Among her lines written on letters, envelopes, and chocolate wrappers, Emily Dickinson’s incandescent thinking is everywhere on display. The poet was born on this day in 1830.
,” the fruits of a collaboration between the Dickinson scholar Marta Werner and the poet and visual artist Jen Bervin. These volumes complement an astounding new digital resource. In 2013, Harvard launched the Emily Dickinson Archive, with the coöperation, if not exactly the blessing, of Amherst, which insisted on open access to all manuscripts. Readers can now find Dickinson’s scraps in print and in digital facsimile.
It has been argued that Dickinson refused publication exactly because it was synonymous with print, whose standardizing tendencies she knew would miscarry her precision effects. When, in 1866, Dickinson’s “A narrow Fellow in the Grass” appeared in the Springfield, Dickinson complained to Higginson that, among other problems, she was “defeated . . . of the third line by punctuation.” Her manuscript had read, “You may have met Him—did you not / His notice sudden is—.
The envelope poems suggest the current exhilarating paradox of Dickinson’s work: her unique actions of mind are bound in unusually dramatic ways to slips of paper a hundred and fifty years old or more, rarities whose near-perfect reproductions are nevertheless now widely and freely available online. It sometimes feels as though Dickinson’s sojourn in print, so fraught from its inception, was a temporary measure, now nearing its end as it’s replaced by a better technology.
A fragment such as “A 316” isn’t like anything except itself. It defeats categorization. It’s worth calling it a poem only if we reinstate the prestige of “poetry” that the scraps, in effect, deconstruct. But neither is it a mere draft: the scraps represent the audacious pinnacle of Dickinson’s mingled verbal and graphic gifts. The envelope poems are not purely works of visual art, like calligraphic screens or proto-modernist collages.
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