After Emily Dickinson died, her sister, Lavinia, contacted two friends of Emily's when she discovered the forty fascicles in Emily's rooms: Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. First Todd began to work on the editing; then Higginson joined her, persuaded by Lavinia. Together, they reworked the poems for publication. Over some years, they published three volumes of Emily Dickinson's poems.
The extensive editing changes they made "regularized" Emily's odd spellings, word usage, and especially punctuation. Emily Dickinson was, for instance, very fond of dashes. Yet the Todd/Higginson volumes have included few of them. Todd was sole editor of the third volume of poems, but kept to the editing principles they'd worked out together.
It's likely that Higginson and Todd were correct in their judgment, that the public could not accept the poems as they were. The daughter of Austin and Susan Dickinson, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, published her own edition of Emily Dickinson's poems in 1914.
It remained until the 1950s, when Thomas Johnson "un-edited" Dickinson's poetry, for the general public to experience her poems more as she'd written them, and as her correspondents had received them. He compared versions in the fascicles, in her many remaining letters, and published his own edition of 1,775 poems. He also edited and published a volume of Dickinson letters, themselves literary gems.
More recently, William Shurr has edited a volume of "new" poems, by gleaning poetic and prose fragments from Dickinson's letters.
Today, scholars still discuss and argue over the paradoxes and ambiguities of Dickinson's life and work. Her work is now included in the humanities education of most American students. Her place in the history of American literature is secure, even if the enigma of her life is still mysterious.
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