Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson

1830-1886

First, the “snake” is a train. 

 

Now to important matters – all those dashes throughout all her poems. What’s the deal with those? (If you have no idea what I’m talking about, Google “Emily Dickinson poem” and read the first 2 you come across).

Are you ready to impress your teachers or lit nerd friends?

After Emily died, they found a grammar book in her room. It was really old and had a section on public speaking. It instructed the speaker to use the marks “-“, “/”, and “\” to represent whether you voice should stay the same, go up, or go down as you read poetry or give speeches in public. In Emily’s original poems, the ones she wrote by hand, she used dashes, just like in the printed versions you buy on Amazon today. Except when she wrote the dashes some of them where strait, some slanted up, and some slanted down. 

They weren’t dashes or hyphens – Emily just understood that poetry is meant to be read out loud and was giving accent marks to her work. She may never have intended to read it publicly herself (Em was a bit of a recluse), but she was providing an inflection aide for the sake of posterity.

But the typist who originally transcribed her work (probably a bored, incompetent typist at that) just converted all those marks into standard, strait dashes. Because, you know, who cares about attention to detail? 

The accent marks have been dashes ever since.

And now we have this mural, which is a pretty good likeness of Em, actually:

So there's that.