^{Note 1 in page 225} R. P. Blackmur, “Emily Dickinson: Notes on Prejudice and Fact,” Language as Gesture (New York, 1952), p. 44.

^{Note 2 in page 225} Henry Wells, Introduction to Emily Dickinson (Chicago, 1947), p. 285.

^{Note 3 in page 225} Richard Chase, Emily Dickinson (New York, 1951), p. 201.

^{Note 4 in page 225} Margery McKay's “ ‘Amazing Sense’: The Application of a New Method to the Poems of Emily Dickinson,” unpubl. honors thesis (Swarthmore Coll., 1936), includes a general study of the words found in Dickinson's The Single Hound: Poems of a Lifetime (Boston, 1914) and of the 2,942 nouns found in the 2 volumes, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Centenary Ed. (Boston, 1930) and Unpublished Poems of Emily Dickinson (Boston, 1935). In This Was a Poet (New York, 1938) G. F. Whicher, covering the same material, noted her habitual tendency toward the use of short words, listed the names of trees, flowers, animals, insects, etc., used by her, and gave her 6 most frequently used nouns, but did not discuss her general vocabulary. Genevieve Taggard compiled a list of legal terms used by Dickinson in her poetry and her correspondence, The Life and Mind of Emily Dickinson (New York, 1930), pp. 278-281. See also Wells, pp. 265–286, Chase, passim, and Blackmur for discussions of certain words used by Dickinson.

^{Note 5 in page 225} Louise Kline Kelly, “A Concordance of Emily Dickinson's Poems,” unpubl. diss. (Penn. State Coll., 1951).

^{Note 6 in page 225} The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1955); hereinafter cited as Johnson.

^{Note 7 in page 225} The material for this study was originally derived from the Kelly concordance, but all figures have been corrected to agree with the poems as they appear in the Johnson edition. Many of her poems were left by Emily Dickinson in an unfinished condition, i.e., the MSS. include alternatives suggested for various words in the text. In this discussion alternative words have been disregarded, and only those words appearing in the principal text or in variant fair copies as established in the Johnson edition have been considered. Although there are over 2,000 changes in the text of the poems as originally published, and although editorial emendations (deletions, substitution of suggested alternatives, and outright changing of individual words or phrases) have occasionally changed the impact of individual poems, no great variations in style or in the use of words result from such changes. The most consistent differences between the poems as written by Emily Dickinson and as originally published are in form (linear arrangement), punctuation, and capitalization. All quotations given in this paper follow the form of the original poems as established in the Johnson edition. All citations for material quoted from the poems give both the Johnson edition and one or the other of the following volumes in which the poem had previously appeared (material not previously published will of course have only the Johnson citation) : The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Martha Dickinson Bianchi and Alfred Leete Hampson (Boston, 1942) cited as Poems. Originally published in 1937, various reprints with identical pagination appeared up to 1952, the later editions being titled Poems by Emily Dickinson; Bolls of Melody, ed. Mabel Loomis Todd and Millicent Todd Bingham (New York, 1945), cited as Bolts.

^{Note 8 in page 226} E.g., “the familiar liking for plush and satin and purple” (F. O. Matthiessen, “The Problems of a Private Poet,” Kenyon Rev., vu, Autumn 1945,589); “the pervasive presence of such terms as ‘decree,’ ‘election,’ ‘confirmed,’ ‘condemned,’ ‘espoused' ” (p. 596). “such favorite words as ‘queen,’ ‘royal,’ ‘wife,’ ‘poet,’ ‘immortal,’ and ‘empress’ ” (Chase, p. 121); “some marvelous word like attar, extrinsic, cochineal, plush, or phosphor … some revelatory fusion of such words as noon, blaze, mazarin, circumference, and recess” (Chase, p. 201); “bees, blossoms, jewels, diadems, plush, bonnets, exotic geographical names, alcohol, and so on are her poetic stock in trade” (Chase, p. 221). “Emily Dickinson's favorite words: ‘diadem,’ … ‘adamant,’ … ‘pilgrim’ and ‘thirst’ ” (M. E. Barbot, “Emily Dickinson Parallels,” New Eng. Quart., xiv, Dec. 1941, 692). “ ‘Bee’ was one of Emily Dickinson's favorite words” (Rebecca Patterson, The Riddle of Emily Dickinson, Boston, 1951, p. 160). “The two words that Emily Dickinson returns to again and again are awe and circumference” (Thomas H. Johnson, Emily Dickinson: An Interpretive Biography, Cambridge, Mass., 1955, p. 134). See also Blackmur's discussion of phosphor, plush, purple, and others of Dickinson's “favorite words” (pp. 42–43, 46–47).

^{Note 9 in page 226} An undue preference for a word can be shown by a writer in other ways than over-frequent use of the word, but with Dickinson it can be shown that the preference is not for particular words but for a manner of expression, a rhetorical device that is likely to be used with almost any word. See below, pp. 235–238.

^{Note 10 in page 227} The material for this comparison has been taken from The Continuity of Poetic Language: Studies in English Poetry from the 1540's to the 1940's, Josephine Miles (Berkeley, 1951). This study covers 1,000 lines of the work, published in the decade of the forties, of each of the following poets: 1540 1640 1740 1840 1940 Chaucer Carew Cooke Landor Williams Langland Donne Gray Emerson Cummings Lydgate, J. Harvey Akenside Macaulay H. D. English Popular Jonson Young Browning, R. Millay Ballads Sandys Johnson Browning, E. B. Auden Douglas More, H. Blair Clough Lowell, R. Skelton Denham Blacklock Arnold Frost Barclay Quarles Montagu Poe Manifold Sternhold Milton Walpole Hawker Warren Lindsay Waller Pope Bryant Pound Wyatt Wither Collins Longfellow Yeats Surrey Crashaw Mason Hood Moore Heywood Shirley Lyttleton Tennyson Spender Baldwin Suckling Shenstone Campbell Stevens Sack ville Vaughan Warton, J. Keble Eliot Googe Cleveland Dyer Wordsworth Crane, Hart Turberville Cowley Armstrong Home Shapiro Breton Herrick Thomson Lowell Thomas Gascoigne Lovelace Warton, T. Hemans Sitwell, E. Spenser Dryden Somerville Tupper Jeffers Shakespeare

For the poets of the 1540's to “make out a roster of twenty poets, one must include the late publication, or republication, of great predecessors … as well as the work of successors” (Miles, p. 15). With the exception of the quotations from Shakespeare and Longfellow and the noting of Robert Browning's use of pampas, all information in this discussion that refers to the work of these poets has been compiled from the various tables in the Miles volume.

^{Note 11 in page 227} An actual count of the listings in the Dickinson concordance plus net additions from the Johnson edition gives a total of 10,784, and sample recounts confirm the approximate accuracy of this figure. All figures given have been checked and rechecked for accuracy, and all mechanical additions have been set up so as to give a check on the accuracy of the totals derived. The significant figures in this discussion, however, are those showing ratios or relationships rather than absolute details. It is more important, for example, to know that Dickinson used day approximately twice as many times as she used night than it is to determine that she used the one exactly 267 times and the other 132 times. Checks from the concordance listings to the text and from the text back to concordance listings covering more than 5,000 individual entries indicate a probable error of less than 1%, a variation that would not materially affect the general findings. 228

^{Note 12 in page 227} A Concordance to the Poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Shelton Hubbell (New York, 1932), and A Concordance to the Poems of Sidney Lanier, Philip Graham and Joseph Jones (Austin, Texas, 1939). The estimates of the number of listings in the Emerson and Lanier concordances are based on an average number of listings per page obtained from an actual count of 30% of the pages in each concordance.

^{Note 13 in page 227} A Concordance to the Poems of John Keats, comp. and ed. Dane Lewis Baldwin et al. (Carnegie Inst, of Washington, 1917), p. viii.

^{Note 14 in page 227} A total of 7,219 different words (exclusive of inflected forms) has been listed and counted.

^{Note 15 in page 227} The number of compound words used by Keats is given in the Keats concordance, p. viii; the numbers for Dickinson, Emerson, and Lanier were obtained from a count of individual words in the respective concordances. Most of Dickinson's compound words are not hyphenated, but the sense of the line indicates that the 2 words are to be considered as a single verbal unit, e.g., “long expectant eyes” (Johnson, i, 75; Poems, p. 64, where the words are hyphenated) could hardly be read as “long, expectant eyes.” Some of these words were written by the poet as single words, e.g., Palmleaf (Johnson, 1, 121; Bolts, p. 87, where it appears as Palm-leaf) and Winterworn (Johnson, in, 1082; this is printed in Poems, p. 243, as winter warm).

^{Note 16 in page 229} For this comparison Emerson, Keats, and Lanier were chosen as being 3 poets, 2 American and 1 English, approximately contemporary with Dickinson, who had differing intellectual and cultural backgrounds and whose work was of varying poetic merit. One of them, Emerson, may have had some influence on Dickinson's ideas and on her poetry (see Whicher, Ch. xi, et passim). There is no evidence, however, that she was aware of the poetry of Lanier despite the appearance of his “The Marshes of Glynn” in A Masque of Poets (Boston, 1878), the anthology in which Dickinson's “Success is counted sweetest” was included, and the occasional publication of or quotation from some of his poems in the Springfield Daily Republican (e.g., issues of 21 July 1877 and 23 Nov. 1879), a paper that was read regularly by Emily Dickinson (Whicher, p. 170). There is likewise no evidence that she was familiar with the work of Keats. Although she told T. W. Higginson that Keats was among the poets she read (Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. Mabel Loomis Todd, New York, 1931, p. 273; this volume hereafter cited as Letters), her single reference to Keats's poetry in her published correspondence, “like Keats's bird and ‘hops and hops in little journeys’ ” (ibid., p. 427), could have been borrowed from Higginson's “The Life of the Birds” (Atlantic Monthly, x, Sept. 1862, 368), where the line is quoted correctly, and not from the passage in Endymion where it occurs (Bk. 1, ll. 698–700).

^{Note 17 in page 229} An American Dictionary of the English Language, Noah Webster, rev. and enl. by Chauncey A. Goodrich (Springfield, Mass.: G. and C. Merriam, 1849); An American Dictionary of the English Language, Noah Webster, rev. ed. (New York: Harper and Bros., 1846). There are a few differences in the two editions, e.g., unsuspended, a word used by Dickinson, appears in the Harper 1846 edition but not in the Merriam edition; un-shriven, also a Dickinson word, is included in the Merriam edition but not in the Harper edition.

^{Note 18 in page 230} “ ‘Here!’ there are typic ‘Heres'—/Foretold Locations—” (Johnson, in, 1046; Bolts. p. 269).

^{Note 19 in page 230} Keats was also addicted to adjectives ending in -less (Keats concordance, p. xii), but none of the unconventional ones used by Dickinson appear in the concordance to his poems.

^{Note 20 in page 231} Superficies does not appear in the Lanier concordance, but it was used by the poet in a poem first published in 1945, Sidney Lanier, ed. Charles R. Anderson, Centennial Ed. (Baltimore, 1945), i, 203.

^{Note 21 in page 231} The early editions of Webster's Dictionary give 4 variant spellings for attar: attar, ottar, otter, and otto.

^{Note 22 in page 231} Five Thousand Receipts in All the Useful and Domestic Arts, Constituting a Complete and Universal Practical Library and Operative Cyclopedia, ed. Colin Mackenzie (Philadelphia, 1827), p. 255 et passim. This compendium also includes a formula for the preparation of “Ottar of Roses,” and cochineal and mazarin are mentioned several times in the section devoted to the preparation of paints.

^{Note 23 in page 231} Review of a play, Baby, Springfield Daily Republican, 11 March 1879, p. 4.

^{Note 24 in page 231} Mercy Philbrick's Choice was originally published in 1876, but indurated appears in a Dickinson poem written about 1868 (Johnson, ii, 793).

^{Note 25 in page 231} An interesting coincidence appears in the use of homogeneous in an editorial in the Springfield Daily Republican (3 April 1877, p. 4), and Dickinson's use of homogeneously in a letter to Mrs. Holland dated “late May 1877” (Emily Dickinson's Letters to Dr. and Mrs. Josiah Gilbert Holland, ed. Theodora Van Wagenen Ward, Cambridge, Mass., 1951, p. 115). Homogeneous does not appear in any form in Dickinson's poetry, and this is the only use of it that has been noted in her correspondence.

^{Note 26 in page 232} An assumption that seems to have been generally accepted, e.g., “made constant use of her lexicon … But the ever-present lexicon promised too much, and the poet who consulted it was often too eager to find some marvelous word like attar, extrinsic, cochineal, plush, or phosphor …” (Chase, p. 201); and “The dictionary was the mine from which the gold of poetry was to be extracted” (Wells, p. 278).

^{Note 27 in page 235} “Emily Dickinson,” Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas (New York, 1936), p. 22.

^{Note 28 in page 236} E.g., Phineas Fletcher's “The Purple Island”; “The bloom of Young Desire and purple light of love,” Thomas Gray, “The Progress of Poesy,” 1.3.17; “On Calvary shot down that purple eye,” George Croly, “To The Stars”; “and in his pained breast/Made purple riot,” Keats, “The Eve of St. Agnes,” 16.3; “Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales,” Tennyson, “Locksley Hall,” i.122; “Stars in the purple dusk above the roof tops,” Aiken, “Morning Song” from Senlin: A Biography.

^{Note 29 in page 238} E.g., in the lines “The Sun and Moon must make their haste—/ The Stars express around” (Johnson, ii, 648; Bolts, p. 26), express is used in the sense of to go with speed, a meaning that the OED notes was utilized by Chaucer and Pepys but that was becoming prevalent in Dickinson's day with reference to the speed of express trains; in “Power is only Pain / Stranded, thro' Discipline, / Till Weights—will hang—” (Johnson, I, 181; Poems, p. 19), stranded becomes intelligible only if it is taken in the sense of twisted together to form a rope or cable, a use cited by the OED as occurring in 1886.

^{Note 30 in page 238} Keats also used panting in some rather unusual ways, e.g., panting light (Endymion, II.383).

^{Note 31 in page 239} Cf. Thomas H. Johnson, Emily Dickinson: An Interpretive Biography (Cambridge, Mass., 1955), p. 141. Taking the circumstances surrounding the writing of this quatrain as a key to its interpretation, Johnson has worked out a very reasonable theory for the meanings of circumference and awe as used by Dickinson. The poet was, however, familiar with Emerson's essays (Whicher, p. 194), and if his sentence “The moral law lies at the centre of nature and radiates to the circumference” (“Nature,” Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. F. I. Carpenter, AWS, New York, 1934, p. 30) is placed alongside Dickinson's statements “My business is circumference” (Letters, p. 276) and “The Bible dealt with the Centre, not with the Circumference” (Letters to Dr. and Mrs. Josiah Gilbert Holland, p. 195), another interpretation can be reached for the meaning of circumference as generally used by her.

^{Note 32 in page 239} Emily Dickinson may not have been writing for publication, but she did send poems to T. W. Higginson, on the staff of the Atlantic Monthly, to Thomas Niles, a member of the editorial staff of the publishing house of Roberts Brothers, and she sent poems in letters to her friends. She did not write poetry solely for her own pleasure.

^{Note 33 in page 239} American Humor (New York, 1931), pp. 266–276.

^{Note 34 in page 240} E.g., “The parasol is the umbrella's daughter,” (Johnson, iii, 1174; Bolts, p. 84); “I asked no other thing—” (Johnson, ii, 478; Poems, p. 8); “Papa above! / Regard a mouse” (Johnson, I, 46; Poems, p. 255). Also in this category is Dickinson's revision of the final stanza of the Watts hymn “There is a land of pure delight.” The original reads:

Could we but climb where Moses stood,

And view the landscape o'er, Not Jordan's stream nor death's cold flood

Should fright us from the shore.

The Dickinson version goes:

“Oh could we climb where Moses stood,

And view the landscape o'er“

Not Father's bells—nor Factories

Could scare us any more! (Johnson, I, 83; Bolts, p. 118)

^{Note 35 in page 240} When the domestic sanitary arrangements of Emily Dickinson's day are recalled, the first stanza of the poem—“Alone and in a Circumstance / Reluctant to be told / A spider on my reticence / Assiduously crawled”—certainly suggests a situation which would classify the poem as light verse. But because of the embellishments with which the “half-sheet of notepaper on which the poem is written” is decorated, Johnson comes, quite logically, to a more serious interpretation of the poem (ii, 816), and the phrase toward the end of the poem “That Larceny of time and mind” certainly supports his assumption that the poem was a protest against the time the poet felt she had wasted reading George Sand's Mauprat. But his statement “that ‘in a circumstance reluctant to be told’ ED had been guided to Mauprat and had found the book a ‘larceny of time and mind’ ” fails to account for alone, certainly a key word in the first line. Both interpretations may be valid, however, and the implied physical setting for tie poem may represent Dickinson's appraisal of Mauprat as literature.

^{Note 36 in page 241} E.g., the poem as written by Dickinson (Johnson, ii, 751),

Except the smaller size No lives are round—These—hurry to a sphere And show and end—The larger—slower grow And later hang—The Summers of Hesperides Are long.

can be more conventionally arranged as a quatrain of 5-foot lines as it appears in Poems, p. 223.

^{Note 37 in page 241} Figures in this paragraph relative to the work of poets from the 16th to the 20th centuries are taken from tables by Miles, pp. 19–27, 31–36, 174–182, 264–273, and 394–402. These figures are the result of an examination of only 1,000 lines of the work of each poet, but Miles has noted that whenever the studies were extended to cover the total work of a poet, the results were found to be approximately the same as those obtained from a survey of 1,000 lines. A comparison of the Miles findings for Emerson, Donne, and Wordsworth with the concordances to the poems of those writers tends to support this statement.

^{Note 38 in page 242} In her “Eras in English Poetry” (PMLA, LXX, Sept. 1955, 853–875) Josephine Miles gives an adjective-noun-verb ratio for Dickinson of 5:11:6. This was based on a survey of 1,000 lines of Dickinson's poems as published in the 1939 edition of The Poems of Emily Dickinson. The ratio of 5:12:8 used in this discussion is based on a count made of 1,000 lines as published in the Johnson edition, the lines being selected to give a chronological sampling of Dickinson's work from 1858 to 1886. Material in this paragraph on the work of poets from the 16th to the 20th centuries is taken from Miles, Continuity of Poetic Language, Table A, pp. 518–519. Adjectives include descriptive and limiting adjectives, participial adjectives, and numerical modifiers such as one, many, no; nouns include substantive forms, except verb forms and pronouns; and nouns used as adjectives, as in summer day; verbs include infinitives and gerunds, with auxiliaries counted as part of the single verbal unit. In correspondence with me Josephine Miles has said that she felt that the count of 8 verbs per 10 lines was more representative of Dickinson's work than the figure of 6 per 10 lines obtained from the selections she used.

^{Note 39 in page 242} “Eras in English Poetry,” p. 857. Also see adjective-noun-verb ratios for poets from 1900–40, p. 875. With one exception the work of the earlier poets is balanced or phrasal, while that of the later is clausal.

^{Note 40 in page 246} Additional words referring to parts of the body which are found in her poems on death are bosom, mouth, lips, forehead (2), hair (2), head, fingers (4), features, eyelids, lungs, and cells. These occur only once except as noted.

^{Note 41 in page 247} “Like others brought up in the Puritan faith she held the belief that God's elect, as the solemn moment of dissolution approached, would reveal by hopeful signs their confidence in their soul's eternal welfare. It made a difference that they should be ‘willing to die.‘ This belief in which she was nurtured, and not sentiment or morbid curiosity, was the reason for Emily's lifelong interest in deathbed details.” (Whicher, p. 84). Although this concern with the dying person's attitude is expressed in several poems, it still does not account for the many physical details which have nothing to do with the individual's attitude toward his approaching end, but which are introduced into so many of her poems about death.

^{Note 42 in page 247} It might be noted that a study of her various uses of a particular word will not produce support for some of the conclusions that have been advanced. For example, the statement of Chase that feet, “a constantly recurring symbol,” is generally intended to “evoke the idea of a pilgrimage to immortality” (pp. 223–224) is not supportable unless one is willing to read that interpretation into passages where it is not expressed by the context. “Our feet” are traveling toward “eternity” in the poem beginning “Our journey had advanced” (Johnson, ii, 473; Poems, p. 185), but a completely different idea is evoked in the lines “The Feet, mechanical, go round— / Of Ground, or Air, or Ought— / A Wooden way / Regardless grown” (Johnson, I, 272; Poems, p. 365), an idea that is repeated in the lines “From Blank to Blank— / A Threadless Way / I pushed Mechanic feet—” (Johnson, II, 579; Poems, p. 369). In the poem containing the lines “It was as if a chirping brook / Upon a dusty way— / Set bleeding feet to minuets” (Johnson, i, 67; Poems, p. 34), the “dusty way” is the arduous routine of life, but there is no suggestion that it leads or might lead to immortality. Dickinson in one poem could say “I never spoke with God / Nor visited in Heaven— / Yet certain am I of the spot / As if the Checks were given” (Johnson, ii, 742; Poems, p. 163) and in another “As round a Goalless Road / No faster than a Mile at once / The Traveller proceed—” (Johnson, I, 366; Poems, p. 450). She was deeply concerned with the eternal problems of life and death, but for her life after death was a hope and not a conviction.