In the Battle over Emily Dickinson, Who Has Her "Herbarium"?

In a story about the opening of an online archive of Emily Dickinson manuscripts taken from the Amherst College and Harvard University archives (edickinson.org), the New York Times describes the complicated history of the Harvard-Amherst relationship. To bring color to the inter-institutional competition for Dickinson supremacy, the Times quotes head of archives and special collections at the Frost Library at Amherst and member of the online archive’s advisory board Michael Kelly as saying:

They have the furniture, we have the daguerreotype; they have the herbarium, we have the hair.

A herbarium is a collection of plants. Think terrarium, or even librar-ium, then think herbs, and you'll see both why it sounds to many like a word they ought to know already, and also how you can remember what it means when you see it again.

A herbarium can be large or small, housed within a museum or university or stored on a bookshelf in your home. Emily Dickinson's took the form of an album of dried flowers paired with notes that she assembled as a young woman, described in a New York Times review of a 2006 facsimile (see illustration) in this way:

In page after page of these richly detailed reproductions, the young Dickinson comes to life — in the delicate flourishes of the handwritten labels that fix the more than 400 specimens to the page, in the graceful and exacting way she arranged the plants throughout the album and in the selection of plants themselves, most of them picked within walking distance of her home in Amherst, Mass.

The review then goes on to explain the significance of flowers to Dickinson's work. She "sent her friends more than 30 poems accompanied by pressed flowers and bouquets. Flowers, both as physical objects and as the subject of her writing, became one of her primary means of communication."

Images of Dickinson's herbarium are not included in the stunning online archive, but vocabularians will be thrilled to discover a lexicon of 9,000 words that appeared in Dickinson's poetry. Each word is linked to definitions from the dictionary she used, Webster's 1844 American Dictionary of the English Language. (For more, see "The Poet and the Dictionary.")

Looking for more Emily Dickinson word love? Check out this Vocabulary List of twelve words drawn from her poem "We Grow Accustomed to the Dark."