Since Dickinson’s poems were almost all unpublished in her lifetime, and since she did not authorise the forms in which the ten printed poems appeared, there can be no secure typography and punctuation. Only a facsimile edition or scanning could include the variety of Dickinson’s dashes. Since no typographical equivalent exists, I resort to a long dash for poetry, so as to register a signal more significant than an ordinary dash between the words.
Dickinson’s subjective capitalisation is preserved in all quotations but not her lineation where it is impossible to be certain whether a line ends or runs on at the edge of her manuscript page.
Dates of Dickinson’s writings are approximate, the cumulative but uncertain fruit of scholarship since the late 1880s.