Looking For Inspiration To Write?

Emily Dickinson

Are you familiar with the work of Emily Dickinson, the poet whose work was never published until after her death? She died in 1886 leaving about 1800 poems which her sister found and managed to  get them published beginning in 1890.

She was a recluse for much of her life, writing the poems in her bedroom in Amherst, MA. I have always admired her poems, not that I've read the entire collection. The number is extraordinary. 

She came to mind today when I read the offering on a day-by-day calendar we received for Christmas. The Emily Dickinson Museum has a replica of her bedroom. The bed and small stove are original and the rest of the furniture only replicas. That includes the writing table where she probably wrote her poetry. The museum website offers the opportunity to see the bedroom and learn a bit more about it.

The calendar page offered a quote by the nineteenth-century poet, one I liked a lot and wanted to share with you today. She said:

     "I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word." 

Apparently, the museum has chosen to capitalize on that quote. Visitors are allowed to rent the bedroom for a few hours. They can bring their own writing materials and wait to see if inspiration comes to them. I wonder if certain parts of the room are a Do Not Touch area. Surely, they would not want visitors to stretch out on the bed for a snooze. But, to sit at the writing table and wait for sparks to fly in your writing mind might be wonderful.

I was once a visitor to a German courtroom where the Nuremberg Trials were held after WWII. The tour guide mentioned how the seats were filled with journalists, including Ernie Pyle who was an acclaimed writer in his time and Pulitzer Prize winner. When I heard that, I felt a shiver up my spine. To think that I was sitting where these famed writers had sat, taking notes and planning articles was heady stuff. The longer I was there, the more I wanted to start writing, not only wanted but felt compelled. Was it the ghosts of writers past that reached out? Or just the idea of where I was and who had been there before me? So, maybe I could be inspired to write poetry if I was to visit the museum and sit at Ms. Dickinson's writing table with paper and pen.

I should tell you about the day I had the pleasure of visiting Claude Monet's home in France, but that is a story in itself to be saved for another day.

If you could choose to go to the place where a writer you admired practiced his/her creativity, where would it be? Whose home? Whose garden? Whose bar? Coffeehouse? University? 

A few more quotes by Emily Dickinson: 

“'Hope' is the thing with feathers - That perches in the soul - And sings the tunes without the words - And never stops - at all -”

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?”

"Dwell in possibility."

“Success is counted sweetest/By those who ne'er succeed./To comprehend a nectar/Requires sorest need.”

Writers often ask how to get inspired. One way is to study other writers, their lives, their dwelling place, and their writing. If you have an opportunity to visit the home or museum of a writer, don't pass it up. I felt inspired when I walked the grounds and visited the home of Robert Frost. A friend had the great experience of spending time writing in the Ernest Hemingway House in Oak Park, IL.for a full year. I must check with her and see if being in Hemingway's home did inspire her own writing.