Emily Dickinson Archive

Emily Dickinson Archive (EDA) provides high-resolution images of manuscripts of Dickinson’s poetry, along with transcriptions and annotations from selected historical and scholarly editions. This first release focuses on gathering images of those poems included in The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition, edited by R. W. Franklin (Cambridge: Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1998). These manuscripts vary from “scraps” written on envelope flaps and pieces of wrapping paper; to drafts; to finished poems sent to friends or copied into the manuscript books called “fascicles.”

image from the Library of Congress Dickinson collection

This site is not a new edition of Dickinson’s poems. It is, as its name says, an archive that seeks to make available in one virtual place those resources that seem central to the study of Dickinson’s work: images of her manuscripts; a selection of editions of those manuscripts; and selected print and electronic resources that serve as a starting point for the study of Dickinson’s manuscripts. It should be viewed as a resource from which scholarship can be produced, rather than a work of scholarship itself.

The long-term goal of this Archive is to provide a single site for access to images of all surviving Dickinson autograph manuscripts. Future priorities include: images of Dickinson letters; additional modern and historical editions of both poems and letters; additional metadata about the manuscripts; and additional tools for manipulation of the content of the site.

Recommended in the May 2014 issue of ACRL's Choice.