Illustration from St. Nicholas magazine for children
that accompanied one of Emily's poems
I learned this week that after Emily Dickinson died, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd were left to handle Dickinson's work. Todd was deeply involved in a love affair with Austin Dickinson, Emily’s brother, who was married to Susan, who was a very close friend of Emily.
Emily had been famously hesitant to publish while she was alive.
In an effort to promote the posthumously published volumes of Dickinson's poetry, her editors sometimes positioned the work as children's literature. These edits ranged from changing punctuation to amending the rhyme schemes to be more elementary and even changing entire lines. Todd said she altered some of Dickinson's poems to be more lullaby-like, changing them “in order to have the rhyme perfect."
I still have a tough time as an adult interpreting many of Dickinson's poems, and could not imagine reading them as a child.
One famous example of an edit is in "I taste a liquor never brewed." Dickinson originally wrote:
Not all the Frankfort Berries
Yield such an Alcohol!
Todd and Higginson published it as:
Not Frankfort Berries yield the sense
Such a delirious whirl!
which substantially changes Dickinson's imagery and rhythm.
Some Dickinson poems appeared in children's magazines in the 1890s. Here is one poem from a children's magazine.
Here is Emily's original version:
Will there really be a "Morning"?
Is there such a thing as "Day"?
Could I see it from the mountains
If I were as tall as they?
Has it feet like Water lilies?
Has it feathers like a Bird?
Is it brought from famous countries
Of which I have never heard?
Oh some Scholar! Oh some Sailor!
Oh some Wise Men from the skies!
Please to tell a little Pilgrim
Where the place called "Morning" lies!
You can see that the only changes here are Emily's distinctive capitalizations.
St. Nicholas was the premier magazine for children's literature and it serialized some of the most famous classics in children’s literature, including: The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling, Tom Sawyer Abroad by Mark Twain, Little Men by Louisa May Alcott, and The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett.
The purist in me objects to changes made to her poems after her death, but the example above does read fine as a poem for children.
What are your feelings about what the editors did with her work?
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