Editing Emily Dickinson (section)

=== Structure and syntax ===
[[File:Emily Dickinson "Wild nights" manuscript.jpg|thumb|right|Dickinson's handwritten manuscript of her poem "[[Wild Nights&nbsp;– Wild Nights!]]"]]
The extensive use of [[dash]]es and unconventional [[capitalization]] in Dickinson's manuscripts, and the [[idiosyncratic]] vocabulary and imagery, combine to create a body of work that is "far more various in its styles and forms than is commonly supposed".<ref name="Mc2" /><ref name="Hecht153">Hecht (1996), 153–155.</ref> Dickinson avoids [[pentameter]], opting more generally for [[trimeter]], [[tetrameter]] and, less often, [[dimeter]]. Sometimes her use of these meters is regular, but oftentimes it is irregular. The regular form that she most often employs is the [[ballad stanza]], a traditional form that is divided into quatrains, using tetrameter for the first and third lines and trimeter for the second and fourth, while rhyming the second and fourth lines (ABCB). Though Dickinson often uses perfect rhymes for lines two and four, she also makes frequent use of [[half rhyme|slant rhyme]].<ref name="For63">Ford (1966), 63.</ref> In some of her poems, she varies the meter from the traditional ballad stanza by using trimeter for lines one, two and four; while using tetrameter for only line three.

Since many of her poems were written in traditional ballad stanzas with ABCB rhyme schemes, some of these poems can be sung to fit the melodies of popular folk songs and hymns that also use the [[common meter]], employing alternating lines of [[iambic tetrameter]] and [[iambic trimeter]].<ref>Wolff (1986), 186.</ref>

Dickinson scholar and poet [[Anthony Hecht]] finds resonances in Dickinson's poetry not only with hymns and song forms but also with [[psalms]] and [[riddle]]s, citing the following example: "Who is the East?&nbsp;/ The Yellow Man&nbsp;/ Who may be Purple if he can&nbsp;/ That carries in the Sun.&nbsp;/ Who is the West?&nbsp;/ The Purple Man&nbsp;/ Who may be Yellow if He can&nbsp;/ That lets Him out again."<ref name="Hecht153" />

Late 20th-century scholars are "deeply interested" in Dickinson's highly individual use of punctuation and lineation (line lengths and line breaks).<ref name="Farr3" /> Following the publication of one of the few poems that appeared in her lifetime—"A Narrow Fellow in the Grass", published as "The Snake" in ''The Republican''—Dickinson complained that the edited punctuation (an added comma and a full stop substitution for the original dash) altered the meaning of the entire poem.<ref name="For32" />

:{|
| style="width:20em; vertical-align:top; white-space:nowrap"|
'''Original wording'''<br />
A narrow Fellow in the Grass<br />
Occasionally rides&nbsp;–<br />
You may have met Him&nbsp;– did you not<br />
His notice sudden is&nbsp;–
|
'''''Republican'' version'''<ref name="For32">Ford (1966), 32.</ref><br />
A narrow Fellow in the Grass<br />
Occasionally rides&nbsp;–<br />
You may have met Him&nbsp;– did you not,<br />
His notice sudden is.
|
|}

As Farr points out, "snakes instantly notice you"; Dickinson's version captures the "breathless immediacy" of the encounter; and ''The Republican''{{'}}s punctuation renders "her lines more commonplace".<ref name="Farr3" /> With the increasingly close focus on Dickinson's structures and syntax has come a growing appreciation that they are "aesthetically based".<ref name="Farr3" /> Although Johnson's landmark 1955 edition of poems was relatively unaltered from the original, later scholars critiqued it for deviating from the style and layout of Dickinson's manuscripts. Meaningful distinctions, these scholars assert, can be drawn from varying lengths and angles of dash, and differing arrangements of text on the page.<ref>Crumbley (1997), 14.</ref> Several volumes have attempted to render Dickinson's handwritten dashes using many typographic symbols of varying length and angle. R. W. Franklin's 1998 variorum edition of the poems provided alternate wordings to those chosen by Johnson, in a more limited editorial intervention. Franklin also used typeset dashes of varying length to approximate the manuscripts' dashes more closely.<ref name="Martin" />