Dickinson's Birds

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Poem Archive Notes

= Original manuscript lost or destroyed

= Manuscript facsimile coming soon

Keyword Search

You can use the Poem Archive Keyword Search to locate specific words and phrases within the transcriptions of Dickinson's poems provided here. For more advanced navigation, see the Search Menu on the left.

Manuscript Sources

The Emily Dickinson Archive, an open-access site containing digital surrogates of many of the manuscripts of Dickinson’s poems and letters is the primary source for the manuscript images reproduced here. This single site includes at least some Dickinson manuscripts from the following Libraries:

American Antiquarian Society

Amherst College Archives & Special Collections

Beinecke Library, Yale University

Boston Public Library

Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University

Houghton Library, Harvard University

Jones Library

Library of Congress

The Morgan Library & Museum

New York Public Library

The Rosenbach Library

Smith College Libraries

Vassar Special Collections

In addition to the above collections, manuscripts for Dickinson’s Birds have been drawn from Forbes Library, Middlebury College, Princeton University Library, The Robert P. Esty Library, Scripps College, and the State Historical Society of Iowa.

Grateful acknowledgment is extended to these libraries and institutions for making these documents publicly accessible.

Transcriptions, diplomatic and encoded

All transcriptions of Dickinson’s poems are from her manuscripts.

Poem-manuscript dates

Poem dates generally follow those in R. W. Franklin’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson, 3 vols. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998). For those manuscripts composed by Dickinson and shared with Susan Dickinson, the dates proposed by Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith in Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson (Paris Press, 1998) are also noted in the Commentaries. With very few exceptions, all dates based on handwriting alone should be considered open to revision.

Poem-manuscript paper data

In addition to the manuscripts themselves, data on Dickinson’s paper types is drawn from two

scholarly sources. The most important source for paper data for fascicle and “set” poems is R. W. Franklin’s The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, 2 vols. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986). A second key source for paper data is Jay Leyda’s cataloging notes at Amherst College, Archives & Special Collections.

Excluded Works

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.

For more information see Reading Coordinates & Navigation Notes.

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