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The notion that readers don’t like poetry because they find it too difficult, is frequently written about. Troublesome elements can include a reader’s ignorance about a poet’s times, cultural undertones, intellectual allusions, use of language, a general befuddlement about the poet’s intention, and a lack of reader involvement. While researching the many cultural and historical references of “The Cantos,” or “The Waste Land,” can be an overwhelming task, reading hypertext versions of these poems can enable a reader to link to other incidences of a word within the poem or other works by the poet, to related texts, annotations, biographical material, graphics, sounds, and bibliographic information.

Readers bring varying amounts of knowledge to the reading of a poem, and hypertext renditions allow one to choose which poetic detail requires more elucidation, and at which stage of study. Each particular further illuminates the poem, with the reader gradually synthesizing the information into a meaningful pattern. Reading poetry in this kind of hypertext environment, then, requires active involvement on the part of the reader.

This is not to say all writing would be better read in hypertext. The format of a written piece should be determined by the purpose of the material, as Tim Bulkeley has pointed out, with hypertext better, in some cases, and the monograph, in others. One format does not preclude the other. A hypertext reader who has become actively involved in the work of a particular poet will likely pursue a more expansive study of the poet’s work or life, often found in a monograph. This paper will examine the development of interesting hypertext tools that foster active reading and help explicate poetry, as well as the implications of such tools on more traditional modes of study.

Stream: Information Society, and Print and Electronic Texts

Paper: Hypertext Editions of Eliot, Dante, DG Rossetti, and Dickinson

Lois O’Neill is Electronic Resources and Reference Librarian at Adelphi University, in Garden City, NY. She received a BA in English from SUNY New Paltz, an MS in Library Service from Columbia University, and is currently a student in the MFA program in Creative Writing, at Adelphi. Her research interests include the role of poetry in academia, the use of the hypertext environment in studying poetry, evaluating instructional tools through usability testing,and methods of assessing the use and performance of research databases.