MY SOURCE for Poems and Fancies is the first edition of 1653. The revised edition of 1664 often improves the meter and rhyme, but, according to Sara Mendelson, Cavendish “paid an anonymous drudge to ‘correct’ the stylistic errors of her earliest works for second editions.” We cannot know how involved she was in this editing process. Moreover, the revisions sometimes sacrifice what George Parfitt, who oversaw the Scolar Press facsimile of the first edition in 1972, calls Cavendish’s “energy. . . accompanied by a generous unpredictability.” On rare occasion, however, I have silently adopted a minor orthographical correction from the second edition, where the first edition most likely reflects a printing error. I have retained Cavendish’s punctuation, italics, and capitalization in the body of the poems but have employed modern spelling, except for dialectal variants (e.g., champian for champaign).