This Republic of Suffering [99]
Dickinson’s poetry was revolutionary in its departure from the order and logic of prevailing poetic form.
The thought behind, I strove to join
Unto the thought before—
But Sequence ravelled out of Sound
Like Balls—upon a Floor,
she wrote in 1864. Marked by discontinuities, her poems were assailed after their posthumous publication by critics who deplored their travesties of grammar and syntax. But contemporary critics see in these attributes the embodiment of Dickinson’s doubts about the foundations of understanding and coherence. Shira Wolosky has argued that Dickinson’s poetry challenges “the whole question of linguistic meaning and of meaning in general.” This is a crisis of language and epistemology as much as one of eschatology; it is about not just whether there is a God and whether we can know him but whether we can know or communicate anything at all.80
Dickinson’s poems did not appear in print for three decades after the Civil War; Melville’s Battle-Pieces, published in 1866, sold about five hundred copies; Bierce was well known as a journalist but did not begin to publish his writings about the war until nearly twenty years after Appomattox. The significance of these authors’ understanding of war’s destruction does not lie in their influence upon popular thought. Nor can they be seen as representative of widely held views. Their writings instead provide access into one point on the spectrum of possible reactions to the crisis of belief that war presented to mid-nineteenth-century America. Dickinson, Melville, and Bierce transformed the need to grapple with the meaning of national conflagration into broad and lasting questions about the foundations of religion and of human understanding. Each of these authors has been regarded as a way station on the route to the modernist disillusion that would be associated with the even more destructive war that erupted in 1914. That very connection with the future suggests the tenuous relationship that each writer had with the prevailing assumptions and outlook of an earlier time. But the Civil War contributed to the ability of each of these authors to see the world in the framework and images that made his or her work possible. And in mapping the contours of doubt, Dickinson, Melville, and Bierce helped delineate the broader topography of belief and unbelief that grew from the war. It is, in fact, striking to see that their sense of a failure of knowledge and understanding was widely articulated by ordinary Americans.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. called the experience of war “incommunicable.” Fellow soldiers felt the same and filled their letters and diaries with declarations of their inability to describe what they had seen. “Language would in no way express the true picture as it really was,” Confederate Reuben Allen Pierson wrote his father after Gaines Mill in 1862, emphasizing in his redundancy both the power and the inaccessibility of his experience. A depiction of Chickamauga, James Suiter of the 84th Illinois wrote in his diary, “would be an absolute impossibility.” Daniel Holt, a Union surgeon, proclaimed battle “indescribable” in its horror. John Casler of the Stonewall Brigade struggled for words to tell his parents about his first experience of combat: “I have not power to describe the scene. It beggars all description.” Like Melville, the soldiers found war beyond narration.81
Women nurses and relief workers responded to the suffering they witnessed at the front with a similar sense of verbal incapacity. In 1862, Cordelia Harvey wrote home from Tennessee to Madison’s Wisconsin State Journal, “There are times when the meaning of words seem to fade away; so entirely does our language fail to express the reality. This fact I never so fully realized as when attempting to depict the suffering, both mental and physical, which I