In my many pilgrimages to writers’ homes, I’ve felt two responses, often simultaneously. There’s excitement about my proximity to creation. About the whiff of genius that lingers—like lavender, like music—beyond a study’s velvet rope. But then I feel comforted, too. That my literary heroes were, in the sunny patois of supermarket tabloids, “just like us.” Folks who fretted over floorboards and flashing. Who had toilets, toasters, and trash.

Robert Frost’s Stone House in Shaftsbury, Vermont is just that—a stone house—but it’s also where he wrote “The Road Not Taken.” That poem’s lines fill the rooms like winter light. Emily Dickinson’s Homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts, stunned me into a reverential silence until I saw it for its component parts: beds and windows, beams and bricks.

Another way to think about all this is personification. A writer’s home personifies its owner, giving visitors the sense of “knowing” a person (usually dead) who held the pen. It personifies their writing too. Here’s their typewriter, here’s their table, here’s something tactile on which to ground an artform that can, at its best, hang words in air.

This holds true for writers we admire and those we don’t. When I spiral up the stone steps of Hawk Tower, the poet Robinson Jeffers’ oceanside eyrie in Carmel, California, I feel like I am Jeffers, or at least his houseguest. No such joy accompanied my daily walks around the General Lew Wallace Study & Museum in Crawfordsville, Indiana. I rack this up to the badness of Ben-Hur. My dog shared my disdain, peeing frequently on old Lew’s trees.

Lately, when I pass a sign for a writer’s home or peek into J.D. McClatchy’s coffee table book, American Writers at Home, I feel something sour. Like the foxing of a frontispiece. Like crawl space mold. At first, I thought it simple envy. We writers are envious creatures. We envy each other’s sentences. We envy each other’s successes. We even envy our predecessors’ sentences and successes, which surround us in their homes.

This stirring, though, was different, and newer, dating back to 2022, when my wife and I sold our home of six years in Crawfordsville, just across the street from Lew Wallace. It deepened in the year we spent in Portland, Oregon—lucky beneficiaries of my sabbatical—and even after we returned to a new Hoosier zip code. By then the very idea of a writer’s home, a domicile where an author sets up permanent shop, struck me as antiquated. Even privileged. What changed?

Well, we did. From 2022 to 2024, we bounced among three houses, returning to what was, for the majority of our marriage, native ground: the rental market. My perspective on housing shifted. Renting was flexible and maintenance-free. Ownership was permanent and bougie. Mortgage rates rose while the number of active listings plummeted. Prices ballooned, inflation flattened (or shrank) buying power. It felt like a bad time to buy a home.

And yet last fall my wife and I started haunting Zillow and pouncing on early showings. We chatted up our elderly neighbor’s sons—I’m not proud of this—when that neighbor died. (They were selling, but for more than we had.) Throughout it all, I thought about the writers’ homes I’d visited, and if those writers’ lives bore any resemblance to my own. Did I secretly hope, in buying a home, to mimic their lifestyle? Was that possible in 2024?

Not if I wanted to emulate Mark Twain, whose Hartford mansion boasts a billiard parlor and a fireplace with a fluted flue. Ditto Edna St. Vincent Millay, who’d ask the swimmers in her outdoor pool to splash about nude. Even the more modest homes, like Walt Whitman’s row house in Camden, New Jersey, reek of entitlement and stability. Photographs show the elderly poet’s floors there bestrewn with papers—like a hoarder clinging to a golden past.

Of course, this is all unfair—to these writers and to me. The economics of literature has shifted. Its cultural capital too. (Besides, it’s masochistic to compete with someone whose home address is a historic landmark.) As the internet makes writing more democratic, writers’ homes feel elite or off-limits. Don’t touch anything! isn’t just a warning about rarified artifacts; it’s a reminder that this is all out of reach. Today, writers’ homes represent twin goals that remain, for most working writers, distant or divorced: financial security and geographic certainty.

I’ve met few writers who publish their way to a down payment, and if the AI innovators have their way, I’ll meet fewer still. Most writers I know are peripatetic, moving toward the promise of a paycheck, which they often teach to secure. A “room of one’s own” was Virginia Woolf’s metaphor for the solitude needed by (and denied to) women writers. But as the local Starbucks and public library, the soccer sideline and the playground can attest, solitude is a luxury that many writers can’t afford. What plaque will hang over these sites of hurried composition? Who’ll tour them, 50 years hence, to pay homage to the novels being written there right now?

If I’m still alive then, two things will be true: my poetry still won’t make money, and my mortgage will be paid off. That’s right, Dear Reader, we did buy a home, though not—at least in my case—because pride of ownership or wealth building held much allure. Nor did the promise of a home office, its shelves sagging with books. No, I bought a house to retain a feeling, however misguided or intangible, that I have some control over my own life. That my loves were perpetually protected. That we’re safe inside our weatherproof ark.

The history of writers’ homes reminds me that this is a delusion, and one we sign for on the dotted line. Ernest Hemingway lost his Havana residence, Finca Vigía, to the Cuban Revolution. Ralph Waldo Emerson watched his Concord home burn; he was so beset by despair or dementia that he tossed a few belongings back into the flames. The poet Anne Bradstreet, who wrote “Here Follows Some Verses upon the Burning of Our House (July 10th, 1666),” suffered much the same:

Here stood that trunk, and there that chest,
There lay that store I counted best.
My pleasant things in ashes lie,
And them behold no more shall I.

It doesn’t take a coup or conflagration to remind us that our lives are fragile and that our “pleasant things” are bound, like our bodies, for ash. We can install smoke detectors, map the flood plains, and test for radon. (God knows, I’ve done all three.) But catastrophe will inevitably find—if not our actual houses—then everything they represent: family, contentment, a quiet place in the world.

Owning a home helps us to forget that fact, however briefly, as we arrange new furniture and mow the lawn. I’d almost forgotten it myself, tucked away in my new basement study, until I looked out my only window to see the bees, right at eye level, pollinating the front yard. Then I remembered the siding needs painting. Then I remembered that I’m already halfway underground.

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With that, I ask this question: What makes Collins’ poetry so captivating to so many?

Robert Frost, 1874-1963.

The answer may lie in the example of Frost, who also had a large public role. In 1961, Frost became the first poet ever invited to read at a presidential inauguration, for John F. Kennedy. His public fame rested on his image as a benign New England sage. Cultural critic Lionel Trilling objected to that view, saying of Frost in 1959, “He is not the Frost who reassures us by affirmations of old virtues, simplicities, pieties, and ways of feeling: anything but … I regard Frost as a terrifying poet.” Trilling found in Frost’s poetry existential questions seething with darkness.

Collins was appointed poet laureate shortly before September 11, 2001. Today, as we live in a post-9/11 society, we reflect upon the events of that day—and the years that have followed—realizing that our world is far too familiar with danger and dread.

Hence Collins’ appeal. While Frost’s poetry consists of fear and terror where one would expect happiness and joy, Collins has an uncanny ability to find a small glimmer of light, love, and hope in the most basic tokens of our dark times: Silverware, a bird, lawn chairs, and teenage girls who cannot help but say, “Oh, my God” to everyone about everything.

Collins populates his poems with lonely figures straight out of an Edward Hopper painting, imbuing them with simple good will and humor. His poem, “The Chairs That No One Sits In,” would be an example of anomie and bleakness, particularly because he tells us that, “You never see anyone/ sitting in these forlorn chairs,” if not for stanzas such as these:

It may be none of my business,
but let us suppose one day
that everyone who placed those vacant chairs

on a veranda or a dock sat down in them
if only for the sake of remembering
what it was they thought deserved

to be viewed from two chairs,

That imaginative turn takes what should be an oppressively sad poem and transforms it into a cause for wonder as he imagines people in the two chairs, a man and a woman, and tells us that, “there is only the sound of their looking.” This, Collins argues, is the very definition of poetry. In his poem called “Poetry,” he con-cludes the following of himself and his fellow poets:

We are busy doing nothing—
and all we need for that is an afternoon,
a rowboat under a blue sky,

and maybe a man fishing from a stone bridge,
or, better still, nobody on that bridge at all.

Collins unabashedly celebrates poetry for its ability to make readers pause, celebrate, and engage in anything and everything, from the most awful to the most seemingly trivial—until, at a poems’ root, it yields surprise, and that glimmer of light we need so much.

In his poem “Baby Listening,” Collins imagines that a hotel service for “baby listen-ing” is offering babies who will listen to guests. In fact, the service is for families who would like staff to listen in on a sleeping baby while the parents go out to the hotel restaurant. As he writes: “Baby listening—not a baby who happens to be listening/ as I thought when I first checked in.” He adds: “Lucky for some of us/ poetry is a place where both are true at once/ where meaning only one thing at a time spells malfunction.”

In the universe of poetry that Collins creates, the poet fails only when he or she becomes too simple. Like Frost, Collins is deceptive. But unlike Frost, Collins, in a dark time, lets his readers know the secret of how and where to find light.

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