Corrective Measures
Recent posts have focused on edits and corrections editors made with the first edition of poems by Emily Dickinson. Yesterday I focused on the use of “lain” (vs. “laid” – for the ever confounding verbs “lay” and “lie”), specifically in the poems “I died for beauty, but was scarce” and “How many times these low feet staggered.” “Even outsiders protested” (about issues with grammar) wrote Millicent Todd Bingham in “Ancestors’ Brocades,” her 1945 account of “Emily Dickinson’s Literary Debut.” Bingham shared a letter from a school principal to Thomas Wentworth Higginson about the “lain”/”laid” issue in the two poems mentioned above, and across the top of that letter he wrote, “I have discouraged this” (i.e., making any change). Between the third and fourth printing of the first edition of “Poems,” co-editor Mabel Loomis Todd wrote to Higginson to discuss some misprints in the book. “The first (in the poem beginning ‘A wounded deer leaps highest’) is on page 20 – of w...