When looking at the poetry of Emily Dickinson, it is very important to look at the Civil War and it’s effect it had on Ms. Dickinson. The Civil War was the bloodiest era America had seen, and it was also the time that Emily Dickinson wrote an enormous amount of her work (Taggart 76). The severity of the war and the new weapon technology that allowed for faster and more brutal combat made Dickinson consider issues of liberty, life, and death in ways that she never had done so previously (Martin 34). Looking at two of her poems from this period, it is easy to see the issue of death being presented. In the poem titled “320” Dickinson ends her poem with the word death, and in the poem titled “407” death and ghost like images are presented throughout the poems entirety.
The impact of the Civil War on Emily Dickinson seems to be apparent with the subject matter of her poems at that time, but many theorist believe that other events happening at the time also might have been effecting Emily in ways that inspired her to write such a large amount of her work. From 1861 to 1865 Ms. Dickinson wrote approximately half of her 1,800 existing poems. In 1862 Ms. Dickinson wrote an average of one completely finished poem a day and many of these poems were considered to be her best work (Kirk 77). This enormous amount of poetry leaves many scholars wondering what besides the Civil War had such an effect on Ms. Dickinson to cause her to write such a large amount of her work and some of her most passionate work. The most advanced and what many people consider believable theory is that the sudden influx of passionate work came after she experienced a failed love affair. There are many possible candidates who could have been her possible lover, but unfortunately there is no hard evidence that supports any of the men being the one she had an affair with (Kirk 78). Emily Dickinson is one of the greatest American poets to have ever lived, and even though she has been and continues to be studied, there is still so much about her that remains a mystery including the reasons for so much of her work being written in the years of the Civil War.
Bibliography
Dickinson, Emily. “320” and “407.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature: Volume B, Ninth Edition. Ed. Nina Baym. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2012.
Kirk, Connie Ann. Emily Dickinson: A Biography. Westport Ct: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004.
Martin, Wendy. The Cambridge Introduction to Emily Dickinson. United Kingdom, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Taggard, Genevieve. The Life and Mind of Emily Dickinson. New York, NY: Cooper Square Publishers Inc. 1967.
103A: American Literature from 1789 to 1900 