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Tag: Emily Dickinson

  • Emily Dickinson, Set to New Music, Kills at Carnegie Hall

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    Perhaps a Carnegie Hall archivist has recorded how often an evening-long work of brand-new chamber music, performed in the big auditorium, has prompted a standing ovation, but I would guess almost never. I was afraid that Kevin Puts’s Emily — No Prisoner Be, for mezzo-soprano and string trio, would get swallowed up in the hall’s expanse. The sight of microphones increased my skepticism, because amplification can only help so much if the music is too small or the space too big. I didn’t need to worry: As soon as the first notes sounded, it became clear that Emily is both intimate and symphonic. And mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, the star whose name alone was enough to fill the house on February 19, skipped back and forth across that expressive chasm with ease, accompanied by the string trio Time for Three.

    Puts’s cycle of two dozen Emily Dickinson songs, plus a couple of interludes, begins with “They Shut me Up in Prose,” a poem whose first four words evoke rage and resistance against a darkly tyrannical force.

    They shut me up in Prose —

    As when a little Girl

    They put me in the Closet —

    Because they liked me “still” —

    Stillness is imprisonment, but confinement is pointless against the immense, liberating force of Dickinson’s poetic mind. She has only to think it, and, “easy as a Star,” she can “look down upon Captivity — And laugh.” It’s a powerful statement of intellectual and artistic freedom, and Puts prepares it with a furious trembling of strings, like the buzzing bees that populate other Dickinson poems. DiDonato enters with a pop-song-worthy hook, and the players double as vocalists, surrounding the tune with a halo of close harmony. But it takes less than a minute for her voice, like the poet’s restless mind, to take flight and spin off into the heavens.

    The second song is an introvert’s anthem, “I Was the Slightest in the House,” and Puts sets it as a hushed reflection, almost a diary entry in musical form. DiDonato has one of the opera world’s great murmurs, a soft, warm filament of sound that stays perfectly clear down to the lowest reach of her register and the quietest pianissimo until it simply disappears. When this diva with a big personality, who makes her living lobbing arias to the upper balconies of an overscale opera house, utters the words “ I could not bear to live—aloud— / The Racket shamed me so—” you believe without hesitation that she is a lover of quietude.

    Those first two numbers stake out the territory for the rest of the work, which lasts about 75 minutes and lingers on many shades of human experience and musical reference: the Straussian exuberance of “I Dwell in Possibility,” the ravishing depressiveness of “I Felt a Funeral in My Brain,” the Sondheimian wryness of (and millinery references) of “I Tie My Hat – I Crease My Shawl.” That makes Emily sound like a derivative pastiche, though, and it’s not, because Puts’s prosody and melodic gift both keep it fresh.

    He has a knack for translating Dickinson’s rhythms into music. Her mixture of plain New England speech and jerky hesitations, of the vernacular and the gnomic, have made her abidingly popular with American composers, who have churned out thousands of settings. But those qualities rarely fit a composer’s style as well as they do Puts’s. His score slips back and forth between hymnlike simplicity and operatic virtuosity. It feels like you could learn to sing along, but you almost certainly can’t.

    If Dickinson has a fine collaborator in Puts, the composer has equal affinity with the performers. He wrote the role of Virginia Woolf in his opera The Hours for DiDonato, and the triple concerto Contact for Time for Three. Inevitably, their strengths and quirks seeped into the composer’s head so that the musicians helped shape the score instead of just carrying out its instructions.

    The director, Andrew Staples, placed the performers on a stage within a stage, a stylized version of Dickinson’s bedroom in Amherst, Massachusetts with sheer curtains billowing and lighting that traces the bright and darkling recesses of the soul. The production works, mostly because DiDonato and Time for Three all know how to use it, moving without awkwardness, bringing the audience closer to the music instead of creating a distracting barrier. For an encore, DiDonato conscripted the audience into singing the lilting refrain of the final song, “No Prisoner Be,” while the musicians gradually fell silent. This is your music, now, she was saying: Cherish it.

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    Justin Davidson

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  • Rachel Ruysch’s Tirade of Beauty at Boston’s MFA

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    Rachel Ruysch, Posy of Flowers with a Beetle on a Stone Ledge, 1741. Oil on canvas. Courtesy the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

    Craving ever new varieties in nature for experimentation, Darwin wrote to his good friend and botanist, Joseph Hooker, “I have a passion to grow orchid seeds…for love of Heaven favour my madness & have some lichens or mosses scraped off & sent me. I am a gambler & love a wild experiment.” It seems that Darwin was not the only one to crave exotic flowers. Three centuries earlier, the Dutch were hot on the trail to expand their imperial power by collecting exotic specimens from all over the world. The Dutch East India Company was established in 1602 and the West East India Company in 1621, enabling the empire’s expansion through their maritime fleet. By using enslaved labor, they amassed huge collections of flowers, insects, reptiles and birds from North and South America, Africa, Australia, India and even Borneo. The difficulty in transporting all of these delicate specimens across vast oceans was extreme. There were rats on board ships, and radical changes of temperature going from the tropics to frigid Europe. The Dutch greenhouses on Cape Horn were a stopover for the exotics, before the last treacherous sail home. Cape Horn has the deadliest seas on Earth.

    During the 1600s in the Netherlands, hundreds of devoted scientists and artists documented these discoveries. One of the most famous was the painter Rachel Ruysch. Her father, Frederik Ruysch, a renowned collector and artist, was known for his anatomical, zoological and botanical specimens, as well as his embalming technique. This was Rachel’s early laboratory until she went on to study painting, becoming the highest-paid painter in the Netherlands, earning more money than Rembrandt.

    Born in 1664, she painted for seven decades, dying in 1750 at the age of 86. She painted 185 known works (possibly 250). She was lauded during her time, internationally famous and the subject of poems. She painted from the age of 15 and well into her 80s. Lest we forget, Ruysch also had ten children. None of the poems mentions that.

    And her paintings are downright gorgeous. The vitality of her work, the meticulous accuracy, the fullness of color and the enchanting compositions are a wonder to behold. She painted nature in all its blooming, populated with exotic flowers, fruits, insects, reptiles, moths and butterflies. The paintings are rich in vibrant color, deeply shaded and with exact anatomical precision. She recorded for the ages flora and fauna, insects and reptiles, that may now already be extinct or on their way to extinction.

    An oil painting depicts a woman artist, believed to be Rachel Ruysch, seated at a table with a palette and brushes as she delicately arranges a flower beside an open botanical book, emphasizing her dual role as painter and scientific observer.An oil painting depicts a woman artist, believed to be Rachel Ruysch, seated at a table with a palette and brushes as she delicately arranges a flower beside an open botanical book, emphasizing her dual role as painter and scientific observer.
    Michiel van Musscher, Rachel Ruysch, 1692. Oil on canvas. Courtesy the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

    The MFA in Boston is displaying 35 of Ruysch’s paintings in all their glory in “Rachel Ruysch: Artist, Naturalist, and Pioneer.” In the floral still lifes, she focuses not just on the blooms but also on the creatures that populated the flowers. From 1686, Forest Recess with Flowers, the blooms are framed in loping, draping milk thistle leaves, almost like reptilian skin. A curling mushroom below, a frog, snail, moths, tree trunk, the clay forest floor—these details lift her far beyond a flower painter into a deep and astute scientific observer.

    In 1714, she paints a still life with 25 species from 15 botanical families of flowers and fruit. Still Life with Fruits and Flowers displays a cacophony of pomegranates, peaches, corn, wheat, grapes, squash, pumpkin, along with tulips, peonies, lizard, butterflies and moths. You wonder how long it took her to paint these bounties before decay set in. Everything is fresh, glistening, delicious, fragrant—alive. A sumptuous, irresistible feast, joining the hungry reptiles and insects.

    She doesn’t stop there. In 1735, Still Life of Exotic Flowers on a Marble Ledge, she paints 36 species from around the world. Represented are flowers native to North and South America, South Africa, the Caribbean, East and Southeast Asia. She includes in her many paintings 17 species of diurnal butterflies (active during the day), 24 species of moths, spiders and many species of bee beetles, including the mango longhorn beetle from South America. There are lizards and birds and egg shells, and many plants in the cactus family. A painting technique prevalent in nature paintings during her early career was lepidochromy. Butterfly wings were pressed into the wet paint for further authenticity. Ruysch often placed exotic and native animals, butterflies and flowers together—always with an astute eye for composition.

    A densely detailed still life painting shows an overflowing arrangement of flowers, fruits, and plants—such as tulips, peonies, grapes, peaches, and pomegranates—intermixed with insects and small animals, illustrating the abundance and scientific precision characteristic of Rachel Ruysch’s work.A densely detailed still life painting shows an overflowing arrangement of flowers, fruits, and plants—such as tulips, peonies, grapes, peaches, and pomegranates—intermixed with insects and small animals, illustrating the abundance and scientific precision characteristic of Rachel Ruysch’s work.
    Rachel Ruysch, Still Life with Fruits and Flowers, 1714. Oil on canvas. © Kunstsammlungen und Museen Augsburg / Photo: Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Nicole Wilhelms / Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

    She also included frogs and toads. One, Surinam toad (Pipa pipa), gets a portrait all to herself. The entire painting is dark green and brown, hard to see. Does it need cleaning? The toad is accompanied nearby with a specimen in a glass jar, better to see the indentations in her back where the male leaves his sperm. The eggs incubate in these small craters on her back until they hatch, fully formed.

    The curator, Anna Knaap, has organized the exhibit into six luxurious sections, highlighted against sumptuously painted dark, rich burgundy and deep green walls. In the sections are specimens in glass jars of reptiles, cases of pinned butterflies and moths, maps of the empire, botanical drawings, as well as paintings by her sister Anna Ruysch and many other Dutch painters of that time. The plant and insect specimens are from Harvard University’s Herbarium and Museum of Comparative Zoology.

    Ruysch’s last painting, Posy of Flowers with a Beetle on a Stone Ledge, 1741, is comparatively small with very few flowers. The bowl of the pink peony is flecked with dew and a bee. It is a tender painting and luminous. To see an exhibition including all three giants—Darwin, Ruysch and Emily Dickinson, another lover of botany and flowers—would be exciting. As Dickinson wrote in Flowers – Well – if anybody:

    Butterflies from St. Domingo
    Cruising round the purple line—
    Have a system of aesthetics—
    Far superior to mine.

    “Rachel Ruysch: Artist, Naturalist, and Pioneer” is at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, through December 7, 2025. An excellent, comprehensive, award-winning catalogue accompanies the exhibition.

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    Rachel Ruysch’s Tirade of Beauty at Boston’s MFA

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    Dian Parker

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  • Debbii Dawson Doesn’t Want To End Up Like Emily Dickinson

    Debbii Dawson Doesn’t Want To End Up Like Emily Dickinson

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    For her second EP, Debbie Dawson set herself a just about impossible task: figure out how to be human. Yet, the result, How To Be Human, doesn’t purport to have all the answers. Instead, it offers scenes and sentiments of a person simply trying to live in the world — torn between the comfort of solitude and the call of the unpredictable outside world.

    One of her major inspirations for the album is Emily Dickinson, she tells me. After grappling with her own reclusive tendencies, Dawson dug into Dickinson’s life and work. In the end, she has resolved not to end up like Dickinson. So she leaned away from her desire to isolate and into her need to create. And we, the audience. are so lucky to reap the benefits.

    How To Be Human follows her 2023 debut EP, Learning, a folk-tinged proclamation of her utterly unique singer-songwriter voice. The songs convey the stumbling first-steps of establishing one’s own personhood, filled with musings that are raw and never pedantic. Although the title was exploratory the songs hold clear truths about lessons learned. Dawson’s wisdom is inherited from legendary country songwriters like Johnny Cash and Patsy Cline while her ear for melody was honed by hymns and sharpened by classical music. The result is 70s-inspired folk-pop with songs fit for a cinescape. They’re songs of yearning, but also songs for dancing around your bedroom just to remind you that you’re alive.

    Her eclectic influences get even more surprising as she tells me about her writing process — sometimes humming over dishes, sometimes inspired by art she’s consuming. Yes, the Dickinson, but also movies like
    Shrek. You’ve heard of a wall of sound? Dawson combines her unique musical background, diverse influences, and personal identities to create a tapestry of sound that cocoons its listener and welcomes them into her world.

    How To Be Human doesn’t feel like a departure from Learning but a continuation, filled with the frenetic energy of someone who’s been still too long and is yearning for a life beyond their bubble. It’s the pressure, the build-up of energy before the release — which I hope we’ll get to experience in Dawson’s next project.

    It’s thanks to this new energy, which manifests in disco-tinged production and anthemic synths, that we see a different side of Dawson as a vocalist, producer, and artist. The lyrics retain their tight intimacy but this nascent sound rattles alongside Dawson’s vibrato in satisfying chord progressions and soaring melodies.

    Debbii DawsonRCA

    When Dawson speaks, her answers come like her lyrics: concise and precise, but not at the expense of vulnerability. She reflects on themes like solitude, belonging, and multiplicity in her life and her music with specificity
    and universality. She doesn’t fall into cliches — she’s currently listening to Chinese classical music in her spare time, so nothing about her is run-of-the-mill — while also speaking to themes of connection and relatability.

    Her groundedness is part of what makes her compelling as an artist, despite her success. She signed to RCA Records in April, joined Orville Peck on part of his Stampede North American Tour, and is slated for festival dates and a slot supporting Suki Waterhouse in September.

    Dawson let us in to talk about her EPs, her recent collaboration with Orville Peck, and what’s coming next.

    POPDUST: First of all, congrats on the new EP. How are you feeling about it being out in the world?

    Debbii Dawson: I’m relieved to have it off my hands. I started some of them, like, a year ago, some of them at the same time as the last EP was being written. It was just about deciding what stories I wanted to tell when. And the sound, too.

    POPDUST: The sound really shifts from the first EP to this one. Learning was more folk-inspired, but How To Be Human sounds like ABBA meets Kasey Musgraves. Can you talk through the choices that you were making on both and why you gravitated to this new sound?

    Debbii Dawson: When I was trying to find my sound when I first started doing music, I thought I had to pick one lane so as not to confuse people. A lot of that was me actually trying to come to terms with my own identity. And until I did that, the sound didn’t come. So I had to be comfortable being a person in multiple worlds — being a first generation American, being a person of color, growing up in a white town. I had a lot of things to deal with internally. Once I accepted that, the sound came and I realized I didn’t have to pick parts of myself. I could do more than one thing at a time and people would be fine with it.

    POPDUST: How did those different parts of your identity impact you as a musician?

    Debbii Dawson: Being South Asian, I had a different cultural upbringing and realities than my peers, so my version of what it means to be an American looks different from someone else. Even with other South Asians, it varies so much between us. Musically, I also had so many influences. I grew up with old country music like Johnny Cash and Patsy Cline because that’s the western music my parents, who are immigrants, had access to. And then I grew up listening to a lot of hymns and classical music. And I think you can hear all of those present in the stuff I make. And, of course, older songs like ABBA and later, QUEEN, and really amazing musicians really resonated with me.

    POPDUST: When did you start picking out the music that you were listening to, and what were you gravitating to?

    Debbii Dawson: I had more of a religious upbringing, so I wasn’t exposed to music a lot of other kids my age were. So I started listening to music for myself probably in middle school. I listened to Coldplay for the first time, and John Lennon, and a lot of Muse. And because I loved classical music too, it was really cool how these people could take from their influences, like blues influences — and I know Coldplay had a lot of influence from hymns as well — and see them make something palatable for people.

    POPDUST: In the first EP, it feels like you’re on the outside looking in, but then the second EP is trying to bring in everyone else on the inside. What themes do you gravitate to when you write?

    Debbii Dawson: These EPs were really inspired by my own story and by Emily Dickinson, actually. She’s an American poet, who was a recluse and wrote all these amazing pieces of poetry and wasn’t published until after she died. I also have very reclusive tendencies. There was a period of time in my life where I kind of just retreated from the world and was kind of over it, and didn’t leave home for a while — and this is all pre-pandemic. Around this time I started writing as well and reading Emily Dickinson’s poems, and thinking about her life. I was like, I don’t know if I want to end up the way she did. So I decided I could change the ending if I wanted to, so her story really inspired me. So yeah, the last two EPs are written from the perspective of a recluse, and, like you mentioned, from the outside looking in, and also from the inside looking out, and maybe reasons that led that person to that place, and reasons for leaving and trying to change their situation.

    POPDUST: What drew you to songwriting?

    Debbii Dawson: I wrote poetry when I was a child. I didn’t start writing songs seriously until maybe eight years ago. I’m not the most expressive person, so it was a way for me to process thoughts and feelings privately. Then it just turned into this thing and I’ve been working on it since. It can be really scary. Songwriting is really therapeutic, but when it’s done publicly, it’s a little invasive. So it’s kind of scary. For me personally, it’s something I feel like I have to do. I have to get it off my chest. Like I said, I’m not the most expressive person, and so this is the only way I know how to do it. It’s really helpful, getting messages from people who listen to my music saying how much it impacts them, too. knowing I can write some words down and have an impact on someone is really, really special.

    POPDUST: I’m sure your songwriting has changed in the past eight years, but do you think that it’s changed in the past few years between the two EPs?

    Debbii Dawson: How To Be Human was done over a period of about a year, so it was a longer amount of time. I think “Solitude” and “Eulogy for Nobody” were written the same day. I wrote “Eulogy for Nobody” — super depressing song — on my floor in my room, and brought that into a session I had a couple of days later. I didn’t know if I wanted to work on that one or “Solitude,” which I had the riff for. And people I was with were like, Let’s do both.

    And this one, I produced. I did production on a song last time, but it’s just a guitar. But this one, I did a little bit more intense production, so it was fun to kind of dive into that. And I started “Solitude” last year, but up until a couple days before I turned it in, I was tweaking and adding arrangements at the very last minute. So it was a very fluid process. My collaborators are great, open minded people, creative people like super fun to work with.

    POPDUST: How have the people you’ve collaborated with and worked with stretched you or challenged your own instincts?

    Debbii Dawson: They’re so good at what they do. I love that they make me feel comfortable to create, which is super important in the creative process. I think I can be a perfectionist and they help me realize things don’t need to be perfect. There’s a good perfectionism and bad perfectionism. And they’re helping me with that. And then it’s always really refreshing to hear other perspectives and other angles on how people approach things.

    During the first EP, I was also more timid in rooms. I would go into the studio and maybe there’s a couple of other people in there too, and I was more shy. It takes me a minute to warm up to strangers, and so I’m still working on it, but I’m more comfortable being vocal about what I want to say, how I want to say it, if I don’t like something. Having more confidence this time around, made all the difference.

    POPDUST: You collaborated with Orville Peck for his album Stampede. How does collaboration impact sound when you’re blending your sound and your style with someone else’s?

    Debbii Dawson: With Orville, we wrote the song together. Before going into the studio to write with him, I was thinking about what through lines we had. He’s this amazing, fabulous cowboy. And I love the older country songs I mentioned, so those old country duets seemed like such a great connection. Finding the connectors between both of us, I think, allows two different people to still authentically be themselves, without one having to change the other. And I got to do a little tour with him which was so great. His fans are so welcoming and warm.

    Listen to “Back At Your Door” by Orville Peck and Debbii Dawson here:

    POPDUST: Connecting to people and connecting to fans is so special. How do you keep that alive on stage?

    Debbii Dawson: It’s a different connection. I was super shy. I didn’t know if I could perform live. I wanted to throw up thinking about it, but I remember doing my first show last year and realizing that I really loved it, and it was different when people are connecting with the music. It’s not about me standing and having people look at me — it’s about what I’m bringing to them. It’s like, here look at this thing. So it’s been nice to connect with people in that way. It’s not me and listeners connecting, but me, the listeners, and the music. So it’s less scary.

    POPDUST: So you’ve built this community. Was there any sort of trepidation about releasing this new EP with a new sound, about how people would receive it?

    Debbii Dawson: Yeah, that’s always there. I want people to like my music but you never know. But I also make music because I get uncomfortable if I don’t do it. So there’s always a hope that as long as it’s true to who I am — and if anyone else makes music, if it’s true to who you are — it’ll be easier to accept if it’s new.

    POPDUST: What goes into putting together each EP and deciding on the direction it goes?

    Debbii Dawson: I try to be cohesive. I can be a little chaotic and scattered, so I try my best to find the through line of things. I’m also a really big gut feeling person, so I try to lean into that as well. I really value the wisdom of my peers and my team. So I’ll pick people’s brains and then sit by myself for a while and chew on it. But sometimes it’s so random. Like “Happy World” was actually super inspired by Shrek.

    POPDUST: No way. The “Holding Out for a Hero” in Shrek 2?

    Debbii Dawson: No, it was when Shrek and Donkey enter Duloc and those puppets are singing the “Welcome to Duloc” song. I wanted to write a song that felt like that. Like it’s this perfect place, but something’s not quite right here. So you never know where it’s coming from.

    POPDUST: Do you have any favorite songs of all the music you’ve worked on?

    Debbii Dawson: I love “Happy World.” That was so fun to make. “Downer” was also really fun to make. I remember we all couldn’t stop smiling when we were recording that in the studio. “Solitude,” too is just a super fun song. Yeah, so many favorite children.

    POPDUST: It’s a good sign, when it’s impossible to pick. What do you hope people take from this EP — and from your music in general?

    Debbii Dawson: I hope that when people listen to my music, they know that they’re not alone and what they’re feeling or experiencing — or if they were people like me who grew up in a marginalized community — that they feel like they have somewhere to belong. And I hope that it stretches them creatively, and they know that anything is possible.That there’s no limits to what they want to create and how they want to do it.

    POPDUST: You said you’re writing. What’s coming next? What can we expect down the line?

    Debbii Dawson: I like to keep people on their toes. I think you can expect, without saying too much, more color. Yeah, more color.

    Listen to How To Be Human here:

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    LKC

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  • For Emily Dickinson’s Birthday, Visit Her New England Home

    For Emily Dickinson’s Birthday, Visit Her New England Home

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    Emily Dickinson was born December 10, 1830; the coming anniversary will mark her 193rd birthday. Few 19th century women have had her staying power. Little known during her life, she is regarded as one of the greatest figures of American letters who wrote 1,800 poems that continue to hold our attention and evoke our admiration.

    Now the house she lived in looks again as it did when she was alive.

    “Seventy percent of the interior now is original to the 19th century,” says Emily Dickinson Museum Executive Director Jane Wald. “The rest is filled in with pieces from the Apple TV show.”

    Emily Dickinson’s poetic style of writing was concise and exacting. Perhaps because she eschewed extraneous words, used short lines, slanted rhyme, ambiguous meanings and eccentric punctuation, her poems are still being interpreted and discussed today. They are brilliant examples of minimalism created long before minimalism existed. Her themes include nature, flowers and gardens, relationships, the divine and mortality. Brought up during America’s Second Great Awakening, a time of enthusiastic religious revivals, she was alone among her family members and friends for refusing to profess a Christian conversion. Yet many of her poems reflect a preoccupation with the teachings of Jesus Christ and, in fact, many are addressed to him. She never married and spend much of her life as a recluse, but her poems display a personal knowledge of romantic and carnal love. Through movies, plays, television shows and books we become ever more fascinated with the woman who wore white; who, after her twenties, almost never left her home or even her room; who was famous as a gifted baker and gardener during her lifetime; whose family did not know the extent of her poetic talent and ambition; who became a myth almost immediately after her death in 1886.

    Hers was a prominent family in Amherst, Massachusetts and, befitting their stature, lived in a grand brick Federal house built in 1813. When Emily’s father bought the house in 1855, he had achieved financial prosperity after a period of persistent money troubles. In 1865, he built an Italianate house, The Evergreens, next door to the Dickinson Homestead as a wedding gift for Emily’s brother, Austin, and his wife Susan. Today the two substantial historic houses comprise the Emily Dickinson Museum. Prominently sited on Main Street a half block from the center of town, they are still a persuasive representation of the role of the Dickinson family in 19thcentury Amherst.

    To walk through the high-ceilinged rooms of The Homestead today is to feel and see the world Emily Dickinson inhabited. When the house became a museum open to the public in 2003, occupants had dropped ceilings, installed bathrooms, put up new wallpaper and paint, covered the original flooring with linoleum and other new materials and converted part of the attic to living space. An ambitious project aimed at making the house look as it did during Dickinson’s lifetime has removed a bathroom and new stairs, restored or recreated hardwood flooring and, following careful paint, fabric and wallpaper analysis, put up new wall coverings, paint, floor coverings and window treatments.

    “I thought it was important to change the interior to be more like it was during Emily’s lifetime,” says Jane Wald. “It is a subtle reinforcement of how this poet was moving through space. Without the physicality of her place, it is more difficult to know how her poetry is formed.”

    In Emily’s room, the wallpapered walls wear sprigs of pink flowers. The floor is covered with rush matting and, in front of a window, stands a small writing desk. A mannequin wears a replica of the single white cotton dress of Emily’s that survives; the original is at the Amherst Historical Society. The room’s simplicity and intimacy evokes the spirit of a woman who, while mostly unpublished and unknown during her lifetime, was acknowledged by her siblings as the family’s intellectual and deep thinker.

    “We are making the Emily Dickinson Museum a center for supporting work inspired by her,” says Wald. “We want to amplify her revolutionary poetic voice from her home.”

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    Regina Cole, Contributor

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