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couldn’t read the future very well, couldn’t have seen that the twentieth century would soon explode into slant rhymes that would render him obsolete. Yet Dickinson desperately needed him. He was her lifeline—not to the literary culture of Boston; she wasn’t much interested in that. But she could practice her own intelligence—and her craft—on him. And so much of what we will ever know about her comes from her letters to Higginson; with him, she could wear the mask of a poet.
    If I read a book      [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever 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.      [Letter 342a, Higginson to his wife]
    Not as far as Dickinson’s poetry is concerned. And that’s why we pay homage to this outlaw. She wasn’t one more madwoman in the attic. She was the mistress of her own interior time and space, where she delivered “Dirks of Melody” that could delight and stun. She was the blonde Assassin who could dance with “the man of noon” and walk away at will—in her poetry.
    â€œI cannot dance opon my Toes—/No Man instructed me—” she declared in one of her most striking poems. But she needed no instruction. Dickinson was dancing all the time. Few people in Amherst ever caught that dance, not even Sue. She danced right past her father’s eyes, made herself invisible in her white dress. And Allen Tate, one of ahandful of poets and critics who rediscovered Emily Dickinson in the twentieth century, paid her the highest sort of compliment when he said:“Cotton Mather would have burned her for a witch.”
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    I WANTED TO FOLLOW THE WITCH ’ S WAKE , so I went on a pilgrimage to Mount Holyoke College, in western Massachusetts, to breathe in some of the atmosphere the poet had breathed for two semesters, in 1847 and 1848, and to interview Dickinson scholar Christopher Benfey, who teaches a course on Emily Dickinson’s time at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, as the college was then called. But it was like trafficking in ghosts, since the seminary’s main building, with its elaborate portico and line of chimneys, no longer exists. And from the window of Benfey’s office near the main gate, I looked out upon the little serene pockets and hills of the college lawn.“We did an archaeological dig,” he said, “so where you see that oak tree”—in a lacuna on the lawn—“is perhaps the footprint of the building. . . . And the road you came in on is the same road. So Dickinson was right here. Dickinson stood right here where you’re sitting—lived right here.”
    Most scholars, including Alfred Habegger, dismiss the importance of Dickinson’s stay at Mount Holyoke.“We know of no new friends she kept up with after leaving. In later years she hardly mentioned the place.” Yet I’m convinced that her grounding as a poet started here, in South Hadley. It was Dickinson’s first extended leave from Amherst as an adolescent—it troubled her, made her feel horribly homesick, but she found a kind of solace in words; there’s a sudden thrill in language itself as she writes letter after letter to Austin, and we can sense her plumage gather, like some songbird startled by the sound and texture of its own song.
    A Menagerie performs outside her window, with its pet monkeys and bears. “The whole company stopped in front of the Seminary & played for about a quarter of an hour, for the purpose of gettingcustom in the afternoon I opine. Almost all the girls went & I enjoyed the solitude finely.” [Letter 16, South Hadley, October 21, 1847]
    She needed that solitude—and the distance from her family, so that she could lick her own feathers. As Benfey says about Dickinson, “We put that little