Dickinson's Poems, Letter-Poems, and Letters Digitized by Smith and Vetter

University of Virginia Rotunda Press has released Emily Dickinson’s Correspondences, edited by Martha Nell Smith and Lara Vetter, with consulting editor Ellen Louise Hart.

Smith, Professor of English at University of Maryland, and Vetter, Associate Professor of English at UNC-Charlotte and a 2003 PhD alumna from Maryland,  have produced a major new critical edition of Dickinson’s “poems, letters, and letter-poems.” In their introduction, Smith and Vetter urge students and scholars to rethink the various forms of Dickinson’s correspondences.

The XML-based archive includes seventy-four poems, letter-poems, and letters between Emily and Susan Dickinson. Each text is presented with a digitized scan of the holograph manuscript, as well as extensive notes and metadata never offered before in a scholarly edition of Dickinson. Users are able to zoom in on specific areas of the image, as well as rearrange variants in each constellation of texts.

The edition is fully searchable by date, genre, manuscript features, and full text. The robust content of Emily Dickinson’s Correspondences gives new insight into the possibilities of digital scholarship. Smith and Vetter have designed their new work to complement the Dickinson Electronic Archives, a website featuring experimental editions and literary collections founded by Smith in 1994 and nurtured into the digital collection par excellence ever since. The Dickinson Electronic Archives will feature an interactive response component, intricately linked to every text collected into the scholarly edition, where readers/users can engaged in editorial praxes, critique the editing of the digital scholarly edition, and discuss the work of the edition and their work on it with one another. Already, there is a Facebook page devoted to Emily Dickinson's Correspondences. It is an open group, so non-Facebook users can follow the conversation.

Smith and Vetter hope that this digital edition encourages readers to rethink the forms of Dickinson’s poetry. As part of “a born-digital textual inquiry,” Smith and Vetter sought answers to questions such as, “What kinds of practices did she enact in her letter writing? How are poems integral to, and integrated into, her letters? How might poems in letters, and letter-poems, differ from poems in bound manuscript books?” How this American poet and her work have been made for consumption by readers is central to the work of Emily Dickinson's Correspondences.

Read more about Emily Dickinson’s Correspondences here.