Identification of Emily Dickinson poems

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Identifying Emily Dickinson's poems presents challenges. Though she wrote over 1700 poems (1,775 exactly), Dickinson only provided titles for about 20. Other issues have been introduced due to the convoluted history behind the publication of her work. There are two commonly used strategies for referring to one of her poems, but both have limitations.

One strategy is to identify the first line of the poem. However, different editions of her poems have variations even in their first line, so this approach is not foolproof.

The second strategy is to use "Johnson Numbers", first assigned by Dickinson editor and biographer Thomas H. Johnson in 1955. Johnson's numbering was an attempt to identify the approximate chronological order in which the poems were composed. Although some of his chronology has been superseded by later scholarship, the numbering scheme of his edition of the poems still represents a common identification system among Dickinson scholars. The 1998 variorum edition of Dickinson's poems, edited by R.W. Franklin, re-ordered and re-edited Dickinson's poems; increasingly, scholars refer to Franklin's numbers as well as or instead of Johnson's.

Although many conflicting editions of Dickinson’s poems are available on the internet, a useful starting point is the version of Dickinson’s poems available at Project Gutenberg.