This Poetry Pairing pays tribute to Emily Dickinson (1830-86) and the scholars and archivists whose efforts ensure the poems, letters and other materials she left behind are preserved and accessible. We pair her poem "Forever - Is Composed of Nows -" with the article "Enigmatic Dickinson Revealed Online" by Jennifer Schuessler. After reading the poem and article, tell us what you think - or suggest other Times content that could be matched with the poem instead. According to Jen Bervin in the November 2013 issue of Poetry, "Emily Dickinson, one of the greatest American poets, wrote approximately 1,800 distinct poems within 2,357 poem drafts and at least 1,150 letters and prose fragments - a total of 3,507 pieces before her death at the age of 55." Dickinson's work has inspired numerous artists, and the Poetry Foundation currently displays a number of these artworks in an exhibition that gets its name from the Dickinson poem featured below. Forever - Is Composed of Nows - By Emily Dickinson Forever - is composed of Nows - "Tis not a different time - Except for Infiniteness - And Latitude of Home - From this - experienced Here - Remove the Dates - to These - Let Months dissolve in further Months - And Years - exhale in Years - Without Debate - or Pause - Or Celebrated Days - No different Our Years would be From Anno Dominies - In "Enigmatic Dickinson Revealed Online," Jennifer Schuessler writes about the recently started online Emily Dickinson Archive and the "behind-the-scenes intrigue" that preceded it. The manuscripts of Emily Dickinson have long been scattered across multiple archives, meaning scholars had to knock on numerous doors to see all the handwritten drafts of a poet whose work went almost entirely unpublished in her lifetime. The online Emily Dickinson Archive, to be inaugurated on Wednesday, promises to change all that by bringing together on a single open-access website thousands of manuscripts held by Harvard University, Amherst College, the Boston Public Library and five other institutions. Now, scholars and lay readers alike will be able to browse easily through handwritten versions of favorite poems, puzzle over lines that snake along the edges of used envelopes and other scraps of paper, or zoom in on one of Dickinson's famous dashes until it almost fills the screen. ... Since planning began two years ago, there has been a revival of decades-old tensions between Harvard and Amherst, which hold the two largest Dickinson collections. And sometimes-bitter debate has flared on the advisory board, with some members saying that Harvard's choice of which materials to include provides too narrow an answer to a basic question: Just what counts as an Emily Dickinson "poem," anyway? "The scholarship with any major figure produces factions and divisions," said Christopher Benfey, a Dickinson scholar at Mount Holyoke College, who is not involved with the project. But with Dickinson, the truly bizarre thing is the quarrel has been handed to generation after generation after generation. The trouble began when Dickinson died, in 1886, leaving behind just 10 published poems and a vast and enigmatic handwritten paper trail, ranging from finished-seeming poems assembled into hand-sewn books to fragments inscribed on advertising fliers, envelope flaps, brown household paper, even a chocolate wrapper. After finding a cache of writings in a locked chest, Dickinson's sister Lavinia gave them first to Susan Dickinson, the wife of their brother, Austin, to organize and publish. When Susan worked too slowly, the papers went to Austin's mistress, Mabel Loomis Todd, who helped edit the first published edition of Emily Dickinson's poems. Todd subsequently claimed ownership to some manuscripts, furthering a long-running legal dispute called "the war between the houses." Material from Austin's descendants went to Harvard in 1950, while Todd's material went to Amherst in 1956. Since then, there have been tensions over copyright and boasting over whose collection is bigger and better. ... By leaving out most of Dickinson's so-called scraps (as scholars somewhat reluctantly call the fragments from after 1875, when she seems to have stopped copying out clean versions of poems), along with passages from letters not included in Mr. Franklin's edition but identified by other experts as poems, the archive plays down Dickinson's evolution toward more radically experimental forms, some scholars assert. "She was continually challenging the boundaries of genre," said Marta Werner, a professor at D'Youville College in Buffalo and the creator of "Radical Scatters," a 1999 digital project based on the scraps, which are mostly held by Amherst. She was someone who wrote all the time, and by the end she was writing on everything. Such matters may seem irrelevant to people who come to the website for the sheer pleasure of looking at Dickinson's often startlingly beautiful manuscripts (some festooned with dried flowers or doodles), or comparing the poems as they appeared in her handwriting to printed versions in six published editions, including Mr. Franklin's.