"Eastern Exiles": Dickinson, Whiggery and War

This essay argues for the centrality of the rise and fall of the American Whig party to Emily Dickinson's poetic projects. Though careful not to conflate their individual political investments, the essay charts relationships between Edward Dickinson's "public" life and Emily Dickinson's "private" life, arguing that we cannot understand either Edward or Emily Dickinson outside of the context of latter day Whig party politics. In so doing, the essay urges Dickinson studies to reconsider and reconceptualize the poet's complex relationship to her immediate political milieu, and, in turn, the relationship of that immediate political milieu to the American Civil War.