Editor’s Note: This is the second column in a series of four.

Many of us live in the same town most or all of our lives, but some people live in the same home always. This is true of the enigmatic genius Emily Dickinson who lived almost her entire life in this great home called The Homestead on Main Street in Amherst, Massachusetts. From any view, the estate is prepossessing. It commands the site and demands respect. Dickinson’s beloved brother and her father were prominent attorneys in town. The home reflects their professional and social status. More though, this place evokes a sense of respect for nature, gardens, the outdoors, a communion with the heavens. Surely it was muse for the great poet Dickinson, now regarded – and rightly so – as one of the greatest poets in any language.

In her lifetime, however, Dickinson was disregarded as an odd old maid who wrote some 1,800 oblique poems no one quite understood. She kept them tied with string and ribbon in little round bundles. She submitted a few, and two were published in her lifetime, but the others were rejected, so Dickinson showed them only to a chosen few, including her dear brother Austin, his wife Sue, and her beloved sister Lavinia. Even then, most of the 1,800 poems remained unread and undiscovered until her death in 1886 at the age of 56.

One must wonder if she would have written poetry at all had she lived in another age where women went to college and entered professions worthy of their ambitions. Clearly she had a monumental intelligence, philosophical and inquiring in type. Perhaps she would have become a professor of history or literature, a doctor, an attorney like her father and brother. But of course, it was the 19th century, and a woman’s place was definitely in the home. Emily seemed quite content with that. She spent her life caring for her chronically ill mother (whose condition is unclear, perhaps a mental disorder of some kind), playing the adoring aunt to her nephews and nieces next door for whom she baked specialties weekly, and caring for her father until he died.

Dickinson’s choice to stay outside “society” has been regarded as her choice to be some kind of “recluse,” but I think that is a misnomer. “The soul selects her own society, then shuts the door” she wrote in poem number 303. This was a serious woman though one of great humor and tenderness, who felt no kinship with the doings of society or most women her age. She selected her own society, and that meant she stayed home with her family, those she loved and trusted with all her heart in a great home filled with light and surrounded by gardens she and her father built and tended. This was a choice by a genius who required exactly that. To infer other is to misunderstand her.

After all I had heard and read about Dickinson during college and as a teacher, even I was surprised to find this grand house, a mansion of sorts, on a hill surveying 280 Main St. in Amherst. Built by her grandfather in 1813, it was the place where she was born and died, though there was a brief interim when the house was lost due to bankruptcy. It’s a mighty place, one designed for people who keep themselves apart of their own choosing. Brother Austin built a home next door, through the arbor walk, where he and Sue raised four children, one who died in childhood. Lavinia too remained unmarried and home all her life. One must infer then that this insular family was all they needed, tightly bonded and loving to one another all their lives.

Dickinson had a serious interest in metaphysics and botany, so much so that her father built her a conservatory and an herbarium. She grew and nurtured, picked and dried numerous plants and flowers in all seasons (she had a collection of 400 dried flowers with annotations). Her poems are filled with references to the natural world, and through those references and images she makes leaps of inference about the universe, God and being. This qualifies her as a member of the Transcendentalist writers though she has never been so identified. Dickinson’s perpetual struggle to come to terms with living and dying, God and sin and mercy, are existential; her use of the natural world to reflect God and universal truths is transcendental. Thus she is both, and a rebel at that, breaking rules of punctuation and using slant rhyme.

Here is an example where she does that in a little poem about pansies also known as heart’s ease: “Dear – Old fashioned, little flower! Eden is old fashioned, too! Birds are antiquated fellows! Heaven does not change her blue. Nor will I, the little Heart’s Ease – Ever be induced to do!” (poem 167). Notice the exclamation marks, which lend a sing-song quality of hyperbole, and the words which on first glance read simple, almost childlike. On subsequent readings, however, the subtext begins to emerge and with it some kind of remarkable insight into sorrow and mercy, into the reliability of Heaven and the metaphor of Eden.

Outside the back porch lay a fragrant garden of herbs, most notably the lovely and edible nasturtium, one of Dickinson’s favorite plants. It blooms there today in the spot where she planted it 150 years ago or more.

What the great poet had here at Homestead was a solitude so great – literally and figuratively – from the cares of the outside world that she heard her muse clearly, daily, and wrote works of literature so mighty they still shake us to the core when we read them, when we really hear them. I am particularly drawn to her poems about death and grief, as I find they offer structure and succor to times awash with darkness.

Before I left Amherst on an August morning so lovely it seemed magical – the whole town splayed in a heavenly golden light – I pulled up to the house and sat in my car alone. It was 7 a.m. It might have been 1850 still. I had the street to myself, and my view of the eastside of the house where Dickinson’s room sits on the second floor. “There’s a certain slant of light,” she writes in poem 327, When it comes, the Landscape listens Shadows hold their breath When it goes, ’tis like the Distance On the look of Death.” The shadows held their breath that morning.

Those lines and others played in my head. The morning light streamed in like balm.

To be continued …