Postbellum Productions: Dickinson, Editorial Theory, and the Buffalo Poetics Program

Abstract:This essay takes the recent conference at the University at Buffalo marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Buffalo Poetics Program as an occasion for rethinking the ways in which we read Dickinson as responsive to culture, politics, and history. To prompt this rethinking this essay moves through three interrelated sections. The first provides an account of the Poetics Program as a center for editorial theory regarding Dickinson; the second offers a comparison of what I argue are the two primary editorial representations of Dickinson's work now available, namely Marta Werner and Jen Bervin's The Gorgeous Nothings and Cristanne Miller's Emily Dickinson's Poems: As She Preserved Them, both intimately associated with the program; and the third, considering Werner and Bervin's edition in light of Miller's, calls for greater critical attention to traces of cultural, political, and historical responsiveness in Dickinson's later poems, which I propose can be understood as postbellum productions.