I have encountered Dickinson’s poetry frequently throughout my Literature classes thus far. Particularly in Poetry and Poetics last semester, we spend a good amount of time dissecting her work and the underlying messages hidden within. Something that has always fascinated me about her poetry since then is her unconventional use of capitalization and punctuation.
Starting with capitalization, in the fair majority of Dickinson’s poetry she chooses to capitalize strange words that otherwise wouldn’t be emphasized. The effect has been speculated by innumerable literary scholars. Some believe the capitalization could be a misinterpretation of Dickinson’s penmanship (which her poems were translated from). Others believe the capitalized words are meant to personify a theme painted by Dickinson, as the capitalized words appear to add to the theme of the poem. From either perspective, it’s interesting to consider the intentionality.
Secondly, as I’ve approached Dickinson’s poems I’ve also been drawn to her use of punctuation. She tends to use a lot of dashes ending her sentences and sandwiched between descriptor words. In essence, the dashes definitely aim to set apart specific words and phrases, forcing the reader to slow down while reading and contemplate the lines. However, in some of her poems that she has formally published during her lifetime, the dashes are used sparingly. This makes me wonder if it was a stylistic choice used for an unfinished poem. The fact that the dashes are absent in some of her more definite poems appears as if they represented her hesitancy for a poem that was still under consideration. Either way, the use of punctuation has an undeniable effect on the rhythm and readability of the poem, ultimately affecting its delivery and the perception of the reader.
-Siena Rose
Great observations, Siena! I was also picking up on these things. When it comes to capitalization, I agree that it is hard to tell if she is trying to sort of make certain words proper nouns, or if she used capitalization to emphasize certain words or phrases, often giving them a heightened significance or making them stand out visually on the page. Either way, stylistically this seemed to allow her to convey layers of meaning and emotion. To me, the dashes seem to serve a similar purpose to other punctuation marks like commas or semicolons, but beyond that they help her create a distinct rhythm and pace. While they could signify a kind of incompleteness, I think maybe they can indicate intentional pauses or shifts in thought, adding to the overall musicality and flow of her poems, and even the visual appearance of her poems on the page. And clearly all of this unconventional punctuation and capitalization, as you say, has led to so many different interpretations of her work, so maybe she included these elements to purposely allow for some ambiguity and interpretations for readers?
Part of me wonders if the hesitancy you’re reading into the more “unfinished” poems, given the greater presence of dashes, is actually an intentional stylistic quirk. I agree with Kaitlin with regards to the idea that Dickinson clearly dedicates a significant amount of attention to the musicality and visual aesthetic of each poem. Many of her pieces of work are introspective in a way which lends itself to a natural awkwardness, so to speak. They mirror human thought and stream-of-consciousness ideas which marry well to pauses, breaks, and, yes, hesitation. Her formally published works could lack them due to them being more closely tied to an “unfinished” state, but it could also be that she used a heavier hand with more intimate pieces which she was less likely to put out on a public stage.
What her use of capitals and dashes means, or what was intended, is a vexed issue. The few published poems would have had very few dashes likely because editors would not have allowed them. They would have wanted Dickinson to adhere to ‘standard’ English, and be precise and polished, or ‘finished’ as you say. You can see from the image of her handwritten poem in the Anthology that even the dashes themselves are ambiguous–some short, some long, some angled up, etc. There is no way to reproduce these variations on the printed page, and of course also no way to know if those differences are meaningful or not.
I tend to find her capitalization quite random, and so I don’t attach much meaning to most of it.