“It is finished’ can never be said of us,” Emily Dickinson once wrote, and certainly there is nothing finished about Emily Dickinson. (...) Dickinson’s poems seem always to be in progress or in transit; she revised, reconsidered, and reconceived them, particularly when sending them to friends, as her very first editors would discover—and as editors keep discovering today.(...) To Dickinson, then, it seems that literature was partly improvisation, much like her inventions at the piano, which were affectionately recalled by all who heard them. She toyed with several possibilities for an individual word while playing with image patterns, line arrangement, and metrics; she did not necessarily prefer one variation over another; she did not indicate when or if a poem was “finished.” What’s more, she frequently composed on snippets of paper—newspaper clippings, cut-up paper sacks—or around the edges of thin sheets, her cursive often illegible. (...)
de Cristina Fernandes e Rui Manuel Amaral