Observations on Friendship and God ...

Digital and Electronic Research Resources

In addition to links cited above in Dickinson Manuscripts and Related Collections, the electronic resources listed below are useful in pursuing Dickinson interests.
Emily Dickinson Archive (edickinson.org) Emily Dickinson Archive (2013) makes high-resolution images of Dickinson’s surviving manuscripts available in open access, and provides readers with a website through which they can view images of manuscripts held in multiple libraries and archives. This first phase of the EDA includes images for the corpus of poems identified in The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition, edited by R. W. Franklin (Cambridge: Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1998).


Digitized Dickinson Manuscripts This link allows the user to peruse Amherst College's complete collection (850 items) of Emily Dickinson manuscripts. The College's Archives and Special Collections department houses about half of Dickinson's poetry manuscripts.


Dickinson Electronic Archives A website devoted to the study of Emily Dickinson, her writing practices, writings directly influencing her work, and critical and creative writings generated by her work. Includes texts of letters, correspondence of the Dickinson family, and teaching resources. The DEA is produced by the Dickinson Editing Collective, Martha Nell Smith and Lara Vetter, General Editors and Coordinators.
Emily Dickinson International Society A member society formed in 1988 to promote, perpetuate, and enhance the study and appreciation of Emily Dickinson throughout the world. The society publishes the Emily Dickinson Journal and the Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin and hosts annual meetings and conferences about topics of interest in Dickinson studies.
Emily Dickinson Online A website with “quick and easy access” to information about the poet, including sections on Fast Facts," "Bibliography,'" "Links," and a "Photo Album" of Dickinson-related images.
Emily Dickinson Lexicon Project The Emily Dickinson Lexicon is an on-line dictionary of all of the words in Emily Dickinson’s collected poems (Johnson 1955 and Franklin 1998 editions), using Dickinson's own Noah Webster's 1844 American Dictionary of the English Language as the primary source for definitions.
Radical Scatters: Emily Dickinson’s Fragments and Related Texts A subscripton may be required to access this material, which is related to the printed text cited above in Printed Materials.
Emily Dickinson's Correspondences: A Born-Digital Textual Inquiry A searchable archive of seventy-four poems and letters from Emily’s correspondence with Susan Dickinson. Each text is presented with a digitized scan of the holograph manuscript.
Dickinson Listserv An e-mail subscription list devoted to discussion of the work of Emily Dickinson. It is open to anyone interested in Dickinson's writing.
Emily Dickinson Bibliography An extensive bibliography related to Dickinson, created and maintained by Donna Campbell, Washington State University
Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium (Harvard’s Houghton Library) Full color photographs of each page of Dickinson's herbarium.
Dickinson Family Association An organization of and for the descendents of Nathaniel Dickinson, from whom the poet was descended. Nathaniel Dickinson came from England to Connecticut by 1637 and later settled in Hadley, Massachusetts (the town from which Amherst was created in 1759).
Emily Dickinson's Monson A guide to Monson, Massachusetts, where Emily Norcross Dickinson, the poet's mother, was born and raised.
Dickinson Printed Texts On-line
(see above for information about digitized manuscripts)
The Poems of Emily Dickinson ed. by Thomas Johnson (1955). A digitized edition of this landmark work.
Dickinson in The Norton Anthology of Poetry A guide to Emily Dickinson poems in The Norton Anthology of Poetry (5th edition) and Amherst College manuscript holdings.
Academy of American Poets The Dickinson page includes a list of poems and links to selected texts.
Poetry Foundation The Dickinson page includes a list of poems and links to selected texts.
Poems of Emily Dickinson, First, Second, and Third Series (Project Gutenberg) The 1890s editions of Dickinson's work.
Modern American Poetry: Emily Dickinson Dickinson poems selected from An Online Journal and Multimedia Companion to Anthology of Modern American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2000)
Poems of Emily Dickinson Electronic texts of the 1890s editions of Dickinson's poems, available through Google Books.
First Series Electronic text of the 1890 edition (11th printing), ed. by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
Second Series Electronic text of the 1891 edition (4th printing), ed. by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
Third Series Electronic text of the 1896 edition (2nd printing), ed. by Mabel Loomis Todd.
The Complete Poems Electronic text of the 1924 edition of Dickinson's poems, selected and with an introduction by her niece Martha Dickinson Bianchi.

"Houses"—so the Wise Men tell me—
"Mansions"! Mansions must be warm!
Mansions cannot let the tears in,
Mansions must exclude the storm!

"Many Mansions," by "his Father,"
I don't know him; snugly built!
Could the Children find the way there—
Some, would even trudge tonight!

The Singing Place

By Lily A. Long

COLD may lie the day,     And bare of grace; At night I slip away     To the Singing Place.   A border of mist and doubt         5     Before the gate, And the Dancing Stars grow still     As hushed I wait. Then faint and far away     I catch the beat         10 In broken rhythm and rhyme     Of joyous feet,— Lifting waves of sound     That will rise and swell (If the prying eyes of thought         15     Break not the spell), Rise and swell and retreat     And fall and flee, As over the edge of sleep     They beckon me.         20 And I wait as the seaweed waits     For the lifting tide; To ask would be to awake,—     To be denied. I cloud my eyes in the mist         25     That veils the hem,— And then with a rush I am past,—     I am Theirs, and of Them! And the pulsing chant swells up     To touch the sky,         30 And the song is joy, is life,     And the song am I! The thunderous music peals     Around, o’erhead— The dead would awake to hear         35     If there were dead; But the life of the throbbing Sun     Is in the song, And we weave the world anew,     And the Singing Throng         40 Fill every corner of space—   Over the edge of sleep     I bring but a trace Of the chants that pulse and sweep     In the Singing Place.         45

The Gift to Sing
James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938)

Sometimes the mist overhangs my path,
And blackening clouds about me cling;
But, oh, I have a magic way
To turn the gloom to cheerful day—
I softly sing.

And if the way grows darker still,
Shadowed by Sorrow’s somber wing,
With glad defiance in my throat,
I pierce the darkness with a note,
And sing, and sing.

I brood not over the broken past,
Nor dread whatever time may bring;
No nights are dark, no days are long,
While in my heart there swells a song,
And I can sing.