Poetic Pilgrimage

Forget what T.S. Eliot told you. April isn’t the “cruelest month”—it’s National Poetry Month and in honor of that, I’m getting well-versed to take a literature-fueled field trip.

That’s Amore
After scandalously eloping in 1846, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and hubby Robert retreated to Florence where they promptly rented an apartment in a palazzo near Ponte Vecchio. Over the fourteen years she lived at Casa Guidi, Barrett Browning produced Sonnets from the Portuguese, plus her only child (appropriately named Pen). She died there, too, and the lovingly-restored space is now a veritable shrine. Part of it opens to the public for a few hours Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from April through November, so you’re welcome to take a tour. However, those who really love her work (hmm … let me count the ways) may actually sleep over, courtesy of the Landmark Trust. Rates start at $315 a night based on a one-week rental.

Mass Appeal
Like her poems, Emily Dickinson’s world was small. She made her home in Amherst, Massachusetts, a sleepy college town eighty-five miles west of Boston, and seldom ventured beyond her father’s grounds. In fact, the Woman in White was so reclusive that she sometimes communicated with outsiders by lowering notes from her window. Luckily for poetry lovers, though, her private sanctuary is now easy to access. Docents at the Dickinson Homestead will lead you right into her bedroom (look for the yarn-bound facsimile of poems, only ten of which were published in her lifetime). Afterward, take an audio tour of the poet’s beloved garden or take advantage of one of the many readings, lectures, and discussion groups the Homestead hosts.

An American in Paris
Given how busy she was hobnobbing with Picasso, hanging out with Hemingway, and cooking up cannabis-laced brownies with Alice B. Toklas, it’s a wonder Gertrude Stein managed to get any work done in Paris. But work she did, producing convention-flaunting poems that seemed outré even by Modernist standards. Today’s avant garde girls can seek out her former home (and site of Stein’s fabled “salons”) at 27 rue De Fleurus in Montparnasse; then toast her accomplishments at La Closerie des Lilas (the lit clique’s fav watering hole). End your journey, as Stein herself did, in Pére-Lachaise Cemetary  where she is spending eternity with artistic A-listers like Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, and Honoré de Balzac.