The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson's Envelope Poems by Marta Werner and Jen Bervin (New Directions/Christine Burgin)

I was unnerved to learn in my twenties that the poems of Emily Dickinson that I had memorized as a girl were not the poems as she had written them. Her first editors, hoping to make her eccentric verses palatable to the general public, regularized, rewrote, censored, and titled them. In that form, the poems were relished, diffused, commented on, and memorized. Readers first encountered Dickinson’s actual poems in 1955, in the three-volume edition by Thomas H. Johnson, which was supplanted in 1998 by Ralph Franklin’s three-volume edition. Both editions included the varying drafts of the poems, revealing Dickinson’s instant or retrospective self-corrections.

But a printed page cannot reproduce a handwritten one, and it became inevitable that scholars wanted to see exactly how Dickinson’s page looked, rightly suspecting that Dickinson cared about the graphic arrangement of her lines and stanzas. Most of the poet’s manuscripts still awaited photographic reproduction. A digitized version of the Dickinson letter manuscripts, begun some years ago under the auspices of the scholar Marta Werner, has now been complemented by a digitized version of the poetry manuscripts as they appear in Franklin’s three-volume variorum. Harvard University and Amherst College have jointly issued these poems at edickinson.org. This is a relatively uncomplicated database, in which each manuscript can be viewed side by side with its transcription into print, the manuscript placed on the left and the transcription on the right.

Still, a transcription cannot render the whole appearance of the digitized manuscript page to its left. The faintness of the digitized page means that many readers will look first at the printed poem as transcribed. Is there anything to be learned from the manuscript itself that is not evident from the print transcription? I decided to seek out one of my favorite poems, “The Bible is an antique Volume –.” The most intriguing feature of the poem is Dickinson’s repeated rethinking of a crucial element: what quality in a preacher would make unwilling boys want to come to church? Her first adjective for the desired preacher is the rather feeble “thrilling”:

Had but the Tale a thrilling Teller,

All the Boys would come –

Orpheus’ Sermon captivated –

It did not condemn –

But after writing the word “thrilling,” and marking it with the miniature plus sign that was her sign for a word she might revise, she appended thirteen possible substitutions for that one word. In Franklin’s printed volume, these thirteen substitutes are run horizontally across the page, separated by small bullets and including a single comment by Franklin in italics and parentheses: