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How did Emily Dickinson organize her poems into manuscript-books called fascicles?
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Emily Dickinson
Poet Emily Dickinson is one of American poetry's most singular and influential voices.
Beginning in the summer of 1858, Emily Dickinson organized her poems into manuscript-books, which are commonly referred to as "fascicles." To create these, she made clean copies of her poems on fine-quality stationery and then sewed small bundles of these sheets together at the fold.1
Over a period of seven years, Dickinson assembled 40 of these booklets, along with several unsewn sheaves, containing a total of approximately 800 poems. While her exact motivation for this organizational method remains a subject of conjecture, scholars suggest several possibilities:1
- She may have intended to arrange her work in a convenient format for sharing with friends.1
- The assemblage might have been a private endeavor, similar to her earlier herbarium.1
- She may have anticipated posthumous publication, as hinted in her 1863 poem, "This is my letter to the World".1
Because Dickinson left no instructions regarding these manuscripts, her ultimate purpose for creating them remains unknown.1