The digital Dickinson
A biographer once praised reticent and retiring Emily Dickinson for “the modest littleness of her person.” So what might this 19th-century poet make of the decidedly immodest archive of her poems being released today, bringing to light in one digital place most of her surviving manuscripts? What if those manuscripts were the very ones Dickinson hesitated to publish in her own lifetime, or — in bursts of cheerful immodesty — delivered to friends with fresh gingerbread or a bouquet of flowers? What if that archive revealed, in every variant, all of her known poems? And what if it showed the world how her handwriting began to slope and sprawl as she got older, and that she sometimes wrote poems on old bills, paper bags, or the backs of envelopes? Dickinson can’t answer such questions. But her poems keeping speaking, and her readers keep listening and interpreting her timeless celebrations of wit, observation, and...