A life as poetic as her words

The reclusive life of Emily Dickinson, the great hidden poet of the 19th century, still attracts readers' fascination almost as much as her poetry. People wonder about her life today as they read her work and question the relationship between the two.

"She was quite reclusive for most of the latter part of her life. We don't know why," said Cindy Dickinson, who is the director of programming and interpretation for the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst -- and no relation to the famous poet.

Emily Dickinson never explained her unusual life choices in either her letters or a journal, according to Dickinson, who will be the guest speaker at Plymouth Library Monday at 7 p.m. in connection with the library's intensive six -week workshop on Dickinson's poetry.

The workshop is led by Chuck Harper, a member of the Tidepool Poets, a local writing and publishing group. The workshop has been focusing on her treatment of such themes as love and friendship, death and immortality, faith and doubt, vocation and work, and autonomy and community.

Those themes are woven throughout the work of Emily Dickinson, who spent almost her entire life (1830-1886 ) in her Amherst home, had close relationships with members of her family and her brother's family (who lived next door), remained single, and did little in the way of socializing of any sort.

Mostly she confronted the central facts of existence -- birth, death, and the passing of time -- with few distractions, and put her conclusions in verse.

"She saw herself as a poet, that was her vocation," Dickinson said, even though her poetry was almost completely unpublished in her lifetime. After her death almost 2,000 poems were found in her bedroom as "fair copies," in a state of readiness for publication. Some of the poems had been grouped and sewn together in small chapbook form, an arrangement some scholars describe as "private publication."

Her solitude allowed her to devote her life to poetry, Dickinson pointed out, and comfortable family circumstances allowed her to stay at home without pressure to marry. That homebound inwardness and contemplation of life's mysteries led to much-studied poems such as the eerie "Because I could not stop for Death," a poem in which she observes she has put away "my labor, and my leisure too, for his (Death's) civility."

Other mysteries about her personal life continue to draw attention.

"She never married," Dickinson said. "There's been a lot of speculation about her romantic life." It often focuses on a figure she called "my master," whose identity scholars have been unable to establish beyond dispute, and on "the judge," an Amherst College classmate of her father's who was a regular visitor and may have proposed marriage to her.

Scholars are also studying the relation of Emily Dickinson's poems to events of her time, such as the Civil War. Unlike America's other great 19th -century poet, Walt Whitman, who wrote famous poems about Lincoln, Emily Dickinson does not mention contemporary events by name. Her themes -- nature, religion, God, death -- are timeless, but some argue that events such as the Civil War influenced her work.

Cindy Dickinson, whose background combines the study of both literature and museum curating, graduated from the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture at the University of Delaware. She has worked for the museum since 1996.

Located on three acres on Main Street, the Dickinson museum consists of two houses, Homestead (where the poet lived), and The Evergreens (where her brother lived), owned by Amherst College.

Living in a time when transportation was onerous and news traveled slowly, Emily Dickinson imagined Death arriving in a horse and buggy: "The carriage held but just ourselves/ And Immortality." People today can learn more about Dickinson's journey, and perhaps their own, through the Dickinson museum's website, emilydickinsonmuseum.org.

Robert Knox can be contacted at rc.knox@gmail.com.