#Poems with enjantmanet dashes and manual#
#Poems with enjantmanet dashes and full#

Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.ĭickinson also used dashes in place of periods-often at the ends of lines. Courtesy Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

The final dash-Dickinson’s dashes look more like hyphens-follows the cross for the second “t” in “Eternity.” Emily Dickinson Archive.

#Poems with enjantmanet dashes and manual#

That’s exactly how many of us would still use a semicolon today-and how every edition of The Chicago Manual of Style since 1906 would recommend using one.īut Dickinson herself ended that line-as well as the first and third lines-with a dash.† (Another difference: “carriage” and “ourselves,” like “Death,” were capitalized in the original.)Įmily Dickinson, “ Because I could not stop for Death” (ink, ca. So, for example, when Dickinson’s poem about a fateful carriage ride was first published in 1890, as “The Chariot,” it featured a suitably nineteenth-century semicolon at the end of the second line of the first stanza:

And her publishers, who were worried about public reception, made a lot of small but significant changes to conform the poet’s unconventional work to contemporary expectations.

#Poems with enjantmanet dashes and full#

Her poems were first published in full only after she died. I had this image of the poet sitting upright and alone in a window-lit attic writing precisely punctuated midcentury Victorian poetry as a countermeasure against the uncertainties and disappointments of life beyond the page and outside her room.īut the real Emily Dickinson didn’t quite work that way. But I do remember liking Emily Dickinson. When I was in school (many years ago) I didn’t read poetry unless a teacher or professor assigned it. Editors can and should suggest changes and fix problems-and try to anticipate what might work for readers-but the author has the final say. But for a more creative work, the line blurs. In a history journal or academic monograph, yes: a copyeditor can impose Chicago or house style (serial commas!). This can mean something as simple as embracing idiosyncratic or even nonstandard punctuation.

One of the goals of Fiction+ has been to encourage writers and editors to leave the stylebook behind whenever it gets in the way of creative expression.