Editing Whitman and Dickinson: Print and digital representations

This dissertation investigates how editors transformed two figures---Walt Whitman, a highly controversial poet through the end of the nineteenth century, and Emily Dickinson, a largely unread poet until the 1890s---into the giants of the canon of nineteenth-century U.S. poetry. The first two chapters examine crucial moments in the early stages of Whitman\u27s and Dickinson\u27s reception, and how editors worked to situate these poets within contexts that included other authors: in Whitman\u27s case, a New York literary newspaper, and in Dickinson\u27s case, anthologies that sought to define a national literature. Chapter One, Walt Whitman and the King of Bohemia, examines how Whitman\u27s friend and editor, Henry Clapp, Jr., championed Whitman in the pages of the Saturday Press despite the mixed opinions of his readers, and consequently became key to Whitman\u27s surge in popularity---or notoriety---shortly before the Civil War. Chapter Two, How Anthologists Made Dickinson into a Tolerable Woman Writer, investigates how editors who included Dickinson in anthologies (from her first appearance in one in 1897 until the first publication of a scholarly edition of her works in 1955) employed a distorted version of Dickinson\u27s biography to satisfy public tastes, notions about civic responsibility in educating youth, and dominant opinions about women\u27s roles in both literature and society in general. The final two chapters of this dissertation, How Influential Editions Represent Dickinson\u27s Work and Editing Whitman, 1902-2006, study how editors variously presented the poets\u27 work in single-author editions. In each of these chapters, I begin by examining the first posthumous major edition of each poet, then move through the significant scholarly editions of the twentieth century, which in both poets\u27 cases culminate in ongoing digital editions. I argue that the first posthumous editions of the poets\u27 work were important in establishing them as major literary figures, and that subsequent editions have refrained Dickinson\u27s and Whitman\u27s work to make it more available to dominant modes of scholarship