Letter to the Editor: On Emily Dickinson's "Error's"

The Poetry Foundation often receives questions about Emily Dickinson's poems, particularly the typographical, orthographical, and grammatical "errors" in copies of her poems found on the website. For instance, Dickinson's "A Route of Evanescence, (1489)" contains the line "Adjusts it’s tumbled Head –", spurring one reader to email us asking why the apparent error of "it's/it is" instead of "its (possessive)" is included in our copy.

Dickinson's poems as printed on the Poetry Foundation website are intentionally represented with the original punctuation as written by Dickinson, recreated from readings of her original manuscripts as published or available in archives.* Punctuation is similarly preserved in the Dickinson Museum's copies of her work. Dickinson's poems were first posthumously published with editorialization and corrections, first by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson at Emily’s sister Lavinia’s behest. In 1955, scholar Thomas H. Johnson published a new edition of Dickinson’s poems as reproduced from her manuscripts; these transcripts restored many of her original “errors.”

Dickinson technically misuses the apostrophe in the poem "A Route of Evanescence, (1489)" and makes similar errors in other poems. Some of these can be explained as unintentional errors and some scholars have made this case. Other scholars, however, contend that Dickinson often intentionally played with typos and other errors as a sort of linguistic mischief-making in her poems and in her considerable correspondence.

Reading these errors as the intentional warping of language makes for interesting analyses of the work and innovations in Dickinson's poetry. The poet Susan Howe has written excellent work on and inspired by Dickinson, and you can find an excerpt from Howe's book My Emily Dickinson on our website. Another great materials resource is The Gorgeous Nothings edited by Jen Bervin and Marta Werner, which includes facsimile editions of Dickinson’s poems originally written on envelopes and other scraps of paper. For an example of a scholarly article on Dickinson's "errors," see Willis Buckingham's "Emily Dickinson's 'Lone Orthography.'"

As a Dickinson reader, I prefer to read her "errors" as intentional misuses of language to draw attention to the material qualities and fragility of words themselves. As with her envelope poems that feature words handwritten to follow the edges of the paper, Dickinson's poetry is concerned with the physicality of language in space as much as with the imagistic qualities of the words in a reader's mind. For me, this compounds her genius and my enjoyment of her work.

Power to Poetry,

Robert Eric Shoemaker, Digital Archive Editor

*Please consult copyright and publication information provided in the footer of poems on the Poetry Foundation website for clarity about which sources were consulted for reprinting.

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A former editor's note from our Emily Dickinson Sampler:

A Note about Poetry Foundation Dickinson Texts
We are often asked about Dickinson’s style. Did she really spell upon as opon and use its where correct grammar calls for it’s and vice versa? The answer is yes. There are also many competing versions of Dickinson poems, either products of multiple drafts or from the odd and differing practices in which the poems have been edited over the past 110 years. Early publishers of Dickinson radically altered her words and punctuation, often added titles, and even “improved” rhymes where half rhymes were intentional, in an attempt to bring “clarity” to her poetry. It’s unfortunate that one of our most important and unconventional poets was rendered more “proper” than she ever wanted to be.

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This note was written in response to a letter to the editor sent from the Poetry Foundation contact form online. As always, we welcome your questions and comments! We do our best to respond to or address concerns about archival materials and, as with this note, to make answers more available to our readers.