What do “Fr” and “L” mean?
Throughout this website, after quotations from Emily Dickinson’s poems and letters, you will see either “Fr” or”L” followed by a number. These abbreviations refer to specific editions of Emily Dickinson’s poems and letters, respectively. This website cites Dickinson poems as published in The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1998), ed. by R. W. Franklin. Because Emily Dickinson titled few of her poems, they are generally known by their first lines or by numbers assigned to them by editors. Franklin, like his predecessor Thomas Johnson, arranged Dickinson’s poems chronologically and then assigned each one a number. References to poems in the Franklin edition are indicated by an “Fr” followed by the poem number. See The Posthumous Publication of Emily Dickinson’s Poems. “L,” followed by a number, refers to an Emily Dickinson letter as it appears in The Letters of Emily Dickinson (1958), ed. by Thomas Johnson. Thomas Johnson’s edition, assembled with the assistance of Theodora Van Wagenen Ward, i
