Emily Dickinson Archive online

[JackFavell]

I just read that the Emily Dickinson Archive is open online and ready for perusal.

The Archive is the most complete online collection of Emily Dickinson manuscripts to date. The archive takes advantage of many different sources, including the manuscripts donated to Harvard, and also the one's donated to Amherst College. According to some scholars, the manuscripts themselves provide a more accurate picture of Dickinson's work, showing exactly how her poems should be scanned rather than imposing artificial stanzas or metrical values or even punctuation upon them for publishing purposes. Seeing a hand written manuscript (sometimes on the back of a chocolate wrapper or in the margin of a magazine) can show us something of the life and purpose of an artist or poet, some say.

The New York Times article below has some fascinating points to make about Dickinson and how her work is viewed by different archivists and scholars, plus the history of those manuscripts and how they got divided among the different libraries and archives. It's well worth reading. It also includes a lot of links that fans of the poet would find interesting.

New York Times article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/23/books ... d=all&_r=0

Emily Dickinson Archive:

http://www.edickinson.org

Amherst College open access website:

https://www.amherst.edu/library/archive ... edickinson

[moira finnie]

This is fascinating...unfortunately. The online resources such as this that have popped up in the last six months make me wish I had more time to read, view and most of all, understand so much! It really seems as though we each need two lives now: one to live and one to learn

Thank you, Wendy. I really appreciate your bringing this here, despite my sense of feeling torn.

[JackFavell]

I feel your pain, Moira.

Every time someone posts another set of interviews or a website like this one, I bookmark them, and then eventually decide I will never have enough time to actually look at them, so I clean it all out and start over again. Along with the 1000 movies I need to see before I die, this seems further and further out of my grasp, unless I want to end up like Emily herself, never leaving my house.