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How did Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson change Emily Dickinson’s poems for publication?

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Emily Dickinson, c. 1847 — Emily Dickinson Poet Emily Dickinson is one of American poetry's most singular and influential voices.

When Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson prepared Emily Dickinson’s poems for publication in the 1890s, they sought to make her highly original work more accessible to contemporary readers. Because they felt her unique style was nearly unpublishable, they undertook a process of polishing and correcting the manuscripts.1

Specifically, Todd and Higginson altered the poems by:

Inventing titles: They added titles to poems that the author had left untitled.2
Regularizing mechanics: They modified Dickinson’s original work to conform to standard conventions of diction, grammar, meter, and rhyme.2

These editorial interventions significantly smoothed out the unconventional punctuation and rhythm that characterize Dickinson's manuscripts, such as her signature use of dashes and capitalized interior words. It was not until the 1950s that the first scholarly editions, which sought to restore the poems to their original form, were published by Thomas H. Johnson.23