Ten days ago, I was in Amherst in the Western Massachusetts hills where a blush was just beginning to tinge the trees. Soon something far more dramatic will overtake the place, as its most famous resident knew.

The name of it is “Autumn” —
The hue of it is blood —
An artery upon the hill
A vein along the road.

Emily Dickinson, of course, and I was there to see the house in which she spent most of her life. Though she never owned a home of her own, she had a roomand as Virginia Woolf suggested, that will do. It was well worth the effort to visit this sturdy, foursquare New England homestead, the garden where she tended flowers, vegetables and fruit trees, the kitchen where she baked her daily bread, the bedroom where she slept alone and wrote on a tiny table the poems that make her immortal.

A path away is the Italian Villa-style house of her brother and sister-in-law, also restored. The guided tour visits both and includes interesting facts, samples of her handwritten poems and their revisions, and a discussion of the preservation of the two buildings and their contents.

This was her little world, only slightly more circumscribed than any other never-married, Amherst spinster’s. And it was more than enough. The lyric poet’s raw materials — love and death, nature and time — are abundantly available in any time or place if one has the eyes to see, and sufficient skill and leisure to make something of them. Thoreau wryly remarked that he had “traveled a good deal in Concord,” and Dickinson found a universe to consider in Amherst.

Neighbors thought her a trifle odd, no doubt because her mind was busily unlike any other in the vicinity. Editors thought her verse irregular. She declined encouragement to publish, perhaps fearing they would have tried to “normalize” her work. Since she made it the way she wanted, she welcomed no meddling.

What was the problem? The same as always when something new appears. The poet and critic Randall Jarrell once expressed bemusement at older readers who wanted him to explain how to understand the new-fangled verse of the moderns. “You must be born again,” he thought. Her contemporaries didn’t get Emily, her posterity adores her. Like all the best American writers, as the critic Hugh Kenner once said, Emily Dickinson’s art was “a homemade world.”

In 1844, Emerson said the true poet “announces that which no one foretold,” they are seers and so far, he had looked “in vain for the poet whom I describe…We have yet had no genius in America… which knew the value of our incomparable materials.” Yet as he published that lament, two were alive who would fulfill his hope. Walt Whitman was just eleven years from self-publishing the first edition of “Leaves of Grass,” and Dickinson a mere 70 miles West of Concord was 14 and already scribbling what would amount to 1,800 poems by her death at 56 in 1886.

Whitman was large and contained multitudes, as he immodestly proclaimed. Emily was small and modest, but behind that facade was intelligence, wit, passion, a terse, Yankee astringency, an odd, almost Zen, gnomic sagacity. She told the truth, but told it slant, as she advised — in hymn stanzas, half rhymes or slant rhymes, omnipresent dashes and capitalized nouns. You don’t have to visit Emily’s home to know her, you only have to open her book to any page.

There you will find a deep faith, half Calvinist austerity, half ecstatic pantheism. “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church/ I keep it staying at Home/ With a Bobolink for a Chorister/ And an Orchard for a Dome.” You will also find a recluse more engaged with the world than most extroverts. Educated at a girl’s academy, the daughter of a lawyer and politician, the grand-daughter of the founder of Amherst College, she grew up in a house filled with books, and read them.

Her poems are filled with astronomy, biology, geography, flowers and birds, grief and bereavement, “the drop of Anguish that scalds me,” “decades of Agony.” Yet she was also “inebriate of Air,” “debauchee of Dew/ Reeling through endless summer days/ From Inns of Molten Blue,” and could speak of “Wild Nights – Wild Nights/ Were I with thee/ Wild Nights should be/ Our luxury.”

Her many poems on death seem to some morbid, but in a 19th century village, death was a daily fact of life. And a high proportion of the dark poems date from the years of the Civil War when the entire country was awash in blood, funerals, burials. No wonder she speaks familiarly of bereavement as if freezing to death “First chill, then stupor, then the letting go.”

Her joy of playing with words is infectious, as are her homely metaphors, her “Robin’s Red Cravat,” a snake that causes the feeling of “Zero at the bone,” the wind that kneads “the grass/ as women do the dough.” A book like a Frigate “to take us lands away.”

Without her, would the work of later poets as varied as Frost, Williams, Bly, Bishop, Berryman, Moore, Merwin, Snyder have been quite the same? Probably not, and her cadences seem to have haunted some of our folk singers, a hundred years after she wrote. Couldn’t Dylan, too, have felt a funeral in my brain? Or Woody Guthrie have liked to watch a panting steam locomotive “lap the miles.”