Poems of Emily Dickinson

The reader may ask why any poems were published in the first place with stanzas left out. Did the editors presume to pass judgment on Emily's work and to decide that the deletion of this or that would improve a poem, make it less incomprehensible or more acceptable to their contemporaries? In several instances this is evidently what happened. In others, Emily was her own editor and critic. For example, of certain poems she left two drafts, from one of which a stanza at least is missing. She wrote, and later re-wrote, especially during her middle period. But when she died in 1886 at the age of fifty-five, she had not completed all the revisions on which she had been working. Indeed, during her last period, a very productive one, she was. dashing off more and more new poems and giving less and less time to re-writing of earlier drafts. As a result, a good many

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