SIGNIFICANCE IN AMERICAN HISTORY
Emily Dickinson
War feels to me an oblique place,” Emily Dickinson wrote Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson in February 1863 (L280). Higginson was commander of the First South Carolina Regiment, which was comprised of African-American soldiers, and saw action in Florida and South Carolina.
The years of the Civil War corresponded to Dickinson’s most intense period of productivity as a poet, during which she is thought to have written roughly half of her total number of poems, and yet her precise relation to the war remains something of a puzzle. She had friends like Higginson who fought in the war. Her brother, Austin (who paid $500 for a substitute, the standard way to avoid military service), was particularly close to Frazer Stearns, son of the Amherst College president. Stearns’s death at the Battle of New Bern, North Carolina, was a blow to the whole town, recorded in Dickinson’s moving letter above and also in the poem “Victory comes late” which she sent to Samuel Bowles.
Though she said 1864, “I myself, in my smaller way, sang off charnel steps”, Dickinson never wrote a poem explicit in its patriotic fervor as. Her poems tend to assume a less heroic, “smaller” posture. Her most direct participation in the war effort may have been the three poems that appeared anonymously, during late February and March of 1864, in a Brooklyn-based newspaper called Drum Beat, conceived for the purpose of raising money for medical supplies and care for the Union Army. These poems are seen as her contribution to the Union cause.
Walt Whitman
In his early writing, Walt Whitman sets out to explore ideas universal in scope. He made an effort to create a new and distinctly American form of verse. Whitman was determined to express truth through verse using authentic American situations and settings with language that appealed to the senses. The Civil War would provide him with ample opportunity.
Walt Whitman’s notebooks illustrate the Poet at Work and capture wrenching images that war evoked for him. Whitman’s first response to the call of war was: “BEAT! beat! Drums! — blow! bugles! blow!” Haunting scenes of human suffering shape his maturing response to the war and find their way into this tender musing upon “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim,”, that will lead him to minister to soldiers through the end of the war.
Was Whitman describing himself when he declared his ideals in Democratic Vistas? “In the future of these States must arise poets immenser far, and make great poems of death. The poems of life are great, but there must be the poems of the purports of life, not only in itself, but beyond itself.” For Whitman had already written the nation’s quintessential poem on life, death, and rebirth. When Lilacs Last in the dooryard Bloom’d articulates America’s grief upon President Lincoln’s untimely death in this lament of a stricken nation as it watches the train with Lincoln’s body make its way across the country to its final resting place.
War feels to me an oblique place,” Emily Dickinson wrote Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson in February 1863 (L280). Higginson was commander of the First South Carolina Regiment, which was comprised of African-American soldiers, and saw action in Florida and South Carolina.
The years of the Civil War corresponded to Dickinson’s most intense period of productivity as a poet, during which she is thought to have written roughly half of her total number of poems, and yet her precise relation to the war remains something of a puzzle. She had friends like Higginson who fought in the war. Her brother, Austin (who paid $500 for a substitute, the standard way to avoid military service), was particularly close to Frazer Stearns, son of the Amherst College president. Stearns’s death at the Battle of New Bern, North Carolina, was a blow to the whole town, recorded in Dickinson’s moving letter above and also in the poem “Victory comes late” which she sent to Samuel Bowles.
Though she said 1864, “I myself, in my smaller way, sang off charnel steps”, Dickinson never wrote a poem explicit in its patriotic fervor as. Her poems tend to assume a less heroic, “smaller” posture. Her most direct participation in the war effort may have been the three poems that appeared anonymously, during late February and March of 1864, in a Brooklyn-based newspaper called Drum Beat, conceived for the purpose of raising money for medical supplies and care for the Union Army. These poems are seen as her contribution to the Union cause.
Walt Whitman
In his early writing, Walt Whitman sets out to explore ideas universal in scope. He made an effort to create a new and distinctly American form of verse. Whitman was determined to express truth through verse using authentic American situations and settings with language that appealed to the senses. The Civil War would provide him with ample opportunity.
Walt Whitman’s notebooks illustrate the Poet at Work and capture wrenching images that war evoked for him. Whitman’s first response to the call of war was: “BEAT! beat! Drums! — blow! bugles! blow!” Haunting scenes of human suffering shape his maturing response to the war and find their way into this tender musing upon “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim,”, that will lead him to minister to soldiers through the end of the war.
Was Whitman describing himself when he declared his ideals in Democratic Vistas? “In the future of these States must arise poets immenser far, and make great poems of death. The poems of life are great, but there must be the poems of the purports of life, not only in itself, but beyond itself.” For Whitman had already written the nation’s quintessential poem on life, death, and rebirth. When Lilacs Last in the dooryard Bloom’d articulates America’s grief upon President Lincoln’s untimely death in this lament of a stricken nation as it watches the train with Lincoln’s body make its way across the country to its final resting place.