Can I use Emily Dickinson's poems any way I want? Can I reprint them, etc.?

Question

If I was going to plagiarize, Bozo, would I be asking this question?

I read today that Emily's poems are in the public domain...that is WHY I AM ASKING.

Answer 1

You certainly can - they're not protected by copyright law. I used a lot of them in my Master's thesis, which was entitled:
Psychotic Imagery in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson.

Whoops, guess I wasn't quite right:

"Important Copyright Notice


"The copyright situation pertaining to the poetry of Emily Dickinson is extremely complex since nearly all the poems were published after her death and the circumstances surrounding the earliest publication resulted in versions of the poetry that were in many cases significantly different than the form of the poems as penned by Emily Dickinson.... The following poems are in the public domain and we have no objection if you include the following poems on the Web-site [nos. 59, 77, 185, 249, 254, 510, 1078]" (Melinda Koyanis, Manager of Copyright, Harvard University Press, personal correspondence to the editor, April 21, 1997).


Regrettably, permission has not been granted RPO to present the following poems in the way Dickinson wrote them.


After great pain, a formal feeling comes (341)
Dying! dying in the night! (158)
The first day's night had come
I dwell in possibility (657)
I reckon, when I count at all (569)
It would have starved a gnat (612)
Much madness is divinest sense
My triumph lasted till the drums (1227)
Of nearness to her sundered things (607)
Publication is the auction (709)
The spider holds a silver ball (605)
To die takes just a little while (255)
'Twas like a maelstrom, with a notch (414)
These RPO poems are based on editions of Emily Dickinson's poetry in 1890, 1891, and 1896, published after her death. These texts, edited by her friends, evidently differ in minutiae (punctuation, lineation) as well as occasionally in wording from the originals on which they were based. Her friends numbered these poems under general thematic subsections (the names of which are omitted in this edition). The words of the existing manuscripts remain in copyright to Harvard University Press, evidently because they have only been published in the past 75 years. Any substantial variation from the existing manuscripts is noted in textual notes to these poems. Readers should pay careful attention to these changes.


Emily (Elizabeth) Dickinson (1830-1886) lived and died, unmarried and intensely retired, in Amherst, Massachusetts. The daughter of Edward Dickinson, a lawyer, Emily attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley and afterwards retired to a quite private life that, although without event, was rich in creativity. She developed close, if corresponding relationships with several men who encouraged her to write poetry, including Benjamin F. Newton, the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, and T. W. Higginson. A good introduction to her life is through her letters, edited by Thomas H. Johnston and Theodora Ward in three volumes (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap University Press, 1965). Her discovery of a power to write poetry--in the late 1850s--gifted an astonishing inner life to her nation, which has chosen her to be one of its greatest poets.

Dickinson published only seven of her nearly 2,000 poems, but several hundreds were edited after her death in three very popular volumes in the 1890s. These exist in facsimile in Poems (1890-1896) by Emily Dickinson: A Facsimile Reproduction of the Original Volumes Issued in 1890, 1891, and 1896, with an Introduction by George Monteiro (Gainesville, Florida: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1967). Twentieth-century editors have re-edited these and others of her poems from manuscript bundles in her hand. The most authoritative is The Poems of Emily Dickinson Including variant readings critically compared with known manuscripts, edited by Thomas H. Johnson in three volumes (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963).

The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, edited by R. W. Franklin in two volumes (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1981) shows that Emily wrote her poems in batches and bound them together in fascicles or little packets. Her hand is easily legible, although her habits of punctuation--a heavy use of dashes and periods--makes her manuscripts sometimes a challenge to read. Her capitalization, punctuation, and spelling are normalized here, "as surely she would have expected had her poems been published in her lifetime" (Johnson, I: lxii). Readers who come to love the mind in Dickinson's poems will want to read her manuscript copy, in part for its punctuation. Where the manuscript versions remain in copyright, the text of her poems in Representative Poetry On-line comes from the early editions of the 1890s."


BUT

"COPYRIGHT STATUS

Author: Emily Dickinson
Born: 1830
Died: 1886
Available works:


Poems, First Series (1890)
[HTML] 93 KB

Poems, Second Series (1891)
[HTML] 140 KB

The original books are in the public domain in the United States and in most, if not all, other countries as well. Readers outside the United States should check their own countries’ copyright laws to be certain they can legally download these ebooks. The Online Books Page has an FAQ which gives a summary of copyright durations for many other countries, as well as links to more official sources."

Answer 2

Emily Dickinson Public Domain

Answer 3

This Site Might Help You.

RE:
Can I use Emily Dickinson's poems any way I want? Can I reprint them, etc.?

Answer 4

The one where Natalie says "Who wants to be a skinny pencil? I'm happy being a magic marker!" and then Blair says.."I had been hungry all the years, my noon had come, to dine..." and then they chow down.

Answer 5

No you absolutely may NOT. They are not public domain. The only way you may use them is using the proper MLA format to quote them in a paper and citing them at the end. Please allow authors the dignity of not plagerizing their work. Please refer to copyright laws. They are easily found by Googling them. Refer to the 1978 revisions which are the newest. C.