To Fight Aloud Is Very Brave: American Poetry and the Civil War

4. Addresses to a Divided Nation: Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and the Place of the Lyric I

130 chapter four ADDRESSES TO A DIVIDED NATION Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and the Place of the Lyric I “War feels to me an oblique place,” Emily Dickinson writes in a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson in February 1863, three months after Higginson traveled to South Carolina to take command of a black regiment (JL 280).1 Scholars who examine Dickinson’s poetry often cite this passage as an example of Dickinson’s ambivalent relationship toward the Civil War in particular and toward expressing political commitments more generally. We expect Dickinson, as one of the first American modernists , to position herself at a skeptical and oblique angle in relation to the war and its ideologies. We look for Dickinson to posit a lyric “I’ in her poetry and to avoid the collective stance of the nationalist “we.” Reading Dickinson, we expect to encounter a writer who lives in internal domestic exile, addressing the crisis of the Union and other political events of her day only indirectly if at all. In this same letter, however, Dickinson also offers a far more conventional statement about the war and its risks: echoing the concerns of many women on the homefront writing to friends and relatives in the military, she worries aloud about Higginson’s safety and tells him that she prays for him and for other soldiers in church: “though not reared to prayer – when service is had in Church, for Our Arms, I include yourself” (JL 280). Significantly the phrase “Our Arms” includes not only Higginson and other soldiers, but also Dickinson herself in the collective body of Union supporters in Amherst. As Dickinson’s letter to Higginson suggests, Dickinson’s wartime poetry offers both skeptical commentary on military ideologies and expressions of concern or grief about  addresses to a divided nation 131 soldiers who are in peril or who have lost their lives, expressions that sometime echo sentimental depictions of soldiers as Christian martyrs or of soldiers rejoining their dead mothers in the afterlife. Unlike Frances Watkins Harper, whose protest poetry foregrounds the collective “we” and all but effaces a personal “I,” Dickinson only rarely uses the firstperson plural in her war-related writings; like Julia Ward Howe, however, Dickinson wrestles with the place of the feminine I in her wartime work. Because of the wide variety of stances Dickinson draws on in responding to the war and because of her refusal to publish via the conventional print means, we need to attend with particular care to the rhetorical contexts in which she produces individual texts. In reading the much cited letter to Higginson, for example, we need to consider the extent to which Dickinson plays a role Higginson would by now expect of her: her reclusiveness and her eccentricity, both coded as part of her diminutive femininity in the correspondence with him, contrast with his bravely engaged public masculinity, his decision to serve as an officer and to lead one of the first black regiments. In emphasizing that her own rapport to the conflict is an “oblique” and thus a sheltered one, Dickinson may well be telling Higginson what she imagines he wants to hear. Indeed, Dickinson here echoes the common refrain of Northern soldier-poets who insist that Northern women are too far removed from combat to imagine or understand its horrors. By praying for Higginson’s safety, Dickinson joins the collective of Union supporters in Amherst and assumes the role of the faithful woman on the homefront, keeping her loved ones alive with hopes and prayers and letters. Just as Julia Ward Howe balances poems about abolition with poems about Victorian motherhood in her collections , so too will Dickinson balance radical and sentimental stances in her wartime poems and letters in order to meet the expectations of the family and friends who read her work. Repositioning Dickinson’s wartime poetry in relation to that of her female contemporaries foregrounds the concerns these women share in establishing a relationship between the individual “I” and the collective “we” of nationalist ideologies. While analysis of Dickinson’s wartime writings will serve as the main focus of this chapter, parallel readings of Walt Whitman—the other great formal innovator of this era and the other nineteenth-century American poet with high canonical status—will serve to contextualize my analysis of Dickinson’s addresses to the nation. It is a critical commonplace that chapter four 132 Whitman is...