Dickinson Electronic Archives - Current

Current

Although originally created to showcase the writings of and scholarship concerning American poet Emily Dickinson, the Dickinson Electronic Archives projects have since expanded to include as well the writings of Emily Dickinson's correspondents, many of whom were family members such as Susan Dickinson and nephew Edward (Ned) Dickinson. The DEA has also grown to feature numerous images of Dickinson’s manuscripts – both poetic manuscripts and letters – as well as detailed scholastic analysis by executive editor Martha Nell Smith and other leading Dickinson scholars.

One of the primary missions of the Dickinson Electronic Archives is to enhance knowledge surrounding Emily Dickinson, one of the United States' most admired and popular poets and beloved nineteenth-century figures, through the contextual clues of her creative process as discovered in her manuscripts. While casual biographies of Dickinson are likely to describe the poet as isolated, morbid, crazy, humorless, and a writer of "little poems," her written records suggest otherwise. Dickinson’s manuscripts and correspondences, as showcased in the Dickinson Electronic Archives, show that Emily Dickinson sometimes collaborated with another writer, that she sometimes reveled in a bawdy sense of humor, and that letter writing became an artistic form for her, one she exploited for poetic experimentation.