![]() “The dash suggests that disjunction, to Dickinson, is one of the defining characteristics of the self in language.” Deirdre Fagan, however, counters that that dash – which appears more often than any single word in Dickinson’s poetry – represents “the unutterable” itself. It is “a graphic representation in the poem of the presence of the creative impulse, of the spontaneity of the emotional force that went into the composition.”įor Paul Crumbley, Dickinson’s many different dashes – penned with different lengths and different angles of slant – likewise reach out to readers and suggest multiple possibilities of discourse. ![]() “The dash sensitizes the reader’s reactions, activates the responsive reservoirs of the reader,” wrote David Porter back in 1966. But many understand it to signify more powerfully. The Dickinson dash might be read merely as a cue for a pause – a breath – a hesitation. “Has our experience of Dickinson’s writing altered, if subliminally, with these changes?” asks Loeffelholz. Such a shortening is not without its effects. (And now the online Emily Dickinson Archive makes it easy to view the poet’s original manuscripts, potentially eliminating the need for standard typography.) Franklin’s authoritative 1998 edition of The Poems of Emily Dickinson shrunk them further by using mere hyphens. Thomas Johnson’s monumental 1955 edition of The Poems of Emily Dickinson went with the medium-length en-dash (my own personal preference). Scholars have generally preferred shorter marks. The em-dash is what is most generally thought of as a “dash.” But “are the marks we refer to, for convenience, as Dickinson’s dashes truly conventional dashes?” wonders Mary Loeffelholz. For the few they retained, the publisher chose the longer em-dash, a choice that was naturally repeated as Dickinson’s poems were increasingly anthologized in the first half of the twentieth century. When Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson first collected and published some of Dickinson’s poems in 1890, they omitted most of the dashes, replacing some with commas. How do you reprint Dickinson’s idiosyncratic handwriting using a standard typeface? Do you go with the short hyphen (-), the medium en-dash (–), or the long em-dash (-)? Adam O’Fallon Price observes that this particular style of punctuation is so frequently associated with Dickinson that the “em” in “em-dash” might stand for “Emily”! Scholars don’t simply debate what the dashes mean they debate what the dashes are. And they are famously ambiguous – “among the most widely contested diacriticals in the modern literary canon,” notes Ena Jung. ![]() According to Linda Ellis, this dash represents our whole life.Emily Dickinson’s dashes are the most famous punctuation marks in all of American literature. However, between the time we are born and the time we die, there lies a dash of events that sum up our life. Questions of how and why pertaining to birth and death have stirred many and several are still in the quest for answers. Would you be proud of the things they sayįor centuries, life and death have been philosophies explored by thinkers time and again. ![]() He noted that first came the date of birth He referred to the dates on the tombstone The Dash Poem by Linda Ellis I read of a man who stood to speak ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |