{"id":985,"date":"2024-03-20T20:05:04","date_gmt":"2024-03-21T00:05:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/?p=985"},"modified":"2024-12-17T12:21:11","modified_gmt":"2024-12-17T17:21:11","slug":"holly-wiegand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/2024\/03\/20\/holly-wiegand\/","title":{"rendered":"Holly Wiegand"},"content":{"rendered":"

Holly Wiegand<\/strong> is a doctoral candidate in English at Boston University. Holly’s research and teaching chart interdisciplinary approaches to British and American literature and religion of the long nineteenth century. <\/span>Her dissertation, \u201cBold Devotion: Female Religious Authority and Transatlantic 19th-Century Fiction,\u201d <\/span>tells a new story about how period women\u2019s writing stages public female preachers and theologians within cultures that seek to silence them. Her graduate work has been supported by the BU Center of the Humanities. Portions of Holly’s research are also forthcoming in <\/span><\/em>Legacy<\/span> <\/span>and the edited collection <\/span><\/em>Victorians and Videogames<\/span> with Routledge.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Dickinson on the Surface: Contemporary Children\u2019s Editions of Dickinson and the Board-Book Canon<\/strong><\/h3>\n

In 1891, two edited poems by American author Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) appeared in the popular children\u2019s magazine St. Nicholas<\/em>.[1]<\/span><\/a> The famously reclusive Dickinson sent out only a handful of her almost 1800 poems to be published during her lifetime; the poems at hand, titled by the editors as \u201cThe Sleeping Flowers\u201d and \u201cMorning,\u201d join reams of Dickinson poems that were modified by publishers, editors, and adapters during and after her life to fit a perceived poetic taste.[2]<\/span><\/a> In contemporary literary studies, early edited Dickinson poems on the whole remain ephemera to be exhumed only as opportunities for comparison, favoring analysis of facsimile manuscripts or accepted scholarly editions. Yet as book historian Ingrid Satelmajer points out, the packaged St. Nicholas <\/em>poems reveal how Dickinson\u2019s editors and publishers sought to \u201cintroduce her into print culture,\u201d pointing out that periodicals easily outsold books and stood as a bastion of nineteenth-century literary culture.[3]<\/span><\/a> The St. Nicholas <\/em>Dickinson poems point us to popular sentiments about Dickinson\u2019s poetry and, moreover, how adults interpret children interpreting poetry. Even today, children\u2019s book publishers re-package Dickinson and see her as children\u2019s reading, evidenced in the slew of kid-oriented Dickinson collections ranging from young readers\u2019 picture books to infants\u2019 illustrated board books. Here, I examine five modern Dickinson collections for children as a growing archive of a kid-oriented canon: I’m Nobody! Who Are You?: Poems of Emily Dickinson for Children <\/em>(1978), Poetry for Young People: Emily Dickinson <\/em>(1994), Poetry for Kids: Emily Dickinson <\/em>(2016), Little Poet Emily Dickinson: In Emily\u2019s Garden <\/em>(2019), and The Illustrated Emily Dickinson: 25 Essential Poems<\/em> (2022).[4]<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Taking up Dickinson children\u2019s books as objects of analysis reveals a complex network of popular assumptions about poetry for kids. As picture books, these Dickinson editions specifically engage multivalent material and textual surfaces: the surface of the language, the surface of the page, and the surface of the book. I argue contemporary Dickinson children\u2019s book editors arrange the surfaces of Dickinson\u2019s poems to cultivate an accessible and consumable Dickinson poetry. These picture books craft this image of Dickinson by emphasizing her poems about nature, couching her poetry among playful illustrations of bugs, animals, and flowers to \u201cmake them irresistible, beguiling\u2014and clearly understandable,\u201d as the book jacket of I\u2019m Nobody! <\/em>declares.[5]<\/span><\/a> Such editorial choices paint Dickinson\u2019s poems as safe and simple<\/em>, swerving away from Dickinson\u2019s notorious complexity. I contend these children\u2019s versions of Dickinson epitomize an accessible \u201csurface reading\u201d approach to literary interpretation: a posture of reading that foregrounds the \u201cevident, perceptible, apprehensible\u201d in interpretation, according to Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus.[6]<\/span><\/a> The children\u2019s picture books at hand are a collaborative multimodal effort among past and present authors, publishers, and illustrators. As such, Dickinson children\u2019s books both represent and respond to surface reading approaches. In surface mode, Dickinson kids\u2019 books epitomize the push for child-friendly versions of canonical literature in popular culture growing out of adult anxieties (and fantasies) about poetic literacy and cultural inheritance.<\/p>\n

Dickinson picture books offer an evocative case study for approaching the \u201cboard-book canon,\u201d as I call it, by identifying the surfaces, audiences, and philosophies of reading within the children\u2019s literature genre: the publisher\/curator, the editor, the illustrator, and the adult purchaser. The Dickinson \u201cboard books\u201d at hand (books constructed from durable paperboard for children), these Dickinson editions are calculated to spark a child\u2019s interest in and understanding of poetry through its many surfaces. In brief, \u201csurface reading\u201d as an exterior interpretive posture arises in reaction to an inward excavatory approach of \u201csymptomatic reading\u201d made popular by Frederic Jameson.[7]<\/span><\/a> Symptomatic reading seeks to diagnose hidden or unsayable codes and meanings \u201crepresse[d]\u201d beneath \u201cthe surface of the text,\u201d in Jameson\u2019s words.[8]<\/span><\/a> As Best and Marcus point out, this interpretive posture might be traced to Freud\u2019s understanding of the unconscious and takes many forms.[9]<\/span><\/a> Symptomatic reading is akin to \u201csuspicious reading\u201d and \u201creading against the grain\u201d of a text in order to attend to its silences and how those silences often have real socio-political stakes, particularly for figures and ideologies often relegated to covert spaces and signs.[10]<\/span><\/a> In contrast, Best and Marcus encourage us not to forsake the obvious for the obscure. Pushing back on suspicious reading, they summarize, \u201cA surface is what insists on being looked at<\/em> rather than what we must train ourselves to see through<\/em>.\u201d[11]<\/span><\/a> Marcus\u2019s investigation of female friendship in Victorian novels exemplifies this approach, arguing for \u201cjust reading,\u201d seeing the surface text as \u201cample\u201d for analysis.[12]<\/span><\/a> Surface reading, then, holds kinship with \u201creading with the grain\u201d and Eve Sedgwick\u2019s \u201creparative reading\u201d among other coinages.[13]<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

In scholarly conversation, Dickinson remains a prime candidate for both symptomatic and surface reading approaches for a host of compelling reasons ranging from biography (her reclusive spinsterhood and complicated sexuality) to publication history (her complicated legacy of editorial targeting) to language and genre (her complicated poetry).[14]<\/span><\/a> Dickinson stands as the dominant female poet of the nineteenth century in part because of the never-ending complexity of her life and work. Surface readings of Dickinson largely attend to her manuscript facsimiles, as exemplified first by Ralph W. Franklin\u2019s 1981 two-volume publication of Dickinson facsimiles in The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson<\/em> and Marta L. Werner\u2019s 1995 Emily Dickinson\u2019s Open Folios, <\/em>the latter of which lovingly reproduces photos of manuscripts side-by-side with transcriptions and analysis; the scholarly text itself forces us to attend to Dickinson\u2019s surfaces in its scrapbook-like format.[15]<\/span><\/a> Yet as Domhnall Mitchell summarizes, manuscript surface supremacy in Dickinson scholarship can tend toward a limiting (and limited) interpretive road. Mitchell suggests that emphasizing the manuscript implies \u201cnot only that there must be right and wrong textual approaches<\/em>, but also that there are right and wrong texts<\/em>\u2014original and corrupt versions.\u201d[16]<\/span><\/a> Mitchell rightly points out that elevating Dickinson\u2019s archives brings about problems of access equity and exclusionist critical approaches when, as Satelmajer represents, there is much to gain from analyzing Dickinson\u2019s edited works and children\u2019s editions.[17]<\/span><\/a> Dickinson materiality scholars emphasize an ethos of fidelity, immediacy, and intimacy that privileges the authorial manuscript surface; Dickinson children\u2019s book producers emphasize a different kind of fidelity, immediacy, and intimacy that privileges engagement with multimodal surfaces\u2014and the consumer.<\/p>\n

Reading surface does not mean forsaking depth but being alert to the exterior and the literal, therefore offering a useful methodology in children\u2019s literature analysis and studies of adaptation. Surface study, Best and Marcus indicate, might attend to the physical materiality of the text, invest in formalist concerns of structure and design, attend to digital humanities analysis and cross-text comparisons, or simply contend for a literal interpretation of the words on the page. I wield and explore each of these various surface reading approaches to help sort out the networks of interpretation and intention of Dickinson\u2019s works. I perceive these Dickinson children\u2019s editions as doing <\/em>surface reading as well as the books facilitating it. Material surfaces in children\u2019s books are destined for years of wear and tear, to be cast aside, re-gifted, or stored away. And, particularly in adaptations, abridgments, and collections of established literary works for kids, textual and visual surface reigns supreme. Children\u2019s literature scholar Peter Hunt suggests \u201cthe study of children\u2019s literature brings us back to some very fundamental concerns: why are we reading? what are books for<\/em>?\u201d[18]<\/span><\/a> I follow Hunt in arguing that children\u2019s literature similarly returns to questions of how <\/em>we read and what surfaces we value\u2014consciously or unconsciously\u2014in that reading. Kids\u2019 books clue us into how adults interpret Dickinson as a cultural figure.<\/p>\n

Illustrated children\u2019s books geared toward aesthetic and ideological formation in U.S. culture like the Dickinson books at hand have a long history traceable to Benjamin Harris\u2019s 1690 New England Primer<\/em>, an alphabet book of couplets and correlated illustrations drawn from the Bible.[19]<\/span><\/a> In the nineteenth century, as modern views of the home, the family, and the individual began to emphasize childhood as distinct from adulthood, children\u2019s literature exploded.[20]<\/span><\/a> Children\u2019s picture books and primers of the past and present seek to prime children for adult reading and, moreover, for reading and being in adult society and culture.[21]<\/span><\/a> Following children\u2019s pedagogy scholar Hong-Nguyen (Gwen) Nguyen, I emphasize poetry reading as a social act emerging from, engaging, and creating literary culture.[22]<\/span><\/a> Nguyen builds on sociocultural theories of child literacy and psychology, which emphasize students\u2019 prior knowledge, cultural backgrounds, and social contexts to scaffold future work, \u201cbuilding on what children bring,\u201d to quote Catherine Compton-Lilly.[23]<\/span><\/a> Nguyen\u2019s research on children learning to read haiku suggests that children reading poetry with an adult is not only an inherently social activity by relating to others through individual reading but also \u201ca visible and irreducible joint production\u201d among the poem, the adult reader, and the child learner.[24]<\/span><\/a> Sociocultural literacy theory offers useful foundations for analyzing children\u2019s poetry and the children\u2019s poetry publishing industry in tandem with surface reading because of its attention to interacting interpretive tools and forces within texts and within the reading moment. Surface reading shows us that contemporary Dickinson editions emerge from and seek to build on \u201cwhat children bring\u201d culturally\u2014a culture in which Dickinson is a popular figure in the Western canon. Close reading the surfaces of Dickinson children\u2019s books points us to the utility of a sociocultural surface reading as a theory and method for approaching the board-book canon broadly.<\/p>\n

Dickinson children\u2019s editions uniquely manifest the tensions between simplicity and complexity, image and language in Dickinson\u2019s poetry as well as the tensions between adult consumer nostalgia and creative adaptation in pop-culture Dickinson editions. The board-book canon grants us important insight into how contemporary culture considers literary legacy. And despite being transparently objects of cultural capital, these texts help emphasize the playfulness and vibrancy of Dickinson\u2019s poems. They belong in conversations about Dickinson\u2019s poetics because they urge us to consider afresh how we read Dickinson (in culture and in scholarship) and what surfaces we value in that reading.<\/p>\n

Poetic Imagery, Illustration and Interpretation for Kids<\/strong><\/p>\n

Surface is supreme in contemporary Dickinson children\u2019s literature: pages are made to be touched and turned, images and language flow in and out. These editors, illustrators, and publishers make strategic decisions based on their view of Dickinson, their view of how to read her poetry, and their view of how children will read her poetry. Comparing each of the five selected Dickinson kids\u2019 picture book collections as both exemplifying and responding to surface reading modes, I will show, reveals little about how children actually engage with Dickinson\u2019s poems and more about the editors\u2019 assumptions about children\u2019s intellectual habits and what makes a poem \u201cfor kids\u201d and not for the adult reader. Scholar of children\u2019s literature David Rudd identifies \u201cthree elements\u201d at play in kids\u2019 books: \u201cthe texts, the children, and the adult critics.\u201d[25]<\/span><\/a> I suggest, however, the Dickinson board-book canon trend only privileges the canon and the adult\u2014the literary-minded consumer.<\/p>\n

Even in a scholarly collection of children\u2019s poems like the Oxford Book of Children\u2019s Verse in America <\/em>(1985), editor Donald Hall selects eight Dickinson poems as \u201cfor kids,\u201d though suggesting these poems are \u201csuited to children\u201d and Dickinson \u201cnot at her best.\u201d[26]<\/span><\/a> Each of Hall\u2019s eight poems appears in at least one of the illustrated children\u2019s collections I examine. Hall seeks to historicize\u2014and, implicitly, excuse\u2014Dickinson as a children\u2019s author in nineteenth-century poetic culture. He notes that \u201cchildren\u2019s magazines made much of Emily Dickinson\u201d and claims that Dickinson joins a larger \u201ccurrent of childishness\u201d in the poetic culture of the period, contending in sweeping historical judgment that in the nineteenth-century popular view \u201cto be a poet was to be childlike.\u201d[27]<\/span><\/a> Hall sees Dickinson emerging from and contributing to a poetic culture for kids in broad, undefined terms. To sidestep his far-reaching (and here, uncorroborated) claim about nineteenth-century poetics, Hall\u2019s comments illustrate the slipperiness and arbitrariness of identifying what poetry for children means, fluctuating between authorial intention, reception, tradition, and what he calls \u201cstructural intention.\u201d[28]<\/span><\/a> Even if the other editors concur with his poetry selections, Hall\u2019s derogatory comment about what Dickinson poems are for children\u2014Dickinson \u201cnot at her best\u201d\u2014suggests Hall sees surface simplicity as a lack of skill.<\/p>\n

The host of illustrated children\u2019s editions of Dickinson represents a strong stance about the importance of images in interpreting Dickinson and maintains that Dickinson is an author for children\u2019s poetic consumption and appreciation. Published almost a decade before Hall\u2019s Oxford Book of Children\u2019s Verse<\/em>, Stemmer House Publisher\u2019s I\u2019m Nobody! Who Are You? <\/em>is the first modern illustrated Dickinson kids\u2019 book. Stemmer House forwards a strong surface-oriented entry into Dickinson children\u2019s books. I\u2019m Nobody! <\/em>is directed toward English readers ages 9 to 10 and includes a kid-friendly biographical introduction by Yale English professor Richard B. Sewall. However, the language and tone of the book\u2019s jacket are clearly geared toward adult purchasers and suggest a non-academic author in its stress on simplicity and surface:<\/p>\n

So many of the poems of Emily Dickinson seem made to delight children that we have asked a gifted artist, Rex Schneider, to interpret all those in this book with full-color illustrations. Thus, for the first time, the whimsical and thought-provoking images created by this great American poet are surrounded by marvelous pictures that make them irresistible, beguiling\u2014and clearly understandable.[29]<\/span><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Clunky grammar aside, the publishers of I\u2019m Nobody! <\/em>announce Dickinson as simultaneously a children\u2019s poet and yet also as a poet needing illustration for reader comprehension. Added visual surface helps explicate the linguistic surface.<\/p>\n

As scholar Perry Nodelman explains in his theoretical consideration of children\u2019s book illustrations, the purpose of illustrations is to \u201cassist in the telling of stories\u201d and \u201cbear the burden of conveying most of the information\u201d because they take up the most space.[30]<\/span><\/a> Illustrations are interconnected with text on the page surface and cannot but affect meaning-making; reading involves images as well as words. Poetry for Young People <\/em>similarly declares that illustrations shape, simplify, and codify multiple poetic interpretations and \u201cmeanings\u201d into a singular meaning;\u00a0\u201cAn ideal way to introduce young readers to the marvels of poetry, the Poetry for Young People<\/em> series opens up the world of wonderful word images by pairing classic poems with beautiful, related illustrations and providing helpful definitions and commentary,\u201d the jacket explains.[31]<\/a>\u00a0Certainly, young readers benefit from kid-oriented scaffolding to sort out Dickinson\u2019s \u201cword images.\u201d In blending metaphors of writing as painting, these pieces of surface scaffolding are loaded theories of poetry and poetic interpretation. Stemmer House\u2019s description illustrates the affinity between Dickinson\u2019s poetic \u201cimages\u201d and Schneider\u2019s \u201cpictures,\u201d and Poetry for Young People <\/em>similarly praises Dickinson for \u201c[u]sing words as her brush, she paints vivid pictures of the world around her.\u201d[32]<\/a><\/p>\n

Both I\u2019m Nobody <\/em>and Poetry for Young People <\/em>rely on surface reading postures to familiarize Dickinson\u2019s complexity, particularly in their discussion of her \u201criddle poems\u201d\u2014poems that describe a subject or idea but do not name it, leaving the reader to deduce that subject or idea. In Bolin\u2019s Poetry for Young People<\/em>, an introduction aimed at young children summarizes Dickinson\u2019s biography, and the jacket author swings between Dickinson as simple and surprising: \u201cSee the beauty and magic of the everyday world through the eyes of Emily Dickinson, one of America\u2019s best-loved and most renowned poets. Flowers, birds, sunrises, sunsets, the moon, and even her own existence take on surprising meanings.\u201d[33]<\/span><\/a> The natural world becomes both legible and illegible in the author\u2019s insistence on familiarity and surprise, foreshadowing the book\u2019s interpretation of several Dickinson poems as \u201criddles.\u201d Bolin\u2019s edition explicitly speaks of seven of its Dickinson poems as \u201criddles\u201d with the \u201canswers\u201d printed upside down in small font at the bottom of the page, urging readers to \u201ccover the pictures\u201d to not spoil the answer. I\u2019m Nobody!<\/em> offers a similar strategy for Dickinson\u2019s riddle poems: \u201cSome of the most delightful poems hide their meanings like little puzzles, until their last stanzas; and these we have arranged in such a way that the surprises are kept to the very end.\u201d[34]<\/span><\/a> Yet ultimately these picture books emphasize surface because of their emphasis on illustration as interpretation. As I\u2019m Nobody! <\/em>contends, \u201cSometimes [the poems] speak most directly. Sometimes they yield their meanings the way roses open, one petal at a time. [\u2026] Other poems happily allow the reader to find out not only their meanings but their subjects [\u2026] To these Rex Schneider brings vivid pictorial imagery which provides the key to understanding.\u201d[35]<\/span><\/a> \u00a0<\/span>Stemmer House\u2019s philosophy exemplifies Nodelman\u2019s analysis of the power of pictures. Yet because illustrations hold the most emphasis, the power and play within Dickinson\u2019s riddles are undercut immediately: illustrations give away the \u201ckey\u201d as surface image supersedes surface text. Poetry for Kids<\/em>\u2019 short poetic summaries of \u201cWhat Emily Was Thinking\u201d in the back of the book cannot compete with illustration. The Illustrated Emily Dickinson<\/em>\u2019s \u201cEngage\u201d and \u201cImagine\u201d question prompts on the side of each page make a better attempt to engage the reader in poetic interpretation and critical thinking, adding a linguistic surface that addresses the reader directly. Nevertheless, illustration, even the most abstract, dominates.<\/p>\n

Dickinson\u2019s Birds, Bees, and Bugs<\/strong><\/p>\n

According to their dust jackets, contemporary Dickinson picture books seek to offer their young readers both surprise and sophistication alongside simplicity and surface. These books are awash with colors, shapes, and, most of all, critters. The five Dickinson kids\u2019 books consistently select and emphasize Dickinson\u2019s poems about the natural world. Natural subjects are easily representable in illustration and (likely) already identifiable by children. Illustrations of Dickinson\u2019s birds, bees, and bugs are a clear example of publishers and editors \u201cbuilding on what children bring,\u201d to remind us of Compton-Lilly\u2019s philosophy of child literacy. The Oxford Book of Children\u2019s Verse <\/em>selects 8 Dickinson poems, I\u2019m Nobody! <\/em>selects 45, Poetry for Kids <\/em>selects 35, Poetry for Young People <\/em>selects 36, Illustrated Emily Dickinson <\/em>selects 25, and In Emily\u2019s Garden <\/em>selects 8; together these children\u2019s books mark 89 of Dickinson\u2019s 1800 poems as children\u2019s poetry. Five of the six Dickinson books include \u201cA narrow fellow in the grass\u201d (which addresses a snake) and \u201cI\u2019m Nobody! Who are you?\u201d (which addresses a frog). Children\u2019s book editorial selections mirror Dickinson\u2019s oeuvre: Stanley Plumly notes that birds appear in 220 of Dickinson\u2019s poems\u2014the dominant creaturely image before bees and then butterflies.[36]<\/span><\/a> All six of the children\u2019s books at hand include the twenty-line \u201cA Bird came down the Walk,\u201d an 1862 poem in which a speaker observes a bird eat an \u201cangleworm\u201d and engage in other bird behavior before soaring away after the speaker offers \u201chim\u201d crumbs.[37]<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Here, I compare the children\u2019s editions of \u201cA Bird came down the Walk\u201d and their accompanying surfaces and illustrations, beginning with Dickinson\u2019s manuscript, to investigate how these surfaces cling to a simple and kid-friendly Dickinson despite the linguistic complexity in the poem\u2019s final lines. Contemporary children\u2019s picture book treatments of \u201cA Bird came down the Walk\u201d uniquely draw out the tensions between metaphor and image. In clinging to surface, they ironically reveal Dickinson\u2019s complexity by way of contrast. Dickinson\u2019s \u201cA Bird came down the Walk\u201d can be read as a kids\u2019 poem because it stages a humble and realistic encounter between the speaker and the bird\u2014\u201cI offered him a Crumb.\u201d[38]<\/span><\/a> As John Felstiner points out in his reading of the poem, this bird is anthropomorphized in \u201ccom[ing] down the walk,\u201d and familiar even in its Darwinian deed of eating the worm.[39]<\/span><\/a> Richard E. Brantley posits that Dickinson\u2019s \u201ctone celebrates the scientific sense in which both she and the bird share common ground\u201d amid the cruelty and beauty of the natural world.[40]<\/span><\/a> The first stanzas of the poem paint a clear image (see fig. 1).<\/p>\n

\"Handwritten
Figure 1. Emily Dickinson, \u201cA Bird, came down the Walk-,\u201d 1862, Amherst Manuscript Fascicle 85, Emily Dickinson Archive, Amherst College, Amherst, MA. http:\/\/edickinson.org<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Franklin transcribes the first stanza of the poem thusly, maintaining Dickinson\u2019s signature capitalization and dashes:<\/p>\n

A Bird, came down the Walk –<\/p>\n

He did not know I saw –<\/p>\n

He bit an Angle Worm in halves<\/p>\n

And ate the fellow, raw,[41]<\/span><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Each of Dickinson\u2019s contemporary children\u2019s publishers and editors, save for In Emily\u2019s Garden<\/em>, regularizes the capitalization and punctuation throughout the poem. Poetry for Kids<\/em>, for example, eliminates the dashes altogether and adds punctuations to the end of clauses:<\/p>\n

A bird came down the walk<\/p>\n

He did not know I saw;<\/p>\n

He bit an angleworm in halves<\/p>\n

And ate the fellow, raw.[42]<\/span><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This regularization mirrors the methods of St. Nicholas <\/em>editors Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd in prepping Dickinson for children\u2019s reading.[43]<\/span><\/a> The regularized addition of end marks at once both smooths and sections the poem into digestible ideas, removing the ambiguity of the dashes and the dynamism of the hanging comma. Nancy Walker points out that the specifically \u201craw\u201d worm here emphasizes a human perspective in a \u201cwhimsical personification.\u201d[44]<\/span><\/a> The period here underscores this whimsy as a place where the adult reader might pause to laugh at the bird, seeing this act as ridiculous.<\/p>\n

Illustrations of \u201cA Bird came down the Walk\u201d emphasize the bird, of course, because a bird is a familiar, identifiable subject in a kids\u2019 book. Poetry for Young People<\/em>\u2019s illustrator, Chi Chung, frames this poem with a small illustration of a brown bird, perhaps a sparrow, walking across the page\u2019s capacious white background, peering at a small ladybug to its left (see fig. 2).[45]<\/span><\/a> Poetry for Kids<\/em>\u2019s illustrator Christine Davenier emphasizes this first stanza in a triptych-like watercolor series of the bird eating the worm, turning to the invisible speaker, and taking flight (see fig. 3). I\u2019m Nobody!<\/em>\u2019s Rex Schneider allots the poem three full pages of warm colored pencil illustration, tracking the bird in three actions: eating the worm, letting \u201ca Beetle pass,\u201d and finally taking flight above a young Dickinson stand-in (see fig. 4-6).[46]<\/span><\/a> Carme Lemniscates\u00a0in In Emily\u2019s Garden<\/em> shows us a bright blue jay on an abstracted red background, strutting proudly down the sidewalk (see fig. 7-8). The Illustrated Emily Dickinson<\/em>\u2019s collage pages feature a large magpie outlined against a black background below a raspberry-filled girl\u2019s hand (see fig. 9).<\/p>\n

\"Full
Figure 2. Emily Dickinson, \u201cA Bird came down the Walk\u201d Poetry for Young People: Emily Dickinson<\/em> (New York: Sterling House Company, Inc., 1994), 33. Illustration by Chi Chung.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Illustrator
Figure 3. Emily Dickinson, \u201cA Bird came down the Walk,\u201d Poetry for Kids: Emily Dickinson<\/em> (Lake Forest, CA: MoonDance Press, 2016), 11. Illustration by Christine Davenier.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Image
Figure 4. Emily Dickinson, \u201cA Bird came down the Walk,\u201d I\u2019m Nobody! Who Are You?: Poems of Emily Dickinson for Young People<\/em> (Owings Mills, MD: Stemmer House Publishers, Inc., 1978), 20. Illustration by Rex Schneider. Used with permission.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Image
Figure 5. Emily Dickinson, \u201cA Bird came down the Walk,\u201d I\u2019m Nobody! Who Are You?: Poems of Emily Dickinson for Young People<\/em> (Owings Mills, MD: Stemmer House Publishers, Inc., 1978), 21. Illustration by Rex Schneider. Used with permission.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Image
Figure 6. Emily Dickinson, \u201cA Bird came down the Walk,\u201d I\u2019m Nobody! Who Are You?: Poems of Emily Dickinson for Young People<\/em> (Owings Mills, MD: Stemmer House Publishers, Inc., 1978), 22. Illustration by Rex Schneider. Used with permission.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Image
Figure 7. Emily Dickinson, \u201cA Bird came down the Walk,\u201d Little Emily Dickinson: In Emily\u2019s Garden<\/em> (Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith, 2019), 8. Illustration by Carme Lemniscates. Used with permission.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Image
Figure 8. Emily Dickinson, \u201cA Bird came down the Walk,\u201d Little Emily Dickinson: In Emily\u2019s Garden<\/em> (Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith, 2019), 9. Illustration by Carme Lemniscates. Used with permission.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"The
Figure 9. Emily Dickinson, \u201cA Bird came down the Walk,\u201d The Illustrated Emily Dickinson: 25 Essential Poems<\/em> (Fresno, CA: Bushel & Peck Books, 2022), 6-7. Illustration and design by David Miles. Used with permission.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The illustrations above are safe, approachable, engaging. Each of these illustrations emphasizes the bird as the central poetic subject; we see different birds and bugs but little to no full human presence save in I\u2019m Nobody!<\/em> Human absence, counterintuitively, makes the poem more relatable and immersive. Without an illustrated human proxy, the child more easily immerses themselves in the world of the poem to identify with the poetic speaker finding meaning in the bird\u2019s movements through this human-animal encounter. Dickinson\u2019s \u201cA Bird came down the Walk\u201d feels kid-friendly as well because of its seemingly simple storytelling and its rhyming iambs; the poem is easy to read aloud and easy to memorize. Yet this surface safety and familiarity explodes in the final lines as the bird takes flight, becoming distant and strange.<\/p>\n

Dickinson complicates the language surface with a network of metaphors about that flight\u2014a complication that is impossible to represent in simple children\u2019s illustrations: \u201che unrolled his feathers,\u00a0\/ And rowed him softer Home\u00a0\/ Than Oars divide the Ocean, \/ Too silver for a seam \/ Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon, \/ Leap, plashless as they swim.\u201d[47]<\/span><\/a> The bird unrolls like a carpet or a scroll and deftly cuts the horizon like a rowboat in its flight to finally become like a butterfly. Dickinson layers natural imagery, blending sky and sea and bird and butterfly in a confusion of surfaces and signs. In Felstiner\u2019s words, \u201cDickinson wades into the ocean toward creatures somewhere sometime out of mind. [\u2026] \u2018Banks of Noon\u2019 snaps our synapses, leaves us blinking into midday sun.\u201d[48]<\/span><\/a> The bird transcends its natural state to become a dynamic spectacle of language soaring away from view. Dickinson plays with surface meaning and complexity as the bird escapes language and image. Indeed, there is a \u201csurprise\u201d and \u201criddle\u201d to this poem, but not in the senses the publishers described above wherein the reader discovers the satisfaction of closure. Instead, the poem struggles against its surrounding surfaces and itself flies away. These children\u2019s editions distinctively (and on the editor\u2019s part, inadvertently) reveal the pulls between metaphorical and concrete image, surface and suspicion in Dickinson by making that tension visible on the page: Dickinson\u2019s description of flight transcends the in-flight illustrations, too. The poem liberates itself from the illustrations around it.<\/p>\n

Building the Board-Book Canon <\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cA Bird came down the Walk\u201d illustrates the superficiality of contemporary children\u2019s book editors and publishers\u2019 characterization of Dickinson\u2019s \u201ckid poems\u201d and what approaching them looks like. If \u201cBanks of Noon\u201d baffles the adult critic, how can children understand it? These are the \u201cwhimsical and thought-provoking images\u201d Dickinson is known for indeed. The primary aim of these books, though, is to incite a lifelong interest in poetry\u2014not to ensure full reading comprehension. Poetry for Young People <\/em>asserts its collection is \u201c[a]n ideal way to introduce young readers to the marvels of poetry.\u201d Turning finally to a close examination of In Emily\u2019s Garden <\/em>and the BabyLit children\u2019s series underscores what the other Dickinson children\u2019s books imply: these texts are produced to instill poetic literacy and also canon surface literacy\u2014the ability of children to learn canonical texts, characters, images, and ideas early in order to pursue them more fully as their reading levels develop. In other words, the commercialization of Dickinson relies on surface reading.<\/p>\n

BabyLit was created by Suzanne Gibbs Taylor, the Publisher and Chief Creative Officer at Gibbs Smith Publisher, as \u201ca fashionable way to introduce your child to the world of classic literature, while learning numbers, sounds, animals, colors, and more!\u201d according to the back of the Classic Collection boxed set.[49]<\/span><\/a> BabyLit advertises that their board book market is 0-3-year-olds, and, at the time of writing, their \u201cclassic\u201d board book literature series includes twenty-two titles ranging from Anna Karenina <\/em>as a \u201cfashion primer\u201d to Moby-Dick <\/em>as an \u201cocean primer\u201d to Romeo & Juliet <\/em>as a \u201ccounting primer.\u201d[50]<\/span><\/a> In Emily\u2019s Garden <\/em>is the contemporary children\u2019s edition of Dickinson with the youngest target reading level: each page spread includes just one line from a Dickinson poem, each of which refers to a bug, flower, or bee. In Emily\u2019s Garden <\/em>is part of the \u201cLittle Poet\u201d series, joined by Robert Frost, and functions as a primer for garden creatures and Dickinson\u2019s diction: the book teaches both what a hummingbird is and what a \u201csepal\u201d is (the green outer portions of a developing flower bud).[51]<\/span><\/a> Even in BabyLit\u2019s selection of Dickinson’s lines, Dickinson\u2019s complicated language and range of surfaces seem unavoidable. As Beverly Lyon Clark emphasizes in her analysis of BabyLit\u2019s Little Women<\/em>, BabyLit books \u201cerode the segregation of adult and baby audiences,\u201d and the market for these children\u2019s editions is the adult reader and \u201cadult purchaser.\u201d[52]<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

I am (and have been, I freely admit) the ideal BabyLit target: the type who thinks about literature, literacy, and \u201cclassic\u201d literary texts.[53]<\/span><\/a> I\u2019ve gifted several of my expecting friends the Classic Lit A to Z: A Babylit Alphabet Primer<\/em>\u2014with its delightfully absurd specificity of \u201cQ\u201d for Don Quixote\u2014to both amuse my friends and, with any luck, ignite their kid\u2019s curiosity about characters and stories I love. These books are charming and cute. Taylor explains that this impulse is BabyLit\u2019s exact motivation: \u201cit\u2019s never too young to start putting things in front of them that are a little more meaningful, that have more levels [\u2026] It\u2019s not so simple as, \u2018Here\u2019s a dog, here\u2019s the number 2.\u2019\u201d[54]<\/span><\/a> By 2013, the BabyLit series had already sold around 300,000 books and gained even greater attention through Julie Bosman\u2019s The New York Times <\/em>article that year.[55]<\/span><\/a> Yet, in her essay for Inside Higher Ed<\/em>, Carolyn Foster Segal questions BabyLit\u2019s material and aims: \u201cI\u2019m not quite convinced of the value of introducing a 6-month-old to Moby-Dick <\/em>or Les Miserables<\/em>\u201d because \u201c[s]uch an endeavor must clearly involve a great deal of judicious revision. Does Ahab\u2019s line \u2018We become the thing we hate\u2019 now read \u2018We become the thing we teethe on\u2019?\u201d[56]<\/span><\/a> Segal probes BabyLit\u2019s adaptation of adult-oriented novels and sees the broader project as \u201cabsurd\u201d\u2014the board book is not nearly capacious enough for deep content and themes.[57]<\/span><\/a> Segal concludes her essay by sardonically pitching new additions to the series like \u201cAllen Ginsberg\u2019s Howl<\/em> and William Faulkner\u2019s The Sound and the Fury: A Boxed Set of 2 Classic Crying Primers<\/em>.\u201d[58]<\/span><\/a> Segal\u2019s tone throughout is skeptical, asking: Can we really <\/em>adapt complex literature (like Melville, like Tolstoy, like Dickinson) into children\u2019s books? Ought we? What are we actually accomplishing?<\/p>\n

Looking outward towards the broader board-book canon, we find that children\u2019s editions of literature and poetry are nothing new, and continuing to attend to our expectations about what and how a child reads is crucial to the broader project of expanding the canon and challenging notions of canonicity itself. Attending to the interdependent, contradictory surfaces of a \u201cclassic\u201d for kids tells us more about our idealism, nostalgia, and anxiety than the intellectual and emotional processes of children reading. To extend Segal\u2019s suspicious reading of BabyLit, it is crucial to also interrogate which \u201cclassic\u201d books are and are not included in series like BabyLit or its counterparts, Chronicle Books\u2019 \u201cCozy Classics\u201d or Union Square Kids\u2019 \u201cClassic Starts,\u201d each of which principally feature white English-speaking authors and narratives.[59]<\/span><\/a> These texts signal Western cultural capital.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, Dickinson books for kids give us insight into Dickinson\u2019s work by reflecting the values of surface reading: new surfaces and contexts lead to new insights about Dickinson\u2019s poetics and how we interpret her poetry and legacy. I will likely pass on this collection of Dickinson books out of my own hope to plant seeds of interest in Dickinson. Dickinson\u2019s deceptively simple \u201cchildlike\u201d birds, bees, and bugs work better than adaptations of fiction because the poems\u2019 surfaces respond to growing readers as they begin to read more suspiciously and imagine what it means for a bird to \u201cunroll[] his feathers \/ [\u2026] Too silver for a seam\u201d\u2014an image that moves in, around, and beyond surface.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[1]<\/span><\/a> I wish to thank Nick Bloechl, Noa Saunders, and Meghan Townes for their time and generous and incisive feedback in the writing of this essay. \u201cThe Products of my Farm are these \/ Sufficient for my Own \/ And here and there a Benefit \/ Unto a Neighbor\u2019s Bin,\u201d Emily Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition<\/em>, ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), 425.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/span><\/a> After the bulk of Dickinson\u2019s nearly 1800 poems were uncovered by her family after her death in 1886, Dickinson\u2019s sister Lavinia pursued publishing, enlisting Mabel Loomis Todd (1856-1932) and Emily\u2019s longtime correspondent Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911). Todd and Higginson published Poems of Emily Dickinson <\/em>in 1890\u2014adding titles, adjusting punctuation, and altering Dickinson\u2019s language\u2014and began a legacy of Dickinson edits. \u201cThe Sleeping Flowers\u201d and \u201cMorning\u201d are now better known by their first lines, \u201cWhose are the little beds \u2013 I asked\u201d (1859) and \u201cWill there really be a \u2018morning\u2019\u201d (1860), respectively. For more on St. Nicholas <\/em>and the edited Dickinson poems, see Ingrid Satelmajer, \u201cDickinson as Child\u2019s Fare: The Author Served up in \u2018St. Nicholas,\u2019\u201d Book History<\/em> 5 (2002): 105-142.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/span><\/a> Satelmajer, 106. Satelmajer cites nineteenth-century periodical scholars Richard Ohmann, Politics of Letters<\/em> (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1987); Michael Lund, America’s Continuing Story: An Introduction to Serial Fiction, 1850-1900<\/em> (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993; and Ellen Gruber Garvey, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1800s to 1910s<\/em> (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). See also Kenneth M. Price and Susan Belasco Smith, Periodical Literature in Nineteenth-Century America <\/em>(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992).<\/p>\n

[4]<\/span><\/a> While other children\u2019s and young reader\u2019s Dickinson-oriented books are available, for the sake of space I have selected these texts because they center Dickinson\u2019s poetry, not her life story. For contemporary kid-oriented Dickinson biographies, see Michael Bedard\u2019s Emily <\/em>(New York: Doubleday Book for Young Readers, 1992), Jennifer Berne\u2019s On Wings of Words: The Extraordinary Life of Emily Dickinson <\/em>(San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2020), and Jane Yolen\u2019s Emily Writes: Emily Dickinson and Her Poetic Beginnings <\/em>(New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2020). Dickinson herself wrote poems for her favorite young nephew, Thomas Gilbert (Gib) Dickinson (1875-1883); here I focus on poems scholars and editors deem “for kids.”<\/p>\n

[5]<\/span><\/a> I\u2019m Nobody! Who are You?: Poems of Emily Dickinson for Young People <\/em>(Owings Mill, MD: Stemmer House, 1978).<\/p>\n

[6]<\/span><\/a> Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, \u201cSurface Reading: An Introduction.\u201d Representations<\/em> 108, no. 1 (2009), 9.<\/p>\n

[7]<\/span><\/a> Best and Marcus, 5.<\/p>\n

[8]<\/span><\/a> Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act<\/em> (Ithica: Cornell University Press: 1981), 48.<\/p>\n

[9]<\/span><\/a> Best and Marcus, 4. Best and Marcus cite what Paul Ricoeur labelled a \u201chermeneutics of suspicion\u201d in Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation<\/em>, trans. by Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970).<\/p>\n

[10]<\/span><\/a> In this essay I do not intend to dismiss these clear arguments for the benefits of \u201csuspicious reading.\u201d<\/p>\n

[11]<\/span><\/a> Best and Marcus, 9.<\/p>\n

[12]<\/span><\/a> Marcus also clarifies that her coinage, \u201cjust reading,\u201d also recognizes all reading as interpretive: \u201ceven when attending to the givens of a text, we are always only\u2014or just\u2014constructing a reading.\u201d Marcus,\u00a0Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England<\/em> (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 73.<\/p>\n

[13]<\/span><\/a> Best and Marcus point to Susan Sontag\u2019s important 1966 essay \u201cAgainst Interpretation\u201d and Sedgwick. Rita Felski\u2019s The Limits of Critique <\/em>(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015) also marks a more-recent contribution to the surface reading lineage.<\/p>\n

[14]<\/span><\/a> To offer a very abbreviated selection of further reading about these respective topics, see, for example, Richard B. Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson <\/em>(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Lena Christensen, Editing Emily Dickinson <\/em>(New York: Routledge, 2007); and Nicole Panizza and Trisha Kannan (eds.), The Language of Emily Dickinson <\/em>(Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press, 2021).<\/p>\n

[15]<\/span><\/a> Published in 1995, Werner does not speak of her methodology as surface reading explicitly, though she does speak of Dickinson\u2019s \u201csurfaces of writing,\u201d and her description of her project parallels archival surface reading aims: \u201cBy providing facsimiles of forty of Dickinson\u2019s late manuscripts along with typed transcriptions that display as fully as possible her compositional process, I hope to reveal the spectacular complexity of the textual situation circa 1870, which has been all but erased by the editorial interventions and print conventions of the present century\u201d (1-2). Werner rather contends for \u201can aesthetics of open-endedness\u201d (2). Emily Dickinson\u2019s Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing <\/em>(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). Werner follows similar Dickinson projects by Sharon Cameron in Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson\u2019s Fascicles <\/em>(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). See also Werner and Jen Bervin\u2019s Emily Dickinson: The Gorgeous Nothings<\/em> (New York, NY: New Directions, 2013), which is the first full-color coffee-table size publication of Dickinson\u2019s \u201cenvelope poems.\u201d<\/p>\n

[16]<\/span><\/a> Domhnall Mitchell, \u201cThe Grammar of Ornament: Emily Dickinson\u2019s Manuscripts and Their Meanings.\u201d Nineteenth-Century Literature<\/em>\u00a055, no. 4 (2001), 514. Emphasis in original.<\/p>\n

[17]<\/span><\/a> Mitchell, 513-4.<\/p>\n

[18]<\/span><\/a> Peter Hunt, \u201cIntroduction,\u201d Understanding Children\u2019s Literature<\/em>, 2nd<\/sup> ed., edited by Peter Hunt (New York: Taylor & Francis Group, 2005), 10.<\/p>\n

[19]<\/span><\/a> A product of its Puritan culture, The New England Primer <\/em>too reflects and inculcates adult views of children, namely as sinners in need of redemption. As David H. Watters argues in his analysis of Primer<\/em>\u2019s biblical metaphors and allusions, \u201cBy learning a set of religious metaphors, the child learns about his or her place in the world.\u201d Watters, \u201c\u2018I Spake as a Child\u2019: Authority, Metaphor and \u2018The New-England Primer.\u2019\u201d\u00a0Early American Literature<\/em>\u00a020, no. 3 (1985):\u00a0194. See also Kyle B. Roberts, \u201cRethinking the New-England Primer.\u201d The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America<\/em> 104, no. 4 (2010): 489\u2013523.<\/p>\n

[20]<\/span><\/a> For more on the development ideological, social, and material structures of childhood, see for example, Karin Calvert, Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600-1900\u00a0<\/em>(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992) and Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society <\/em>(New York: Routledge, 2005). For more on nineteenth-century children\u2019s literature, see, for example, Anne Scott MacLeod, American Childhood: Essays on Children’s Literature of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries <\/em>(Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 1995); Beverly Lyon Clark, Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children’s Literature in America<\/em> (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); James Holt McGavran (ed.) Romanticism and Children’s Literature in Nineteenth-Century England <\/em>(Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 2009); and Jessica L. Straley Evolution and Imagination in Victorian Children’s Literature <\/em>(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).<\/p>\n

[21]<\/span><\/a> There is a large body of research on children\u2019s engagement with poetry in the classroom that documents how poetry stimulates symbolic thinking and creativity in the individual For recent summaries of child poetic literacy research ranging from 1970 to present, see Krystyna Nowak-Fabrykowski, \u201cThe Role of Poetry and Stories of Young Children in their Process of Learning,\u201d Journal of Instructional Psychology<\/em> 27, no. 1 (2000); and Karen Coats, \u201cThe Meaning of Children’s Poetry: A Cognitive Approach\u201d International Research in Children\u2019s Literature <\/em>6, no. 2 (2016): 127\u2013142.<\/p>\n

[22]<\/span><\/a> Hong-Nguyen (Gwen) Nguyen, \u201cThe Social Nature of Reading Poetry: The Case of Reading Haiku for Content,\u201d Journal of Pedagogical Research<\/em> 4, no. 3, (2020): 387\u2013400.<\/p>\n

[23]<\/span><\/a> Catherine Compton-Lilly, \u201cBuilding on What Children Bring: Cognitive and Sociocultural Approaches to Teaching Literacy,\u201d The Journal of Balanced Literacy Research and Instruction <\/em>1, no. 1 (2013), 1. Dominant socio-cultural literacy theories came to the forefront in the 1960s and continue to spur practical and theoretical child literacy research like Nguyen\u2019s project. See Lev Vygotsky, Mind and Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes <\/em>(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978) and Thought and Language <\/em>(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986); Marie M. Clay, Becoming Literate: The Construction of Inner Control<\/em> (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Press, 1991) and By Different Paths to Common Outcomes <\/em>(Grandview Heights, OH: Stenhouse Publishers, 1998); Ure Bronfenbrenner, The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature and Design <\/em>(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979) and Bronfenbrenner and Pamela A. Morris, \u201cThe Bioecological Model of Human Development\u201d in Handbook of Child Psychology<\/em>, 6th ed., ed. R. M. Lerner and W. Damon (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2006): 793\u2013828. For a useful summary of theories of childhood literacy, see Christine Pegorraro, et. al. Early Childhood Literacy: Engaging and Empowering Emergent Readers and Writers, Birth – Age 5<\/em> (The Virtual Library of Virginia, 2021).<\/p>\n

[24]<\/span><\/a> Nguyen, 387.<\/p>\n

[25]<\/span><\/a> David Rudd, \u201cTheorising and Theories: How does children\u2019s literature exist?\u201d Understanding Children\u2019s Literature<\/em>, second ed. ed. by Peter Hunt (New York: Taylor & Francis Group, 2005), 15.<\/p>\n

[26]<\/span><\/a> Donald Hall, Oxford Book of Children\u2019s Verse in America <\/em>(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), xxxiv. The eight poems Hall includes are \u201cA bird came down the walk,\u201d \u201cI like to see it lap the miles,\u201d \u201cI’m nobody, who are you?\u201d \u201cThe morns are meeker than they were,\u201d \u201cA narrow fellow in the grass,\u201d \u201cThere is no frigate like a book,\u201d \u201cTo make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,\u201d and \u201cWill there really be a morning?\u201d<\/p>\n

[27]<\/span><\/a> Hall, xxxiv.<\/p>\n

[28]<\/span><\/a> Hall, xxiv.<\/p>\n

[29]<\/span><\/a> Book jacket of I\u2019m Nobody! Who Are You?<\/em>, i.<\/p>\n

[30]<\/span><\/a> Nodelman continues to explain that because images take up the most space, \u201cthe texts these pictures accompany are also unique\u2014 unlike all other narrative texts. […] They are always dependent upon the accompanying pictures for their specific meaning and import; they often sound more like plot summaries than like the actual words of a story. Because the words and the pictures in picture books both define and amplify each other, neither is as open-ended as either would be on its own.\u201d Perry Nodelman, Words about Pictures: Narrative Art of Children’s Picture Books<\/em> (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 6.<\/p>\n

[31]<\/span><\/a> Poetry for Young People: Emily Dickinson<\/em>, ed. by Francis Schoonmaker Bolin (New York: Sterling, 1994).<\/p>\n

[32]<\/span><\/a> Ibid.<\/p>\n

[33]<\/span><\/a> Ibid.<\/p>\n

[34]<\/span><\/a> In 1969, scholar Dolores Dyer Lucas identified Dickinson with the English riddle tradition\u2014a lens that Anthony Hecht takes up again in 1978. See Lucas Emily Dickinson and Riddle <\/em>(Northern Illinois University Press, 1969) and Hecht, \u201cThe Riddles of Emily Dickinson.\u201d\u00a0New England Review (1978-1982)<\/em>\u00a01, no. 1 (1978): 1\u201324.<\/p>\n

[35]<\/span><\/a> I\u2019m Nobody! Who Are You?<\/em>, i.<\/p>\n

[36]<\/span><\/a> Stanley Plumly, \u201cWings.\u201d\u00a0The Kenyon Review<\/em>\u00a036, no. 3 (2014), 167-168.<\/p>\n

[37]<\/span><\/a> Dickinson, \u201cA Bird came down the Walk,\u201d The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition<\/em>, ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999): 163, 1-4.<\/p>\n

[38]<\/span><\/a> Dickinson, 14.<\/p>\n

[39]<\/span><\/a> John Felstiner, \u201c\u2018Earth\u2019s Most Graphic Transaction\u2019: The Syllables of Emily Dickinson.\u201d\u00a0The American Poetry Review<\/em> 36, no. 2 (2007), 8.\u00a0For a more-recent analysis, see Onno Oerlemans, \u201cThe Individual Animal in Poetry,\u201d Poetry and Animals: Blurring Boundaries with the Human<\/em> (Columbia University Press, 2018): 129-130.<\/p>\n

[40]<\/span><\/a> Richard E. Brantley\u2019s comprehensive survey of critical interpretations in \u201cThe Empirical Imagination of Emily Dickinson,\u201d\u00a0The Wordsworth Circle<\/em>\u00a032, no. 3 (2001), 146.<\/p>\n

[41]<\/span><\/a> Emily Dickinson, \u201cA Bird came down the Walk,\u201d The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition<\/em>, ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999): 163, 1-4.<\/p>\n

[42]<\/span><\/a> Poetry for Kids: Emily Dickinson<\/em>, ed. by Susan Snively (Lake Forest, CA: MoonDance Press, 2016), 11; 1-4.<\/p>\n

[43]<\/span><\/a> For more on Dickinson\u2019s novel punctuation, spelling, and spacing, see Willis J. Buckingham, \u201cEmily Dickinson\u2019s \u2018Lone Orthography.\u2019\u201d\u00a0The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America<\/em>\u00a075, no. 4 (1981): 419\u201335.<\/p>\n

[44]<\/span><\/a> Nancy Walker, \u201cEmily Dickinson and the Self: Humor as Identity.\u201d Tulsa Studies in Women\u2019s Literature 2, no. 1 (1983), 59.<\/p>\n

[45]<\/span><\/a> Poetry for Young People: Emily Dickinson<\/em>, 33.<\/p>\n

[46]<\/span><\/a> Dickinson, 8.<\/p>\n

[47]<\/span><\/a> Dickinson, 14-20.<\/p>\n

[48]<\/span><\/a> Felstiner, 8.<\/p>\n

[49]<\/span><\/a> Jennifer Adams, The Classic BabyLit Collection <\/em>(Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith, 2018).<\/p>\n

[50]<\/span><\/a> The BabyLit \u201cStorybook\u201d line for 3-5 year-old readers includes The Wonderful Wizard of Oz<\/em>, Moby-Dick<\/em>, The Jungle Book<\/em>, and Little Women<\/em>. https:\/\/gibbs-smith.com\/collections\/babylit-storybooks<\/p>\n

[51]<\/span><\/a> Emily Dickinson, \u201cA sepal, petal, and a thorn,\u201d qtd. in Kate Coombs, Little Poet Emily Dickinson: In Emily\u2019s Garden <\/em>(Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith, 2019), 8.<\/p>\n

[52]<\/span><\/a> Beverly Lyon Clark, \u201cBabyLit to Lusty Little Women<\/em>: Age, Race, and Sexuality in Recent Little Women <\/em>Spinoffs, Women\u2019s Studies 48, no. 4 (2019), 436, 435.<\/p>\n

[53]<\/span><\/a> I\u2019m very sympathetic to Amazon reviewer Izak Contreras\u2019s idealism, who quotes the script of Joe Wright\u2019s 2005 Pride and Prejudice <\/em>film to explain his feelings about the Classic Collection box set: \u201cCompletely[,] Perfectly and Incandescently Wonderful,\u201d the reviewer says, \u201cThe future parents I gave them to were so excited about them.\u201d I similarly have purchased three BabyLit books for three of my expecting friends. Izak Contreras, Review of The Classic Baby Lit Collection Boxed Set by Jennifer Adams (Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith, 2018), August 13, 2022. https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/customer-reviews\/R2N750BK8JPCV8\/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=1423645731<\/p>\n

[54]<\/span><\/a> Suzanne Gibbs Taylor, qtd. in Julie Bosman, \u201cA Library of Classics, Edited for the Teething Set,\u201d New York Times<\/em> (New York, NY), Oct. 26, 2013.<\/p>\n

[55]<\/span><\/a> Julie Bosman, \u201cA Library of Classics, Edited for the Teething Set,\u201d New York Times<\/em> (New York, NY), Oct. 26, 2013.<\/p>\n

[56]<\/span><\/a> Carolyn Foster Segal, \u201cOh, Baby(Lit),\u201d Inside Higher Ed<\/em>, last modified Nov. 20, 2013, https:\/\/www.insidehighered.com\/views\/2013\/11\/21\/assessing-new-baby-board-book-empire-essay<\/a><\/p>\n

[57]<\/span><\/a> Ibid.<\/p>\n

[58]<\/span><\/a> Ibid.<\/p>\n

[59]<\/span><\/a> \u201cCozy Classics,\u201d founded by Jack and Holman Wang, include The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Pride and Prejudice, Moby Dick, War & Peace, The Nutcracker, Les Miserables, Emma, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Jane Eyre, <\/em>and Oliver Twist<\/em>. \u201cClassic Starts,\u201d written for children 7+, includes Little Women<\/em>, Sherlock Holmes<\/em>, The Jungle Book, Grimm\u2019s Fairy Tales, The Adventures of Robin Hood, The War of the Worlds, Gulliver\u2019s Travels, Oliver Twist, A Little Princess, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula, Arabian Nights, White Fang, Greek Myth, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer<\/em>, The Phantom of the Opera<\/em> and many others.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Holly Wiegand is a doctoral candidate in English at Boston University. Holly’s research and teaching chart interdisciplinary approaches to British and American literature and religion of the long nineteenth century. Her dissertation, \u201cBold Devotion: Female Religious Authority and Transatlantic 19th-Century Fiction,\u201d tells a new story about how period women\u2019s writing stages public female preachers and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22232,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[18],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/985"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22232"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=985"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/985\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1154,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/985\/revisions\/1154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/ampersandjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}