"The more you look at Emily Dickinson's work, the more you come to appreciate the stature of her poetry," Archibald MacLeish, Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, observed Friday at the bicentennial of the founding of Amherst Township.

Speaking to a crowd of 1000 in the Amherst College gym, MacLeish described Dickinson as "the town's greatest citizen" and her poems as "the touchstones of all touchstones."

Two other poets who joined in the evening program, sponsored by the college as part of the town's week-long celebration, were Richard Wilbur, Amherst graduate, and Louis Bogan, a critic.

MacLeish plans to compare Dickinson's poetic achievements to those of Yeats, Rousseau, and Keats in the remaining four lectures of his current series, "Poetry and Experience." He will attempt to establish that Dickinson's world is the private world, Yeat's the public, Rousseau's the artistic, and Keats's the arable.