A few days ago I drove to Amherst to visit the Emily Dickinson Homestead on Main Street. (And has an American poet ever lived less on Main Street and more within his or her own imagination? I doubt it. Poe, maybe.) The house was built in 1813 by Samuel Fowler Dickinson, Emily’s grandfather. After passing out of the family when Emily was nine, it was repurchased by Edward Dickinson, Emily’s father, in 1855. Two years before moving back to the house on Main Street, and upon hearing that her brother Austin had taken up verse-writing, the 23-year-old Emily wrote her brother a letter:
Now Brother Pegasus, I’ll tell you what it is — I’ve been in the habit myself of writing some few things, and it rather appears to me that you’re getting away my patent, so you’d better be somewhat careful, or I’ll call the police!
No police officer was ever summoned. Austin became a lawyer and an Amherst College luminary, like his father and his grandfather. Emily became Emily Dickinson.
From her second-story bedroom, Emily would lower baskets of gingerbread to children waiting below. She would also write (and then bind in small fascicles) poems that we now refer to by their first lines: “The Brain — is wider than the Sky,” “Wild Nights — Wild Nights!,” “After great pain, a formal feeling comes,” “Much Madness is divinest Sense.” Her room contained a small single bed, a wash basin, and a Ben Franklin stove. She asked her younger sister Lavinia to burn her correspondence upon her death; Vinnie did so.
The nearly 1800 poems, of course, survived; Vinnie became their champion. I’m looking at various versions now — some in The Complete Poems (edited by Thomas H. Johnson), some in assorted museum handouts, some in The Hand of the Poet (edited by Rodney Phillips). The last is the most interesting: Dickinson’s handwriting — the extravagantly capped capital “T”s, the curlicued lower-case “o”s — must offer some insight into her character. But what? I haven’t a clue.
All of these books belonged to Amy Clampitt, in whose house I’m staying. I’ve examined Amy’s nearly illegible handwriting for similar insights. I’ve also puzzled over her system of classification. In her copy of Dickinson’s Complete Poems, she scrawls various words in the margins: “Carnage,” “Infinitude,” “Light,” “Pain,” “Doubt,” “Love,” “Snow.” I understand the impulse: I read all of Dickinson’s verse a year ago, marking every poem that mentioned summer. (I was teaching a class at the University of Washington called “‘Twas Here My Summer Paused: Six Classics Considered.” Dickinson gave the class its title and its best image: “Go manacle your icicle / Against your Tropic Bride.”) But Amy’s annotations appear more urgent than my idle summer markings. “Blasphemy,” she writes, in the margins of Dickinson’s “So well that I can live without.” On other pages: “Distance,” “Withdrawal,” “Scorn.”
I also have Amy’s copy of Richard B. Sewall’s The Life of Emily Dickinson within reach. The back page is full of notes I can’t make out; in the front I find a scrap of paper that reads, “Amy: I’ll come back for my jacket + umbrella at 4:15. Richard.” Were the jacket and umbrella ever retrieved? And who is this Richard? The book’s author, perhaps? And at what point will this note slip out of the book and into the trash? Will it matter? Does anything?
The fact that Dickinson’s poems survived at all is a much-noted miracle. “This is my letter to the World,” she wrote, in her creative frenzy of 1862. But she never sent the letter. Postage rates, remember, went up this week.
