I didn’t get her poetry when I was a college student (my professors would probably say I didn’t get any literature when I was a college student, and that might be pretty accurate). I remember my American Lit professor characterizing her as a spinster recluse who wrote intense poetry in her attic, so intense that no one got it until the 80’s. (This was in the eighties.) I do read poetry, but mainly a handful of poets who fit into a certain box – Gary Snyder, Hanshan, Robinson Jeffers and Mary Oliver – mostly contemporary, although I break out the Keats or Whitman every once in a while. So I didn’t drive out to Western Mass just to go to Emily Dickinson’s House, going there was a ploy to get my wife to go to the Springfield Armory, along taking a tour of the landmarks of Jonathon Edwards’s life. Turns out that the Emily Dickinson Museum was well worth the drive.

The house is in the center of Amherst; with Amherst College a little ways down the road. The house sits on a hill, surrounded by mighty white oaks, from with Emily and her family could view the goings on across the town. The tour at the house was fantastic, led by an enthusiastic guide who earnestly wanted us to understand Emily, her poetry, her seclusion, her social networking, and passionate love of nature. Referring to Dickinson’s extensive letter writing, our guide imagined how Dickinson would handle instant messaging and Facebook. She stressed that Dickinson was not a recluse, as she maintained correspondence with over one hundred people, but that she did severely limit her face-to-face interactions with people outside a small circle, and did not venture off her family’s property after a certain age.

“I want you to imagine Emily absolutely filthy,” our guide said while showing us one of Emily’s signature white dresses. Dickinson was an accomplished gardener, had created an book of over 400 species of pressed plants from the area, and “spent hours in the hayfields across the road.” Hoop skirts and layers of black velvet (as was the style) would have been impractical for Dickinson, and would have “interfered with her connection to the ground, the earth,” our tour guide told us. So the white dress was a practical dress that could be easily bleached clean, not some symbolic testimony to virginity, as my Freudian English professor had indicated. This is my kind of poet!

When her poems were published, they were heavily edited to make them more conventional. The copy of selected poems I have is the edited “improved” version of her poetry, not the authentic poems they way she wrote them – full of dashes, alternate word choices and non-standard rhyming schemes. Reading her poetry as she wrote is a very different experience – the poems are more demanding and urgent.

Unlike many other old house tours, the focus was not on the stuff in the house. When we visited the Adams National Park, we spent more time learning about the artifacts in the kitchen than the people who lived there. (“See this kids? This is what they used to make toast!) While the tour touched on some of the significant items in the house – her desk, her bureau, the library – the focus was always on the poet and her work. Any mention of the home’s décor was to give insight on how the environment of the home gave rise to Emily’s personality and intellect. The house was getting some rehab work done, and our guide mentioned that it was going to be restored to better reflect how it looked when the Dickinsons lived there. “Go next door (to Evergreens, her brother’s home) to see full on Vampire,” our guide said, referring to the dark, ornate style of the home. One restoration will be the addition of the small greenhouse in which Emily spent hours gardening. The restorations also have led to a discovery – when working on the floor in Emily’s room, they found wear patterns showing the location of her desk, bed and how she paced at night. Harvard has her original desk & bureau, but the replicas help one imagine the environment in which she worked.

This museum helped me connect with Emily Dickinson and her poetry in a way my English major never did. Maybe it was my professor, or maybe I wasn’t ready to appreciate her poetry when I first read it. Our visit has me reading a little poetry again and helped me appreciate one of the “Fathers” of American Literature.