Dickinson's BirdPress

Poem Archive Notes

Scope

The Poem Archive shelters 350 manuscript (MS) facsimiles representing 237 poems composed by Dickinson and marked by the presence of birds. [1] 

Manuscripts  

Every poem gathered here appears on a virtual leaf that includes, whenever possible, a digital facsimile of its manuscript. Currently, only those manuscript leaves/surfaces containing writing are presented; a later iteration of Dickinson’s Birds will present all surfaces to enable a fuller visualization of each manuscript’s physical structure.

MS Dating

The dates assigned here derive pricipally from R. W. Franklin’s 1998 variorum The Poems of Emily Dickinson [2]. Since the Poem Archive is an archive of Manuscripts rather than Works, moreover, the dates assigned are to each manuscript witness of a given work rather than to the work itself—i.e., the manuscript of a draft will bear the composition date; the manuscript of a copy will bear the copying date; and the manuscript of a poem circulated to a recipient will bear the circulation date. When no manuscript is extant, but the poem is accessible in an early (C19) printed source, the date given is the date of its printing.
 
The temporal focus of this project—the importance of the seasons [3]—has led us to treat the dates assigned by Franklin in the following way: poems assigned to “late” in the year are assigned to fall; poems assigned to “early” in the year are assigned to winter.  We have not attempted to assign poems dated “first half of the year” or “second half of the year” to a specific season.

Headnotes

Headnotes identify the manuscript by archive cataloging number and Franklin variorum number, and offer information, when known, on the manuscript’s date of composition, copying, or circulation; its medium (ink, pencil, ink+ pencil); its state (draft or fair copy); its setting in Dickinson’s archive (bound; unbound); its paper type [4]; and its circulation status (retained or sent). In cases where a manuscript has circulated, the recipient(s) is/are identified and further information about them reported. All manuscripts affiliated with the poem are identified and linked. 

In addition to textual and bibliographical information, each poem is also accompanied by a list of the birds it names. In instances where a specific bird is identified, an audio file of the sound of the bird is included and a link to the Bird Archive enables further tracking of the bird both inside and outside Dickinson’s work and century. In instances where unnamed birds appear in a poem, a link opens to the Bird Archive as a whole.

Finally, a partial, ever-evolving list of the environmental/atmospheric phenomena reported in a poem appears to the right of the MS facsimile, the space conventionally reserved for a transcription. Clicking on any specific environmental phenomenon associated with a given poem generates a list of other poems in the archive including that phenomenon. [5]

Transcriptions

In transcribing Dickinson’s poems our aim has been to render as precisely and accurately as possible in the typographic medium Dickinson’s orthography, punctuation, and physical line and stanza breaks, as well as the disposition of her writing across leaves and other surfaces. In carrying out this work we consciously engaged two vital reading traditions: the manuscript tradition in which Dickinson worked exclusively during her lifetime, and the print tradition in which her work was widely disseminated after her death. [6]

Our engagement with the manuscript tradition is registered in our inclusion—foregrounding—of the material faces of Dickinson’s manuscripts via digital facsimiles, and in our practice of transcribing directly from manuscript sources whenever possible. In those instances where Dickinson’s “bird” poems share space on a bifolium sheet or other MS surface with other poems not referencing birds or are embedded within letters and letter drafts, the entire MS is transcribed, with the “bird” poems made quickly locatable through a “glow” effect in the transcription. 

Our engagement with the print tradition is reflected in our decision to prepare limited diplomatic transcriptions of these works rather than typographic facsimiles. Here we deploy typographical forms and editorial symbols for a clarity of presentation that also highlights the non-identity of print and manuscript productions. 

Our transcriptions are presented on spectral panes that exist “behind” the facsimile images until called to the foreground by the user. Like the C19 bird-blinds that were their inspiration, the panes are designed to convey our simultaneous sense of closeness and remoteness from Dickinson, her scene of writing, and her original authorial intentions. [7]

Manuscript and Textual Features Reported in the Transcriptions

State

  • We distinguish typographically between two broad MS states: fair copy manuscripts, which are represented in the font Cormorant Infant and drafts (initial and intermediate), which  are represented in the font Bellefaire. A third sub-state, fair copy, with revisions, is also noted. Given Dickinson’s frequent introduction of variant readings and other alterations even within her fair copies, the distinction between a draft and a fair copy is often a matter of interpretation. Various factors, including but not limited to the number and nature of the alterations, the handwriting style/s, and the material conditions of the manuscript itself have influenced our classification of the state of a given document.  

  • Non-authorial transcripts, whether printed, typed, or handwritten, are represented in Terminal, 10 pt.

Medium

  • Dickinson’s writing in ink appears in sepia (color wheel: 993300).

  • Dickinson’s writing in pencil appears in gray (color wheel: 67787d).

  • Texts by Dickinson transcribed by other hands or taken from printed sources appear in blue (color wheel:087FA3)

Leaf breaks

  • Page and/or leaf breaks in the manuscripts are observed in the transcriptions. 

Missing MS Leaves

  • Missing leaves — i.e., leaves lost, destroyed, or dissociated from the MS — are indicated with the notation [¦] 

Tears in MS Leaves 

  • Open tears in MS leaves are represented with broken lines: – – – – – – – – – .

Manuscript Sectors

  • In cases where Dickinson’s writing crosses a material boundary (e.g., a fold, the parts of an envelope, etc.) to continue in another quadrant of the manuscript, or in cases where Dickinson chooses a quadrant of the manuscript to use as a revision site for further trials or variants, the relationship of the writing to the quadrant is indicated visually. 

Material Fasteners

  • The authorial use of pins or other fasteners, not including fascicle threads, is indicated with the symbol ✣; the type of fastener (e.g., strait pin) is identified in the Textual Notes.

Enclosures

  • The presence of enclosures is indicated with a 🔎; the type of enclosure is identified in [brackets]. 

Orthography & Capitalization

  • Dickinson’s alphabetic forms are not fully regularized, and the distinction between minuscules and majuscules is often ambiguous. Additionally, Dickinson’s orthography and punctuation often seem to function expressively, that is, in excess of the denotative meaning of the marks. While we do not knowingly emend any instance of capitalization or orthography our use of standard typographic forms to represent handwritten forms may at times limit Dickinson’s original meaning. Moreover, while our primary guidance on orthography and punctuation always issues directly from the manuscripts, we recognize that our judgments in these matters—especially in ambiguous cases—is also mediated by our experience of and participation in the long print tradition of her work, which culminates in R. W. Franklin’s Poems: A Variorum Edition (1998). 

Dashes, Commas, Quotation Marks, Periods, Exclamation Points, Question Marks, Variant Markers 

  • Like her orthography, the identity of Dickinson’s punctuation marks is not always unambiguous, with dashes, commas, and periods often being difficult to distinguish definitively from one another. Here again, we have first reckoned with Dickinson’s manuscripts to determine the identity of these marks, but we have also turned to the print tradition for guidance about how the mark in question has been interpreted. Once we have settled upon an interpretation for a given mark, we have used one typographic mark to represent all instances of the mark occurring in the manuscripts: i.e., one form of period, one form of comma, one form of quotation marks, one form of exclamation point, and one form of dash. 
  • Dickinson often marked words or phrases for variant readings (or, on occasion, possibly for another reason) with one or more of the following symbols: x, +, o. While the print tradition has not previously included these marks, we have done so in the belief that they are part of the lexical system of meaning in Dickinson’s poems. 

Line breaks

  • All physical line breaks are reported; metrical line breaks are not presumed. 

Underlining

  • Instances of underlining are indicated with the underscore function, with the many variant forms of underlining (e.g., multiple underscores) present in Dickinson’s MSS identified in the Textual Notes. 

Canceled text

  • Instances of authorial cancelation are indicated with <angle brackets>. While editorial symbols are generally color-coded black,  brackets (<>) indicating cancelations are color-coded to indicate Dickinson’s medium of cancelation (< ink cancelations>; <pencil cancelations>). Since Dickinson’s forms of cancelation are almost as distinct as her other orthographic forms, readers are encouraged to take note of the many variant forms of cancellation (e.g., multiple strikethroughs, cross-hatchings, etc.) present in her manuscripts.
  • Instances of editorial cancelation/censorship are indicated visually in the following way: cancelled text.

Overwriting

  • In cases of authorial overwriting, the material altered by overwriting is first marked as <cancelled>, then followed by the new material surrounded with the following special character: ⠿overwritten text⠿; in cases where there is overwriting, but the overwritten text is illegible, only the instance of overwriting is marked: ⠿⠿.

Parentheses

  • Dickinson sometimes brought a set of words into association by drawing a partial circle or open parenthesis around them; in the transcriptions we have used both open and closed parentheses to represent this textual situation.

Supplied Text

  • In cases where the missing text in a manuscript is available in early transcript, we have included that text in [brackets] and recorded the source of the text in the Textual Notes.

Disposition of the Text

By use of the symbols below, the transcriptions seek to render the disposition of Dickinson’s writing across her manuscript pages as fully and literally as possible; they do not attempt to visually associate additions or possible variant readings dispersed across a given manuscript, though some associations that are spatially inscribed necessarily emerge:

  • Writing, including additions and variants, inscribed inter-linearly:

    • ↑ above the line ↓ ;

    • ↓ below the line ↑.

Note: In cases where the interlineation is not immediately above or below the principle word/line, double arrows indicate the distance.

  • Writing, including additions and variants, inscribed vertically along the right edge of the page: ↪

  • Writing, including additions and variants, inscribed vertically along the left edge of the page:  ↩

  • Writing, including additions and variants, inscribed along the top edge of the page: ⤴

  • Writing, including additions and variants, inscribed along the bottom edge of the page: ⤵

  • Writing, including additions and variants, inscribed perpendicularly through the midst in the text: ⇣(bottom to top of the page); ⇡(top to bottom of the page)

Boundary Lines

  • Authorially-drawn (ink) lines indicating the end of a poem are represented by a stylized form of a typical boundary line from Dickinson’s fascicles:
  • Authorially-drawn (pencil) lines indicating the end of a section of a poem are represented by stylized form of such lines found in Dickinson’s working drafts:

Leaf Rotations 

  • Rotations of the leaves are not specifically noted but are clarified by the facsimiles.

Writing Omitted from the Transcriptions

  • We have not transcribed text inscribed on Dickinson’s manuscripts by other hands or marks made by her earliest editors.

Textual Notes

  • In cases when the above forms of representation cannot adequately convey a textual situation, an explanatory note is added in the Textual Notes. Frequently cited correspondents’ names are abbreviated as follows:
    • EH      Elizabeth Holland
    • HHJ    Helen Hunt Jackson
    • FN       Frances Norcross 
    • LND    Lavinia Norcross Dickinson
    • LN       Louisa Norcross 
    • MLT    Mabel Loomis Todd
    • SD       Susan Gilbert Dickinson
    • SB        Samuel (Sam) Bowles
    • TWH   Thomas Wentworth Higginson
    • TN      Thomas NilesWAD  
    • William (Austin) Dickinson

Archives and Editions

The Emily Dickinson Archive, an open-access resource containing digital surrogates of many of the manuscripts of Dickinson’s poems and letters from the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the Amherst College Archives & Special Collections; the Boston Public Library; and other archives and special collections housing Dickinson manuscripts, is the primary source for the manuscript images reproduced in Dickinson’s Birds. Grateful acknowledgment is given to the EDA and to the many libraries and institutions that also contributed images of Dickinson’s manuscripts featured here: The American Antiquarian Society; The Beinecke Library, Yale University Library; Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University; Forbes Library; The Jones Library; The Library of Congress; Middlebury College Library; The Morgan Library & Museum; The New York Public Library; Princeton University Library; The Robert P. Esty Library; The Rosenbach Library; Scripps College Library; Smith College Libraries; The State Historical Society of Iowa; and Vassar Special Collections. 

Location Symbols for Key Archives

 

A       Amherst College Library. Emily Dickinson Collections [Transcriptions by Mabel Loomis Todd and others are marked as Tr; Printer’s copy for Poems (1896) are marked as 1896PC.]

BPL   Boston Public Library. Thomas Wentworth Higginson Papers Collection

Forbes Forbes Library, Northampton

H      Houghton Library, Harvard University. Emily Dickinson Collections [Poems associated with Martha Dickinson Bianchi are marked as H B; poems sent to Elizabeth and Josiah Holland are marked as H H; transcriptions supplied by Susan Dickinson are marked as ST]

Y-BRBL Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

Scholarly Editions Consulted

 
R. W. Franklin, ed., The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA, and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998.
 
R. W. Franklin, ed., The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA, and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1981.
 
Ellen Louise Hart & Martha Nell Smith, eds., Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson. Ashfield, MA: Paris Press, 1998.
 
Thomas H. Johnson & Theodora Ward, eds., The Letters of Emily Dickinson.. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA, and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958.
 
Cristanne Miller, ed., Emily Dickinson’s Poems as She Preserved Them. Cambridge, MA, and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016.
 
Cristanne Miller & Domhnall Mitchell, eds., The Letters of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge, MA, and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016.
 
Marta Werner, ed. Radical Scatters: An Electronic Archive of Emily Dickinson’s Late Fragments and Related Texts, 1870-1886. Lincoln: The University of Nebraska, 2007-present.
 
Marta Werner, ed., Writing in Time: Emily Dickinson’s Master Hours. Amherst: Amherst College Press, 2021. 
 
Marta Werner & Jen Bervin, Emily Dickinson: The Gorgeous Nothings. New York: New Directions, 2013.

 


[1] The following eleven poems, identified by Jefferey Simons as connected with Dickinson’s lyric ornithology, are not included in dickisnonsbirds: Fr. 1 (juvenilia; outside the temporal boundaries of the archive); Fr 90 (the reference is to a domestic bird: Chanticleer, not a wild bird); Fr 198 (the reference is to a nest only); Fr 1019 (only an implied or ancillary reference to bird); Fr 1182 (only an implied or ancillary reference to bird); Fr 1352 (only an implied or ancillary reference to bird); Fr 1368 (only an implied or ancillary reference to bird); Fr 1408 (only an implied or ancillary reference to bird); Fr 1470 (only an implied or ancillary reference to bird); Fr 1577 (only an implied or ancillary reference to bird); Fr 1603 (only an implied or ancillary reference to bird). See Jefferey Simons, “Dickinson’s Lyric Ornithology,” Emily Dickinson Journal 28.1 (2019): 1-22. We hope that a later iteration of this work will include all of Dickinson’s writings alluding to birds.

[2] R. W. Franklin’s 1998 The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA & London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press) is the principal source for the dates assigned to Dickinson’s poems. Dates in the variorum—and in this gathering—are to manuscript witnesses rather than works, and mark the composition, copying, or circulation date of the particular manuscript. Manuscripts are generally dated to years and, when possible, to season, months, and (rarely), days. While it is possible to positively date a significant number of manuscripts, for many others the dates assigned are likely but not definitive; in these cases the date is marked as “c.”. In those cases where Franklin has assigned a date of “first half of the year” or “second half of the year,” we have dated it to the year only.  In addition to Franklin’s variorum, we have drawn on Miller and Mitchell’s The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge & London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2024). Miller and Mitchell’s careful re-dating of manuscripts is reflected in Dickinson’s Birds. 

[3] Seasons in the Poem Archive are defined as follows: spring=March, April, May; summer=June, July, August; fall=September, October, November; winter=December, January, February. Manuscripts dated by Franklin to the “second half” of a given year are marked as belonging to either “summer” or “fall”, depending on internal and external evidence, while manuscripts dated by Franklin to the first half of a given year are marked as belonging to either “winter” or “spring”, also depending on additional internal and external evidence. 

[4] R. W. Franklin’s 1986 The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA & London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press) is the most comprehensive source of information on Dickinson’s paper types in the fascicles and the unbound bifolium sheets. Jay Leyda’s cataloging notes in the Amherst College Library are also a valuable source for information on paper. Jen Bervin’s recent research on Dickinson’s papers will add significantly to our knowledge of Dickinson’s material productions. One long-term goal of our project is to update information on Dickinson’s papers through additional archival research.

[5] Jefferey Simons (Department of English Philology, University of Huelva) gifted his research materials for his essay “Dickinson’s Lyric Ornithology” to this project. The exquisite notes on the avian behaviors described in Dickinson’s poems are his distinctive contribution to this archive. His essays on Dickinson have appeared in European Journal of American Studies (2017), The Emily Dickinson Journal (2019), and Amerikastudien / American Studies (2020). Other essays on the poetry and prose of James Joyce have appeared in Joyce Studies Annual (2002, 2013, 2018), European Journal of English Studies (2007), Genetic Joyce Studies (2010), and James Joyce Quarterly (2014).  

[6] The advent of new technologies of digital reproduction makes possible the representation of elements from both the manuscript and print traditions but does not necessarily collapse the distance between them. We gesture towards this nascent tradition in our use of just one hand-drawn element—the boundary lines found in Dickinson’s manuscripts—in our typographic transcriptions. Here, two stylized forms only of line are used.
 
[7] We are always seeing the manuscript not only through the veil of print but also under the horizons of the many scholarly editions of her work — Todd, Johnson, Franklin, Smith and Hart, Werner, Werner and Bervin, Miller, Miller and Mitchell, etc.—with their accreted editorial choices and conventions. In the print tradition, R. W. Franklin’s 1998 variorum—a culminating act of scholarship—currently exerts the most influence on editors and readers. This is not because the Franklin variorum perfectly discerns the physiognomy of Dickinson’s manuscripts and translates the signs and marks inscribed on them as Dickinson intended—how could we ever even know for sure what she intended?—in a new medium, but, rather, because he evolves a rigorously consistent internal system for representing these various marks and signs within the editorial (and print) horizons it defines. As a result. Franklin’s transcriptions have been naturalized in the reader’s mind—so much so that even the reader who turns their eyes upon the manuscript after years of reading in print sees the clear letter forms and punctuation of that edition in place of Dickinson’s more various ambiguous forms.
 
 

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