Home alone with the ghost of Emily Dickinson

Uncanny visit to the poet’s hometurned-museum

AMHERST, MASS. •Doesit matter where a writer lived? Can creativity and inspiration insinuate themselves into a physical space, somehow becoming part of the atmosphere? Do you believe in ghosts?

It’s impossible not to think about these things when you visit the Emily Dickinson Museum, which includes the house where Dickinson spent most of her outwardly uneventful life, her fierce mind raging away, quietly producing her profound and enigmatic poetry. Perhaps more than most writers, Dickinson is closely associated with one spot. You can’t really separate the poet from the house.

On a recent afternoon, I found myself all alone in Dickinson’s bedroom, having paid $100 for the chance to spend an hour there. I’d arrived by train and cab from New York, my nerves a little jangly. And now here I was, in a place redolent of a longago past, trying to corral my thoughts, my pencil poised over my notebook.

Because Dickinson spent so much time and was so productive here, the room has resonance for scholars and lovers of her poetry. Several dozen people have worked (or perhaps just sat) alone in it for an hour or two since July, when the museum began offering the private visits, said Brooke Steinhauser, the program director. They tend to arrive with a great passion for the poet and to leave with a new understanding of her place in their lives.

“I wanted to see what it would be like to spend some time in that room,” said Lanette Ward, 70, a retired English teacher from Atlanta. She wrote there for two hours late one afternoon, as day turned to evening and a replica of one of Dickinson’s famous white dresses, displayed in the room, began to take on special significance.

“Oh, yes, I felt closer to her,” Ward said by phone. “It felt magical to me, like being in an Emily Dickinson high holy place.” She hadn’t planned to write anything in particular, but what emerged, she said, were the beginnings of “a story of magical realism, very Southern Gothic, something about the dress being animated and beginning to move.”

To prepare myself for the experience, I wandered through the house, which is being restored to the way it looked, more or less, when Dickinson lived there until her death in 1886. The bedroom is back to its old state, though several pieces of furniture, like the bureau and the tiny writing desk so important to Dickinson’s work, are reproductions. (The originals are owned by Harvard.) For some reason, Dickinson’s single bed, made of a lovely dark wood, seemed particularly poignant and evocative.

Snippets from Dickinson’s poems are scattered throughout the house, and I read a few — “A chilly Peace infests the Grass” and “I dwell in Possibility” — to get into the mood.

Pretty much everyone else had left the house, and I was alone on the second floor. The sound of people rustling downstairs began to recede along with the noises from outside. The light was changing, and already I was feeling different.

Even if you’re lucky enough to have a room of your own, as Virginia Woolf put it, and this applies as much to male as to female writers, there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to suppress the cacophony in your head. It’s hard to find a calm spot for clear thinking. Having left my bags with their comforting electronic devices in another room, all I had at my disposal were some pencils I’d borrowed from the museum office, a couple of Dickinson poems and my notebook.

I read a Dickinson poem aloud, in a murmur, trying to fall into its cadences and absorb its meaning. I closed my eyes. I was so tired.

What happened next also going to sound weird.

A calm came over me, and I was overtaken by a sharp distilled focus that expressed itself, bizarrely, in a compulsion to write. I did something I hadn’t done since elementary school, and never of my own accord: I began to compose a poem. What came out wasn’t very good, but it wasn’t terrible, and that wasn’t really the point anyway. The point was that it just poured out of me, this surge of emotion and language.

The thoughts spilled out in order and did not step over each other. I didn’t stop to think. I didn’t stop writing until Steinhauser came in an hour later and told me it was time to go. It felt thrilling. It felt uncanny. It felt as if no time had passed at all. is