Bachelor of Arts, University of Toledo, 2010, English

Decades of scholarly research have portrayed Emily Dickinson as living a strikingly reserved personal and social life, distributing her poetry not through publication but through handwritten correspondence. In this paper, however, I examine recent critical scholarship on Emily Dickinson's letters to few close friends that reveal her to be a politically aware citizen. I pair this with a reading of the three poems: “Blazing in Gold, and quenching in purple” (02/29/1864), “Flowers – Well – if anybody” (03/02/1864), and “These are the days when Birds come back” (03/11/1864), published anonymously in a Union-driven newspaper entitled the Drum Beat alongside other contemporary poetry in February and March 1864. This Drum Beat publication shows that, at the crucial historical moment of the Civil War, the notoriously private and unpublished poet's work did, in fact, appear in a public venue, and begs readers to examine the significance of the three specific poems within their original context. While scholars have published legitimate and commonly-accepted readings of these works that emphasize their poetic form and their themes of nature, religion and death, these readings have, for the most part, been consistently non war-related. This paper adds to the recent and exciting scholarship of Dickinson's political awareness. Through close attention to the poems and their context, I argue that these poems serve as Emily Dickinson's public response to the Civil War.

Committee: Dr. Sara Lundquist PhD (Advisor); Dr. Melissa Valiska Gregory PhD (Advisor); Dr. Thomas E. Barden PhD (Other) Subjects: American Literature