Editing Emily Dickinson (section)

=== Posthumous ===
After Dickinson's death, [[Lavinia Norcross Dickinson|Lavinia Dickinson]] kept her promise and burned most of the poet's correspondence. Significantly though, Dickinson had left no instructions about the 40 notebooks and loose sheets gathered in a locked chest.<ref name="Farr3">Farr (1996), 3.</ref> Lavinia recognized the poems' worth and became obsessed with seeing them published.<ref>Pickard (1967), xv.</ref> She turned first to her brother's wife and then to Mabel Loomis Todd, his lover, for assistance.<ref name="Wolff 1986, 535" /> A feud ensued, with the manuscripts divided between the Todd and Dickinson houses, preventing the complete publication of Dickinson's poetry for more than half a century.<ref>Wolff (1986), 6</ref>

[[File:Emily Dickinson Poems.jpg|thumb|Cover of the first edition of ''Poems'', published in 1890]]
The first volume of Dickinson's ''Poems,'' edited jointly by Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson, appeared in November 1890.<ref name="Wol537">Wolff (1986), 537.</ref> Although Todd claimed that only essential changes were made, the poems were extensively edited to match punctuation and capitalization to late 19th-century standards, with occasional rewordings to reduce Dickinson's obliquity.<ref>McNeil (1986), 34; Blake (1964), 42.</ref> The first 115-poem volume was a critical and financial success, going through eleven printings in two years.<ref name="Wol537" /> ''Poems: Second Series'' followed in 1891, running to five editions by 1893; a third series appeared in 1896. One reviewer, in 1892, wrote: "The world will not rest satisfied till every scrap of her writings, letters as well as literature, has been published".<ref>Buckingham (1989), 194.</ref>

Nearly a dozen new editions of Dickinson's poetry, whether containing previously unpublished or newly edited poems, were published between 1914 and 1945.<ref>Grabher (1988), p.&nbsp;243</ref> [[Martha Dickinson Bianchi]], the daughter of Susan and Austin Dickinson, published collections of her aunt's poetry based on the manuscripts held by her family, whereas Mabel Loomis Todd's daughter, [[Millicent Todd Bingham]], published collections based on the manuscripts held by her mother. These competing editions of Dickinson's poetry, often differing in order and structure, ensured that the poet's work was in the public's eye.<ref>Mitchell (2009), p.&nbsp;75</ref>

The first scholarly publication came in 1955 with a completely new three-volume set edited by Thomas H. Johnson. Forming the basis of later Dickinson scholarship, Johnson's [[variorum]] brought all of Dickinson's known poems together for the first time.<ref>Grabher (1988), p.&nbsp;122</ref> Johnson's goal was to present the poems very nearly as Dickinson had left them in her manuscripts.<ref name="Martin">Martin (2002), 17.</ref> They were untitled, only numbered in an approximate chronological sequence, strewn with dashes and irregularly capitalized, and often extremely [[wikt:elliptical|elliptical]] in their language.<ref>McNeil (1986), 35.</ref> Three years later, Johnson edited and published, along with Theodora Ward, a complete collection of Dickinson's letters, also presented in three volumes.

In 1981, ''The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson'' was published. Using the physical evidence of the original papers, the poems were intended to be published in their original order for the first time. Editor Ralph W. Franklin relied on smudge marks, needle punctures and other clues to reassemble the poet's packets.<ref name="Martin" /> Since then, many critics have argued for thematic unity in these small collections, believing the ordering of the poems to be more than chronological or convenient.

Dickinson biographer Alfred Habegger wrote in ''My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson'' (2001) that "The consequences of the poet's failure to disseminate her work in a faithful and orderly manner are still very much with us".<ref>Habegger (2001), 628.</ref>