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afflictions of others around her. “Sorrow seems more general than it did, and not the estate of a few persons, since the war began; and if the anguish of others helped one with one’s own, now would be many medicines.” War provided Dickinson with inexhaustible material for her metaphysical speculations. The worth and meaning of human life were for her defined by death’s cost and promise, just as the war itself constantly demanded a balance sheet of loss and purpose. Her poetry uses the deaths of war to ask timeless questions, but her speculations at the same time engage more timely issues that also tormented her far less gifted contemporaries. She too sought to understand the meaning of war’s carnage, the price of victory and defeat, and the implications of Civil War slaughter for the Christian faith that shaped how most Americans lived their lives.75

Dickinson dwelled, as she wrote, “in Possibility.” In the face of doubt, she searched for “Paradise,” for firm foundations for belief, for signs of immortality to relieve her deep uncertainty. She felt herself isolated from the community of believers and once described her family to Higginson as “religious, except me.” Like so many reflective Americans of her time, she grappled with the contradictions of spirit and matter and with their implications for heaven and for God. Death seemed a “Dialogue between the Spirit and the Dust,” an argument left painfully unresolved. Dickinson wondered where she might find heaven (“I’m knocking everywhere”) and what an afterlife might be (“Is Heaven a place—a Sky—a Tree?”). She speculated too on the possibility of corporeal immortality: “I felt my life with both my hands / To see if it was there.” But she could not resolve her uncertainty and found no sure comfort in a “religion / that doubts as fervently as it believes.” Death remained inexorable.76

All but Death, can be Adjusted—

…….….….……

Death—unto itself—Exception

Is exempt from Change.77

Ironically, it was death, not life, that seemed eternal, for it “perishes—to live anew…Annihilation—plated fresh / With Immortality.” No terrestrial justifications, no military or political purposes balance this loss; victory cannot compensate; it “comes late” to those already dead, whose “freezing lips” are “too rapt with frost / to take it.” Dickinson permits herself no relief or escape into either easy transcendence or sentimentality. Instead she faces death in its horror, as “Piles of solid Moan,” and explores how death challenges God’s presence and benevolence, as it raises questions about her own worth and destiny. “It feels a shame to be Alive—/ When Men so brave—are dead.” She, like Bierce, finds herself “sentenced to life.” Dickinson makes clear that the soul’s internal battle is “of all the battles prevalent—/ By far the Greater One—.” But the circumstances of national conflict illustrated and objectified her inner turmoil and encouraged four years of extraordinary poetic productivity.78

Critics writing about Dickinson, Bierce, and Melville have identified in each of them characteristics associated with “modernity.” The challenge to certainty is an important dimension of this designation; each of these writers grapples with religious doubt, and all adopt an irony that reflects anxiety about deception and delusion. All three seek, to borrow Melville’s word, to “undeceive.” But their doubts affect the form as well as the substance of their work. Melville resorts to poetry from the impossibility of narrative. As Helen Vendler has written, Melville recognizes that the war requires “a new sort of language and rhyme.” No comprehensive understanding is possible; any vantage offers, as he writes in “Armies of the Wilderness,” only “glimpses” and only “hints at the maze of war.”79

Bierce similarly eschews any effort at synthesis or claim to omniscience. He writes only of what “I saw” at Shiloh, offers just “A Little of Chickamauga”—once again “what I saw of it.” He trusts his knowledge only of what he has directly experienced. His short stories are like snapshots. War cannot