What Is a 21st-Century ‘Writer’s Home’?
Twain Had a Billiard Room. Hemingway Had a Cuban Abode. St. Vincent Millay Had Pool Parties. But Nowadays Poetry Won’t Pay the Mortgage
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 …
