Out of the Top Drawer

New England Poet-Recluse Emily Dickinson was not stingy with her handiwork. After writing her simple but often cryptic verses at her bedroom writing table, she usually sent them off in letters to friends, or attached them to gifts of cakes and flowers for her brother Austin and his family, who lived next door in Amherst, Mass. But the poems that Emily Dickinson liked best or thought too personal to share she copied on small sheets of note paper; then she sewed them into little booklets with colored string and stored them away in her cherrywood bureau. "

When she died a spinster of 55 in 1886 only five of her poems had been published, all anonymously. But there were well over a thousand more scattered among friends and relatives and in the 40 little booklets in her bureau.

Kinks & Quirks. Since then, scholars who recognized her as a top-drawer American poet have been trying to get their hands on the originals. The Dickinson family, perhaps in Emily's own reticent spirit, put the scholars off for more than 50 years. The family's main concession: doling out heavily edited volumes of Emily's verse, with many omissions and with arbitrary changes in diction and punctuation designed to make her revolutionary prosody and bold use of words more acceptable to conventional taste. Biographers wanted to know why good-looking Emily ("My hair is bold, like the chestnut burr; and my eyes, like the sherry in the glass that the guest leaves") immured herself in her father's sprawling brick mansion for more than twelve years. They also wondered to whom she had addressed her love poems. But the Dickinsons had frustrated the biographers too, by wholesale deletions of personal references from Emily's published letters.

Last week, nonetheless, it looked as though scholars might finally get their chance to straighten out the poetic quirks and biographical kinks in the Dickinson legend. After years of persuasion, Harvard had finally convinced Alfred Leete Hampson, longtime friend of Emily's niece, and heir to Emily's letters and manuscripts, that he should part with them. Manhattan Bibliophile Gilbert Holland Montague had put up "a very substantial sum," turned the collection over to Harvard's Houghton Library for a special Emily Dickinson room.

Scraps & Flaps. Along with the colored-string booklets and other scraps of paper (including scraps of stationery and envelope flaps) on which Emily had scratched her verse, Harvard would get stacks of letters, family records and diaries recently unearthed in old trunks and boxes in Austin Dickinson's Amherst house. Harvard would also get its choice of Emily's library and furniture to outfit the Dickinson room.

For the long-term job of editing the Dickinson papers, Harvard had named Scholar Thomas H. Johnson (Literary History of the U.S.), who estimated that he had enough new Dickinson material to fill three or four volumes. Johnson intended to re-examine all published Dickinson work, since "we have no assurance that any . . . now in print is an accurate transcription of her original writing." By going over letters and family papers, Johnson might also discover the secret of Emily's withdrawal from the world, solve the mystery of her unknown lover.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.