Emily Dickinson collected finished poems in small, handmade manuscript booklets. We call these groupings her "fascicles." The fascicles are reproduced in Franklin's Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge: Belknap, 1981).
This two-volume set is too scarce and expensive for classroom use. Franklin's reading edition - your assigned textbook - includes all the poems from the fascicles. But it does not present the poems in the order in which they appeared in the fascicles. Instead the reading edition presents (and numbers) the poems in the order in which Franklin believes they were composed.
Some of the fascicles collect poems from varying periods. And some of the fascicles appear to have been written "inside out": Franklin's numbering suggests that Dickinson wrote the poems in the center of the fascicle before she wrote the poems at the beginning and end. So the reading edition does not present the poems in the groupings arranged by the author.
We will recreate the experience of reading Dickinson's early poetry in its fascicle context. The University of Akron owns a copy of Franklin's Manuscript Books. With the first-line index in the reading edition, I translated the older Johnson numbers of the Manuscript Books into the newer Franklin numbers of your reading edition.
We'll read three complete fascicles. Our reading schedule recreates the fascicles by listing the poems in fascicle order. Poem number 244, for example, is the first poem of fascicle 10. And poem 253 is the last poem.
