 | |  |
V
If, as Dr. Johnson maintained with unimpeachable authority, the making of dictionaries is "dull work," it would seem to follow that the making of concordances is deadly dull work. With an electronic computer, much of the dullness can be left to the machine to endure. The problems remaining for the maker of the concordance, while numerous, complex, and often undeniably irritating, are really not dull. For some, however, they may appear to be trivial problems; whether or not they are depends largely upon the ends that their solutions serve—upon, in other words, the uses of a computer concordance to the works of Emily Dickinson. Most people who know what a concordance is assume that its primary function is to locate poems or parts of poems that the user has forgotten. In the case of Emily Dickinson's poetry this service is not quite as insignificant as it might be for other poets because of the history of the publication of her manuscripts. As a tool, then, for restoring lines and stanzas, appearing elsewhere as complete poems, to the poems from which they were originally taken, the concordance is useful. Yet this function hardly justifies the human and inhuman labor and expense involved in preparing a computer concordance. A much more important value appears in the fact that a concordance to Emily Dickinson's poems is an index to the words, and consequently the images and ideas, of her art.[38] And unless the words that present these images and ideas are given in their contexts—contexts which include the poet's alternative choices for these words—they remain, as one critic has put it, "inert".[39] Through the inclusion of variants and through the chronological order of the entries under a word, the concordance could be indispensable for studies of Emily Dickinson's poetic development. The concordance is also potentially valuable, if used in the right ways, for biographical and canonical
It must be admitted, however, that one use of a concordance has been inevitably lost by collaborating with a computer. This function was eloquently described by F. S. Ellis in the preface to his lexical concordance of Shelley published in 1892:
| | |