Talk:Poems (Dickinson)/Success

In Page:Emily Dickinson Poems (1890).djvu/21, Host and Flag are not capitalised. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 12:21, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Capitals in the poem

My textbook capitalizes Host, Flag, and Victory. Also, the version of the poem that was published in "A Masque of Poets" was not the original poem; it was edited. In addition, I do not see why there would be a copyright issue over restoring a poem (that is now in the public domain) to its original form. --Humanist Geek (talk) 05:46, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

The two words "host" and "flag" are uncapitalized in the source you give, but this source is not the authoritative 1955 Harvard UP version edited by Thomas H. Johnson. In this source--used by Dickinson scholars all over the world--"Host" and "Flag" are indeed capitalized. Since Dickinson's poems were left in manuscript state at the time of her death, and since all editions prior to the 1955 one freely changed her texts (in particular, altering what was then felt to be her oddities, and in effect taming her poems), editing Dickinson in a print medium remains a difficult task, which has been discussed by scholars since the 1990s. A good starting point to discuss the matter is Martha Nell Smith's article describing the "Dickinson Electronic Archive", available at http://www.emilydickinson.org/edjv2a.html My feeling is that, although Wikisource and Wikipedia are not a scholarly project in the classical sense, they should nonetheless take into account reliable sourcing, which--in Dickinson's case, anyway--can be extremely tricky.

Reference: Thomas H. Johnson, ed. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (3 vols.). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1955.

Feel welcome to compare my Creative Commons resource, on Johnson and other "authoritative" matter, https://archive.org/details/EMILYDICKINSONFIRSTSERIES/page/n2 TeresaPelka --20:17, 11 April 2019 (UTC)~

Editions

Thanks for taking the time to comment. We honestly havent worked out how we are going to manage multiple editions of works, let alone how we are going to deal with the more prevalent minor differences like capitalisation, punctuation and formatting. If you are interested, the most recent discussion here regarding this matter, see Talk:The Bell-Buoy and Wikisource:Scriptorium#Text of Rudyard Kipling's poetry.

I think that all Wikisource contributors are keen to see that we present all editions, especially manuscripts if we can put our hands on the digital images of them, however we have differences of opinion on which editions should be given priority, and what textual comparisons are acceptable.

I agree that all editions should be presented. Furthermore, I think that the original manuscript -- in both image and typed form -- are the most important versions and should be given the most prominence.--Humanist Geek (talk) 05:51, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

One issue we face is that newer "authoritative" editions are often still protected by copyright. In this case, a lot of the material in 1955 Harvard UP volumes is covered by (Renewal: RE182448).

To complicate issues with "Success", I've dug up the edition that appeared in "A masque of poets": see Page:A masque of poets 1878.djvu/180. It differs in the wording twice, and has other differences. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 15:41, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

I agree that until the manuscripts are digitized and accessible we are unfortunately restricted to the heavily edited editions by copyright concerns.--BirgitteSB 04:07, 20 March 2008 (UTC)