The Age of Whitman and Dickinson

The notes and materials archived on this blog have been developed on the way to a book. Not yet begun, alas, not in earnest, but thought about for a long time. Basically, this archive is a record of useful distractions. The itch of curiosity, scratched with information.

My findings here are fed in part by the overflow of two other projects. I am currently trying to finish a long-in-the process book on Emily Dickinson and the Civil War. And I have gingerly begun to scribble notes for a book on the way keyword searching  has changed our relationship to literature, redefining “canonicity.” This latter book to be called In the American Database. All of this work also goes into my teaching.

Benjamin Friedlander: Associate Professor of English at the University of Maine and member of the editorial collective for the National Poetry Foundation. Author of The Missing Occasion of Saying Yes and A Knot Is Not a Tangle (poetry); Simulcast: Four Experiments in Criticism. Editor of Robert Creeley, Selected Poems, 1945-2005; Larry Eigner, Areas Lights Heights, Writings 1954-1989; and (with Donald Allen), Charles Olson, Collected Prose.

I can be reached at ben dot friedlander at umit dot umaine dot edu.