The Emily Dickinson Archive

"The Emily Dickinson Archive is a feat of scholarly effort and a cutting-edge digital project. It’s like Costco, an enormous warehouse for her enormous body of work. Dickinson never willingly published anything. Fewer than a dozen of her poems saw print in her lifetime. She didn’t ask for them to be printed; friends did. She wrote nearly 1,800 poems, often working on many poems at one time, like a painter working on a bunch of canvases or a gardener tending flowers. You can now buy the collected works of Emily Dickinson, from her Poems: As She Preserved Them to collections of her Letters and even her Envelope Poems , but it’s better to experience Emily Dickinson through this archive. You can read each poem in her distinctive handwriting, with distinctive punctuation. We no longer live in a world with much handwriting. But penmanship is a form of self-presentation that writers once thought about while crafting their work. Dickinson’s poems work as visual, as well as verbal, art. So this archive allows you to experience her work more fully than would an ordinary anthology. Poems can be electrifying; you feel a great poem in your body. One doesn’t go to poetry for patient exposition; you go for an experience. In our series, the architect Frank Gehry tells me that poetry is like “a shot of Tequila.” Poetry is language distilled to a thrill: sometimes the thrill is emotional, sometimes it’s intellectual and sometimes it’s even analytical, the thrill of understanding, at last, what the poem is about."