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That the Civil War has a part to play in Dickinson's poetry is no longer in dispute, though what part it plays is a more complicated question. For Barton Levi St. Armand, the war offered Dickinson an "outward and visible sign of [her] own silent and inner torment" (99); for Shira Wolosky, it provided the occasion for an intense meditation on the impossibility of theodicy (Emily Dickinson 64-98; "Public" 111-20); for Cristanne Miller, it provoked meditations on the contentious term "Liberty" (44-61); for Faith Barrett (108-29), the war prompted the poet's "resistance to assuming fixed ideological positions" (109); and for Betsy Erkkila, "the Civil War became the external symbol of the war against God, church, society and state that she began in the antebellum years" (158-59). While all these assessments shed light on previously overlooked or ahistorically read Dickinson poems, there is one perspective missing that underlies them all. My goal in this paper is to explore what the war meant for Dickinson in her capacity as a poet. During the war years, Dickinson was looking to find her way in poetry and to make her name, posthumously, as a poet. The war, to be sure, reflected Dickinson's inner turmoils and struggles (including her struggle to become a memorable poet), but it also threatened to engulf and trivialize her poetics of suffering and experience. What were her private byways of anguish worth, in comparison with the suffering of the soldiers who fought and died on the battlefield, and of those who survived to grieve for them? What did poems of inner torment matter in a world at war with itself and what kind of fame could she claim for herself, a woman and a poet, compared to the glory earned by the men who died on the battlefield? Dickinson's answers, I aim to show, are various, and variously compelling, slipping between competitive defiance and sympathetic identification, hostility, envy, and admiration. This discussion draws attention to a number of unrecognized civil war poems, including several elegies for the assassinated president. I, too, am interested in illuminating Dickinson's attitudes toward the war, but my primary goal is to call attention not to Dickinson the moral or political thinker, but to Dickinson the poet. It is because she...