When searching for Dickinson poems on line without the Norton, I found that there are two numbering systems for Dickinson's poems. Besides being very confusing at first, it led me to consider the fact that the poems we are reading were never titled and/or edited before publication by Dickinson herself. The two numbering systems come from two different publications of Dickinson collections by Thomas H. Johnson in 1955 and R.W. Franklin in 1995, and the numbers represent their judgments of chronology.
What I find interesting about this is that there is no way to know for certain. Most authors and poets have control over their image through publication (e.g. Whitman's unique publication of Leaves of Grass), but Dickinson had no such control. In a way, the Dickinson that we know today is the Dickinson that we have interpreted, I wonder if the author herself would be pleased.
Another aspect that relates to this is Onno's comment that Dickinson's poems can be read as a private/diary language. Had she had control over her publication, which poems would she have chosen and how would she have presented herself? A key characteristic of her poetry seems to be ambiguity. If she had more control over publication would she have chosen less ambiguous poems and kept the more ambiguous ones as part of her own "diary"? We shall never know for certain, but the first and last stanzas of 788 shed some light on Dickinson's view of publication:
Publication — is the Auction
Of the Mind of Man —
Poverty — be justifying
For so foul a thing
In the Parcel — Be the Merchant
Of the Heavenly Grace —
But reduce no Human Spirit
To Disgrace of Price —
Perhaps Dickinson would have preferred her works to be published the way they were, without her mind being auctioned and appraised by the publication market, and without a price being placed on her spirit revealed in her poetry.
This is a very good point that I wished we talked about more in class. One thing that really intrigued me was the fact that the poems are ordered by the date that she supposedly wrote them. Poetry collections rarely do this for publication. There's an expected flow between the pieces. As readers now, however, we are really given pieces and told "This is how we order her work." But one poem doesn't necessarily follow another in this manner. It made me view all of the poems that we had to read as several parts that look like puzzle pieces, but will never have a puzzle.
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