"Words for the Hour": A New Anthology of American Civil War Poetry

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) Emily Dickinson is now widely acknowledged to be one of America’s greatest poets , but during her lifetime, her work was unknown. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts , as the second of three children, Dickinson lived a life without obvious drama. Her father was a noted lawyer and one-term representative to Congress for the state of Massachusetts, and the family promoted good education for women as well as men. Dickinson graduated from Amherst Academy and attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (later Mount Holyoke College) for a year. Neither she nor her sister, Lavinia, married, and their brother, Austin, built a house directly next door to the family “Homestead” for his wife, Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson, and their children. Known as a precocious and witty child, Emily Dickinson had become relatively reclusive by the beginning of the Civil War and became increasingly so thereafter. As a rule, she did not submit her poems for publication, although she did include poems in letters to many acquaintances , and a handful of her poems were sent to newspapers or anthologies by these recipients. In , Dickinson also permitted three poems to be published in Drum-Beat, a fund-raising newspaper for the Union army. Moreover, she copied nearly two-thirds of her poems into small booklets—some with handsewn binding—and she preserved both these booklets and many poems on loose sheets or scraps of paper until her death. After her death, Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson edited a few volumes of her poems, the first appearing in . Since then her poems have been continuously in print, in various (and disputed) editions. Because Dickinson rarely left the town of Amherst and wrote no poems containing explicit topical reference to the Civil War as such, critical commentary for decades assumed that the war was not a matter of pressing interest to her. Since the mid-s, however, critics have increasingly recognized the currency of Dickinson’s information about the progress of the war, the number of poems she wrote in direct response or reference to the war, and the far greater number of poems that seem to have been influenced in their metaphors and concerns by the national conflict. There is no question that the war years constituted her period of greatest productivity; during  and , she wrote an average of two poems every three days, and during , almost a poem a day. Even during , when she spent several months undergoing eye treatment and was not allowed to write,  she composed ninety-eight poems, according to Ralph W. Franklin’s dating of manuscripts (and assuming that the extant copies of poems were produced not long after their initial composition). In no other period of her life did she have a comparable surge of creativity. While Dickinson wrote some poems in response to battles, she responded more profoundly to the war by turning in her poetry to questions about the meaning of the terms touted daily in newspapers and preached from local pulpits. What do “victory” and “defeat” mean, in relation to each other and in relation to moral questions or to religious speculations about an afterlife? How does the individual deal with acute pain? How can one believe in a benevolent and protective God when men are dying by the thousands in the most violent circumstances ? How does news of such cataclysmic dying affect the living, especially those living far from the war’s battlefields—such as in Amherst? Such philosophical ,religious,and moral questioning makes Dickinson among the most profound of the writers on the American Civil War. To fight aloud, is very brave - 1 But gallanter, I know Who charge within the bosom The Cavalry of Wo Who win, and nations do not see Who fall - and none observe Whose dying eyes, no Country Regards with patriot love We trust, in plumed procession For such, the Angels go Rank after Rank, with even feet And Uniforms of snow. (F ) Early   U  P P P . All poems in this section are taken from Ralph W. Franklin, The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ). Numbers assigned by Franklin in accord with their chronological progression appear after each poem in parenthesis; following that number is Franklin’s estimated date of composition. We have followed Franklin in maintaining Dickinson’s misspellings: “it’s” for “its,” “opon” for “upon,” and so on. Unto like Story - Trouble has...