William Hayes Ward

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February 8, 1891

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H bMS Am 1118.95, Box 9

Printed in Millicent Todd Bingham, Ancestors' Brocades: The Literary Debut of Emily Dickinson (114-115), it is transcribed differently in slight but very significant ways. While we transcribe "manuscripts letters-poems etc" Bingham transcribes "manuscripts, letters, poems, etc." and thereby inserts commas and a period where there are none as she edits this letter according to the conventions of print and how she sees its sense. The different sense that we see likewise informs our transcription, which does not insert punctuation and interprets Susan's yoking of the terms letters and poems to makes "letters-poems" as an effort to signal, via nomenclature, Dickinson's writing practices, which blend conventions of epistolary and lyric composition. As Smith's earlier transcriptions demonstrate, the hyphenated term is arguably "letter-poems" rather than "letters-poems" (see "A Note on the Text," Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson, xxv; Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson, 110).