Emily Dickinson, outlaw of Amherst

Holland Cutter, the New York Times art critic, tells all about his love for the other 19th century American poet containing multitudes:

But why do we so badly need to have this poet paired off with someone? Why do we need to make a failure in love — and because Dickinson was single, failure is always assumed — the explanation for her art? We don’t consider “Walden” or “Moby Dick” or “Leaves of Grass” the products of amorous psychopathology. Yet the notion lingers that Dickinson’s poetry was a disturbed response to some unfulfilled need, her retirement a symptom of sickness.

I never saw it that way. From the start I thought of her Homestead bedroom as an empowerment zone. She knew the work she wanted to do; there were serious odds against her doing it, social and personal. At some point she realized, emphatically, that she had to create a place of absolute concentration, where no distractions stood between her and her work, where no talk interfered with the new language she was inventing; where she could ignore the knock on the door, refuse the callers, control access . . .