Petrőczi Éva: Holt költők társaságában. A Puritanizmuskutató Intézet és a Medgyesi Pál Puritán Kiskönyvtár emlékére - Nemzet, egyház, művelődés 9. (Sárospatak, 2014)
Emily Dickinson, the Poetess-Queen of the Webster Dictionary To Tamás Magay, the eternal lexicographer-theologian
It may expire if he»Made Flesh and dwelt among us« Could condescension be Like this consent of Language This loved Philology.”324 And now, after quoting a few remarkable literary experts and the poetess herself, let us turn to the very special homage payed to Emily Dickinson by the American lexicographers, scholars of various aspects of grammar. This is the extremely rich and practical electronic support to everyone dealing with E. D., entitled The Emily Dickinson Lexicon (EDL), one long and worldwide well-received chapter of the Dictionary Society of North America (DSNA) Lexicons Online. And. luckily enough, I found an overture to this great project. A text which foreshadowed such a systematic work, in the middle of the previous century. William Howard’s wise words from 1957 throw light upon the need of such a complex help of Emily Dickinson-researchers, long ago, in the “pre-online” times. As we see from Howard’s remarks, those who dealt with her enormous poetical and prose heritage (her letters) were often lost in the jungle of oppository remarks concerning her vocabulary: “Emily Dickinson’s poetic vocabulary has been variously described as being a small, rigidly compartmented vocabulary of general and conventional terms, plus a moderately capacious vocabulary of homely, acute, directly felt words from which the whole actualizing strength of her verse is drawn (R. P. Nal- ckmur), as being a »large vocabulary including many rare words and some of her own manufacture« (Henry Wells!) and as being »undeniably rich, subtle, and strikingly original« (Richard Chase!) Much of the discussion of her vocabulary had been based upon the impressions of the individual commentators and not upon the objective survey of her vocabulary as a whole, but the appearance in 1951 of a concordance to the poems of the Amherst poet in print at that time and the recent publication of the definitive edition of her poems that includes all of the known Dickinson material have made possible a detailed study of her entire vocabulary which furnishes a factual basis for conclusions as to her verbal habits.”325 324 Ibid., 676. 325 Howard, William 1957,225. 149
