Editorial Principles and Procedures

Our poets, whether named or anonymous, must have lived or published during the long eighteenth century (1660-1800).
The poet’s name is given in the entry title bar, and at the beginning of the post.
For anonymous or pseudonymous poems, if authorship can be reliably determined by available scholarship, the poet’s name will appear in brackets.
If authorship cannot be reliably determined, the poet’s name as it appears in print will be given within quotation marks.
“Anonymous” is used for any unsigned poem.
Where applicable, graduate student editors also write up a short biography of their poet. These are organized alphabetically by surname in the drop-down menu under “Poet Biographies” in the main menu.

We aim to offer poems not typically found in modern teaching anthologies of eighteenth-century poetry.
Poems are chosen based on perceived topical, cultural, historical, and/or aesthetic value.
The poem title is rendered in quotation marks if it was published in a periodical, single-author volume, miscellany, or any other collection of poems.
The title is rendered in italics if the poem was published separately, with its own title page.

We strive to use eighteenth-century print sources as our copy-texts.
However, given our limited archive on campus, and lack of access to a major collection of eighteenth-century books, we allow for the use of digital and microfilm surrogates.
We are reflexively aware of the problems that can ensue from using these surrogates (a line cropped from the bottom of a page in the photography process; poor reproduction quality). Students using surrogate sources are cautioned about these issues, and instructed to avoid texts that were obviously compromised in the surrogate-making process.
When a surrogate source is used as copy-text, that fact is noted in brackets at the end of the bibliographical “Source” line of the post, e.g. “[ECCO].”
This offers transparency for users regarding our limitations, while also allowing us to give credit to a variety of digital sources (e.g. EEBO, ECCO, Hathi Trust, Google Books) that help make a project like this possible.

We aim to format our poems as closely to the original as possible.
Orthography: Original spelling is maintained, unless determined to be a printer’s error.
Punctuation: Original punctuation is maintained, unless determined to be a printer’s error.
Original stanzaic form and any paragraph or stanza breaks are maintained.
Original italics are maintained, but not small caps or ligatures (which are not available in WordPress). We substitute full caps for small caps in our formatting, and silently separate ligatures.
Printer’s Errors: Any discernible printer’s errors are corrected and noted in the apparatus.
Line numbers are added in increments of 5 to all poems for pedagogical purposes.

We aim to gloss all allusions, quotations, geographic and historical references, proper names, and archaic language to aid interpretation of the poem.
Annotations appear immediately below the poem in the “Notes” section.
All annotations are keyed to line number; the word or phrase in question is italicized, and the gloss immediately follows.
Sources are given parenthetically in abbreviated or short form (e. g. “(OED)” for Oxford English Dictionary; (EDD) for English Dialect Dictionary; or (Author, Short Title, [date], p. #) for less well-known sources.

Each poem is tagged according to the following categories: author, poetic genre, verse form, and main topic(s) or theme(s). These tags allow users to retrieve, for example, all poems by a particular author, all elegies, all poems in blank verse, or all poems about nature.

In an effort to address the issue of credit where credit is due in long-term digital humanities projects, editors are encouraged to sign their posts at the end.
In the event that anonymity is desired, an editor is encouraged—following good eighteenth-century practice—to use a pseudonym instead of leaving the line blank.

Poetical Scavenger