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The Networked Recluse The Connected World of Emily Dickinson Not blank The Networked Recluse The Connected World of Emily Dickinson Mike Kelly Carolyn Vega Marta Werner Susan Howe Richard Wilbur Published to accompany the exhibit I’m Nobody! Who are you? The Life and Poetry of Emily Dickinson The Morgan Library & Museum k New York, New York January 20 – May 21, 2017 amherst college press mmxvii The Networked Recluse The Connected World of Emily Dickinson amherst college press Robert Frost Library • Amherst, Massachusetts This work copyright © 2017 by The Trustees of Amherst College. All materials herein released on a Creative Commons 4.0 CC-BY-NC-ND License. You may copy, share, and redistribute this work, under the following conditions: • You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. • You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. • You may not use the material for commercial purposes. • If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material. • You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. For more information: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ The Archives and Special Collections of Amherst College, The Morgan Library & Museum, The Houghton Library of Harvard University, The Boston Public Library, The New York Public Library, and The Archives and Special Collections of Mount Holyoke College have kindly given permission for the inclusion of images of materials in their collections for inclusion in this volume, under terms consistent with the Creative Commons license under which this volume is published. Set in Atma Serif 11/14 ISBN 978-1-943208-06-7 paperback ISBN 978-1-943208-07-4 electronic book Library of Congress Control Number: 2016963773 Contents Foreword Colin B. Bailey vii Introduction Mike Kelly 1 The Realm of Fox: The Dispersal of Emily Dickinson’s Manuscripts Carolyn Vega 5 I’m Nobody! Who are you? The Life and Poetry of Emily Dickinson Checklist of the Exhibition 13 Emily Dickinson: Manuscripts, Maps, and a Poetics of Cartography Marta Werner 89 Sumptuous Destitution Richard Wilbur 113 Transcription and Transgression Susan Howe and Marta Werner 123 Textual Preface: Transcriptions as Thin Maps Marta Werner 139 A Note on the Transcriptions 147 Transcriptions of Manuscripts in the Exhibit 149 Foreword In late 1950 the Morgan Library & Museum received a gift of five first editions of Emily Dickinson’s poems and published letters; an autograph poem, “Distance – is not the Realm of Fox”; and an autograph letter to Dickinson’s cousin Perez Cowan. These books and manuscripts formed a compelling foundation to build a small but potent Dickinson collection at the Morgan. Dickinson’s powerful voice radiates through her original manuscripts. The letter to Cowan, written around February 1873, after a break in their correspondence, warmly notes that “much may have happened to both, but that is the rarest Book which opened at whatever page, equally enchants us.” In addition to expressing her happiness at being in touch once again with Cowan, Dickinson breezily discusses his wife, his sister’s marriage, their shared cousins, and a clergyman friend and thanks him for sending a paper he had edited. The letter exemplifies Dickinson’s rich relationships with friends, family, and the world—networks explored in detail in the essays that follow and in the related exhibition I’m Nobody! Who are you? The Life and Poetry of Emily Dickinson. Dickinson’s earliest editors emphasized the poet’s reclusiveness, and this reputation has endured. But “silence is all we dread,” she wrote, and, although she withdrew from public life beginning in the 1860s, she maintained many connections throughout her life and was always a lively correspondent. A desire to explore these connections led to a collaboration between the Morgan and Amherst College, which holds some 1,200 of Dickinson’s manuscripts and letters. Also drawing on the unparalleled collections of Houghton Library, Harvard University; Mount Holyoke College; the Boston Public Library; the Emily Dickinson Museum; and the New York Public Library, this publication and the exhibition it accompanies contextualize the poet within her personal and literary networks and trace the development of her writing. Foreword vii This is the first time these collections have been brought together for a major biographical exhibition. The show makes a number of important connections: drafts are shown alongside finished poems; a lock of Dickinson’s hair sent to a friend is on display; and all of the portraits of the poet created in her lifetime have been reunited, including a recently discovered daguerreotype, which has never before been exhibited. I am grateful to curator Mike Kelly, head of Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College, and to Susan Howe, Marta Werner, and Carolyn Vega for their contributions to this book. I would also like to acknowledge the generous support of the Ricciardi Family Exhibition Fund, the Lohf Fund for Poetry, the Caroline Macomber Fund, and Rudy and Sally Ruggles along with the assistance from the Acriel Foundation and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation that has made this exhibition possible. k A global institution focused on the European and American traditions, the Morgan Library & Museum houses one of the world’s foremost collections of manuscripts, rare books, music, drawings, and ancient and other works of art. These holdings, which represent the legacy of Pierpont Morgan and numerous later benefactors, comprise a unique and dynamic record of Western civilization as well as an incom- parable repository of ideas and of the creative process. The mission of the Morgan is to preserve, build, study, present, and interpret a collection of extraordinary quality in order to stimulate enjoyment, excite the imagination, advance learning, and nurture creativity. Colin B. Bailey Director, The Morgan Library & Museum viii The Networked Recluse Introduction Mike Kelly When Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson published Poems: Second Series in the fall of 1891, they included a four-page manuscript image, a “Fac-simile of ‘Renunciation,’ by Emily Dickinson,” as the frontispiece to that volume. In their preface, Dickinson’s editors write about the shifts in her hand- writing and her non-standard punctuation, including her “numerous dashes,” further cementing her reputation as an unorthodox poet. Interest in Dickinson’s manuscripts and their idiosyncrasies has waxed and waned over the past century, limited by both the accessibility of the originals and the technologies of reproduc- tion and distribution. During the near century between the “fac-simile” included in Poems: Second Series and the landmark facsimile reconstruction of The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson by Ralph Franklin in 1981, the majority of Dickinson’s manuscripts came to rest at Amherst College, Harvard University, Boston Public Library, and other repositories. Dickinson scholars were quick to appreciate the value of the World Wide Web and digitization as tools for manuscript studies; the first iteration of the Dickinson Electronic Archives under the editorial guidance of Martha Nell Smith was launched in 1994 and remains active today. Other projects followed as scholars grappled with editorial as well as technological challenges. As of late 2016, full-color, high resolution, digital facsimiles of Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts are more widely available than ever before. Amherst College made scans of all of the Dickinson manuscripts held there freely available via Amherst College Digital Collections (acdc.amherst.edu); Harvard University assembled The Emily Dickinson Archive with selected manuscripts from Amherst, the Houghton Library at Harvard University, and others; and the Boston Public Library has made the Dickinson manuscripts in the Galatea Collection of Thomas W. Higginson available through Flickr. Introduction 1