Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War by Shira Wolosky (review)

Book Reviews167 the West Coast in the weeks following Pearl Harbor and the atom bombing of Nagasaki when "our nation was fighting for freedom, for justice" (533). But a larger value rests in the honest story of just how far our nation needed to advance to be a democracy. That this story is told in the voices of everyday Americans who lived through it affirms the value of listening sometimes to our popular culture. Historians and scholars may interpret these voices in time; as of now, they are a voice. LONNIE L. WILLIS Boise State University SHIRA WOLOSKY. Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. 196 p. In developing these brief remarks, I am impelled to return to the late 1940s and early 1950s when Dickinson scholarship was sadly thin. Of good biography there was only George Frisbie Whicher's This Was a Poet (1938), still a major accomplishment; of criticism two opaque essays by Alan Tate and Yvor Winters — "Emily Dickinson," in Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas (1936); Maule's Curse (1938) — are representative of the limited early treatment ofthis great poet. From the first paragraph of "Emily Dickinson and the Limits ofJudgment" (Maule's Curse) comes the following observation: "When the poems of Emily Dickinson first began to appear, in the years shortly following her death, she enjoyed a period of notoriety and of semi-popularity that endured for perhaps ten years; after about ten years of semi-obscurity, her reputation was revived . . . and has lasted unabated to the present day, though with occasional signs that it may soon commence to diminish." Perhaps Winters can be forgiven, for the authoritative Johnson editions of her poems and letters had not yet been done in 1938, and all good recent scholarship and criticism rely upon those works. Still, one cannot but wonder what those "occasional signs" were. Shira Wolosky's addition to the growing body of Dickinson scholarship and criticism will delight those who teach and study in graduate seminars devoted to Dickinson or to the study of poetics. Although parts of it will prove useful to undergraduate literature students, much of it may be frustrating. The book is divided into an introduction and five chapters: "A Syntax of Contention," "Political Theology," "War as Theodician Problem," "Metaphysical Revolt," and "Dickinson's Logos and the Status of Language." There are both an index of poems discussed, some eighty-seven in all, and a general index. Certainly these features enhance the book's usefulness. The thesis of Wolosky's book is sound: there is about Dickinson's art and life a persistent paradox. However great the appearance of conformity in the externals of both, upon careful analysis the interiors of both show a mind in sharp rebellion: in life a dutiful daughter accepts renunciation, a timehonored convention, but in poem after poem the sharpest kind of rejection of convention blazes forth; in form, much, if not most, of her verse appears to employ the common meter of the hymnal, but with close reading the form is shown to be played with or torn asunder while the prose content mocks the conventions of what the age declared should be the subject of verse. 168Book Reviews More particularly, the eighty-seven poems analyzed here are war-inspired, war-dominated, and war-imaged. "The violence of Dickinson's inner life took on impelling form in the context of war" (41). Dickinson is quite ,properly presented as one who, though cloistered, actively sought news of the world, and it was the Civil War that brought into focus the paradox of Dickinson's role as observer-participant. The book is frustrating when Wolosky's language becomes precious, clouding instead of clarifying an issue: "[Her poetry] presents a point of intersection of literary, cultural, and metaphysical concerns, an arena in which conceptual structures and historical pressures implicate and generate configuration" (xiii). The objection is not that an intersection cannot become an arena; the objection is to the concluding adjective clause. "Consciousness of language as a medium becomes consciousness of language as such, representing an increased focus on the process of signification and its possible governing principles" (xv). In context the sentence means...