrast between the passionate poet and the painstaking editor:
Review, 5849 words
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