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147  Reading and Writing the Civil War So we may, in a certain sense, call this whole war of freedom an acted poem, and find a melody of some divine ode in each of its unnumbered deeds of heroism and self-sacrifice. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Poetry of the War” 1865 Poetry is related to music and cadence and therefore to the force of events. George Oppen, Selected Poems 2003 (189) Scholars have debated the extent to which Dickinson was affected by the Civil War and responded to it in her poems, from Thomas H. Johnson’s famous pronouncement that Dickinson “did not live in history and held no view of it” (xx) to Shira Wolosky’s groundbreaking Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War and several recent essays on particular poems relating to the war. Without question, the war was the defining historical event of Dickinson’s lifetime.1 Because the handful of poems Dickinson wrote in unambiguous response to the war are now well known, this chapter will move from those texts to others that more subtly echo popular idiom and genres. Notably, Dickinson circulates none of her explicit war poems and very few of those intersecting with its issues indirectly.2 Perhaps she did not want to share such poems because imagining the situational perspective of a soldier in shock or pain or dying seemed unseemly, or because the subject matter itself was so difficult. Or perhaps these poems of experiential perspective interested her primarily as experiments and she did not want friends to mistake them for her own experience. Whatever her reasons, Dickinson wrote a number of poems during the war trying out popular types of war poems or using popular war idiom, and she shared them with no one—just as she did not circulate the majority of her formally most irregular poems.3 Eric Foner writes that in the United States “no aspect of life emerged untouched from the war” (18). The Civil War began in 1861, when Dickinson was thirty, and ended in 1865, before she turned thirty-five. During these years she wrote over half of the poems she would write during her lifetime. Certainly other personal, local, national, and international events and currents influenced her during these years, and the war itself cannot be understood in isolation from religion, political ideologies, regional loyalties, and social issues like racism and prescribed gender roles. Nonetheless, Dickinson’s emotional and intellectual life would have been unimaginably different had she not come to adulthood during the debates over slavery and secession in the 1850s and lived through the Reconstruction Era in the United States. Seven of the ten poems Dickinson published during her life appeared during the war, and three were given to a Union fundraising paper called Drum Beat in 1864—perhaps with her consent.4 More than in any other realm, Dickinson’s responses to the Civil War illuminate the complexity of her relationship to the culture and discourse of her moment in that many poems borrowing idioms or tropes of popular war poetry have no obvious connection with the war, in much the way that popular Orientalism takes diffuse form in her early poems.5 As a whole, her poems responding to war resemble an amalgam of voices or attitudes taking different emotional and philosophical perspectives , often in the form of dramatic lyrics, more than the crafting of any unified response to the conflict or to war generally.6 Of course, Dickinson was familiar with death before the war began, but as historian Drew Faust writes, the most widely shared experience of the Civil War was that of death (xiii).7 Over 620,000 men died during the war; in several battles, there were more than 2,000 casualties a day, and the ten largest battles each ended with 23,000 or more combined casualties. Many more died in prisons or hospitals, including large numbers killed by disease. Moreover, because the beginning of the war coincided with the invention of the telegraph and photography, reports of battles reached all cities and many towns within hours of their occurrence. In response to seeing photographs of the Antietam battlefield , Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that war is “a repulsive, brutal, sickening, hideous thing” (“Sunbeam” 12). Harper’s Monthly Magazine, to which Lavinia subscribed, and Harper’s Weekly, to which Austin and Sue subscribed, contained several lithographs, sketches, and photographs of war scenes, and the Springfield Republican and Franklin and Hampshire Gazette printed regular lists of the...

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