The Amherst poet Emily Dickinson remains an enigmatic and therefore fascinating figure in American literature and popular culture. While the poetic genius of the “woman in white” is widely recognized, the person behind the poems remains a mystery. Biographers, most recently Lyndall Gordon in *Lives Like Loaded Guns*, have looked to the data of history–-letters, memoirs, etc.–-to explain Dickinson. Others have looked to her poetry as a code to her personality and hidden inner life. In 1962 Swiss-born Hans Werner Luescher wrote to T.J. Wilson, then Director of Harvard University Press, “In the course of my painstaking analysis of the symbols, similes, and parables contained in Emily Dickinson’s poems, I have come to discover the central fact of the life of the poet.” **Lynn Margulis**, famously applying her unique scientific perspective to her favorite poet, responds to Luescher’s lifework “decoding Dickinson.” How is Luescher’s work related to Amherst scholar, Ruth Owen Jones’, far more reliable identification of Emily’s Master figure? How did Margulis, the evolutionist, become interested in Dickinson anyway?
