Addresses to a Divided Nation: Images of War in Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman

FAITH BARRETT Addresses to a Divided Nation: Images of War in Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman Hi O WEET Land of Liberty' is a superfluous Carol till it concern V-/ ourselves," Emily Dickinson writes in a warm and expansive letter to Mabel Loomis Todd in the summer of 1885 (Letters #1004X1 Writing to her brother's mistress, who was then traveling in Europe, Dickinson touches on a subject one might not expect to encounter in her writings: the love of one's homeland, her love for America. "I saw the American Flag last Night in the shutting West," she writes, "and I felt for every exile." She signs the letter "America." In reading Emily Dickinson, we do not expect to encounter a writer who speaks to or for the nation; rather we expect to encounter a writer who lives in internal domestic exile, absenting herself from the political discussions of her day. Yet Dickinson's poetry of the Civil War era raises important questions about speaking to and for "America"; as the ironic stance of the post-war letter to Todd suggests, these questions are invariably raised obliquely. Dickinson's work, I contend, does address the nation, though it does so skeptically and tentatively; simultaneously , her work offers an exhaustive analysis of the risks of that rhetorical platform. Dickinson's speaker thus undercuts her own position, and as a result, readers have been slow to recognize her critical engagement with nineteenth-century political debates. Following the publication of Johnson's complete edition of the poems in 1955, the first generation of scholars who read Dickinson emphasized her intellectual and physical isolation from the outside world.2 Recent scholarship, however , urges us to consider the ways in which her work addresses both Arizona Quarterly Volume 61 , Number 4, Winter 2005 Copyright © 2005 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1610 68 Faith Barrett her immediate community of family and friends and the wider audience she undoubtedly reached through circulation of her work in correspondence ; recent scholarship also urges us to consider the ways in which Dickinson's work addresses political and literary developments in nineteenth-century America.3 Embracing these recent studies, my approach to Dickinson's address to the nation begins with the premise that we must attend to the ways in which her work is vitally connected to its historical and social context. My argument, however, considers the address to the nation not only as an historically determined and embedded stance, but also as the means by which Dickinson articulates a critique of the limitations of the lyric self. For Dickinson, as for Walt Whitman, the political crisis of the Civil War raises unavoidable questions about the workings of literary representation. For both poets, the dilemmas of the address to the nation are inseparable from the dilemmas of witnessing wartime violence and suffering. It is a critical commonplace that Walt Whitman is a public poet and Emily Dickinson, a private one: while Whitman's "I" addresses the whole nation, in Dickinson's poems the positing of the lyric self seems to require a privacy of address that excludes the outside world. Such a reading, however, neglects the tensions which underlie Whitman's inclusive apostrophes; it also neglects the ways in which Dickinson deliberately, though skeptically, addresses the nation. Dickinson's work suggests that the stability of the poet's platform in addressing the nation depends upon the speaker's ability to bear witness to the suffering of others; this is a stance which she profoundly mistrusts .4 Moreover, Dickinson is not alone is displaying this mistrust; the address to the nation is undercut by anxiety and tension in the work of many America writers of the nineteenth century. I contend, however, that Dickinson foregrounds the problems of the address to the nation in a way that no other American poet ofthis era does. Ifwe read American poetry of the Civil War era through the lens of Dickinson's critique of address, we find that her work illuminates changes in the stances of the lyric self, changes which result in part from the crisis of a nation divided by war.5 While Dickinson is invariably skeptical about the address to...