This Republic of Suffering [160]
68. Hawthorne quoted in Lee Rust Brown, “Introduction” to Melville, Battle-Pieces, p. iv; Aaron, Unwritten War, p. 88.
69. Melville, “Armies of the Wilderness,” pp. 101, 102; Melville, “A Utilitarian View of the Monitor’s Fight,” in Battle-Pieces, p. 62.
70. Melville, “Shiloh,” in Battle-Pieces, 63; “Armies of the Wilderness,” p. 103; Melville, “Shiloh,” p. 63.
71. Emily Dickinson, “My Triumph lasted till the Drums,” #1227, and “They dropped like Flakes—,” #409 in Thomas H. Johnson, ed., The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1960). See Robert Milder, “The Rhetoric of Melville’s Battle-Pieces,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 44 (September 1989), pp. 173–200; Maurice S. Lee, “Writing Through the War; Melville and Dickinson After the Renaissance,” PMLA 115 (October 2000): pp. 1124–28.
72. David Higgins, Portrait of Emily Dickinson, The Poet and Her Prose (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1967); Thomas W. Ford, “Emily Dickinson and the Civil War,” University Review—Kansas City 31 (Spring 1965): 199. For the most systematic exploration of the importance of war to Dickinson, see Shira Wolosky, Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). Daniel Aaron relegates Dickinson to Supplement 4, a page and a half, in The Unwritten War and emphasizes the personal nature of her experience, although at the same time he shows the impact of war imagery on her poetry, pp. 355–56.
73. Emily Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, June 8, 1862, and [n.d.] 1863, in Mabel Todd Loomis, ed., Letters of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1894), vol. 2, pp. 304, 310.
74. Emily Dickinson to Fanny Norcross and Loo Norcross, April 1862, Letters of Dickinson, vol. 2, p. 243; William A. Stearns, Adjutant Stearns (Boston: Massachusetts Sabbath School Society, 1862), p. 106. See also Roger Lundin, Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1998), pp. 122–23. The death of another Amherst neighbor at Antietam “in Scarlet Maryland” prompted Dickinson’s “When I was small, a Woman died,” later the same year, #596 in Complete Poems of Dickinson.
75. Emily Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, [n.d.] 1863, in Letters of Dickinson, vol. 2, p. 309; Emily Dickinson to Fanny Norcross and Loo Norcross, April 1862, ibid., p. 243.
76. Emily Dickinson, “I dwell in Possibility,” #657, Complete Poems of Dickinson; Emily Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, April 26, 1862, in Letters of Dickinson, vol. 2, p. 302; “Death is a Dialogue between,” #976; “At least—to pray—is left—is left,” #502; “We pray—to Heaven—” #489; “I felt my life with both my hands,” #351; “Ourselves we do inter with sweet derision,” #1144, all in Complete Poems of Dickinson.
77. “All but Death, can be Adjusted,” #749, in Complete Poems of Dickinson.
78. “Suspense—is Hostiler than Death—,” #705; “Victory comes late—,” #690; “My Portion is Defeat—today—,” #639; “It feels a shame to be Alive,” #444; “The Battle fought between the Soul,” #594, all in Complete Poems of Dickinson. See Maria Magdalena Farland, “‘That Tritest/Brightest Truth’: Emily Dickinson’s Anti-Sentimentality,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 53 (December 1998): 364–89. Barton Levi St. Armand, Emily Dickinson and Her Culture: The Soul’s Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), portrays her as less doubting and more conventional.
79. Helen Vendler, “Melville and the Lyric of History,” in Melville, Battle-Pieces, pp. 262, 265.
80. “I felt a Cleaving in my Mind,” #937, in Complete Poems of Dickinson; Wolosky, Emily Dickinson, p. xv. See also David T. Porter, Dickinson: The Modern Idiom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 39, 98, 120. On Amy Lowell’s judgment that Dickinson