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Barrett, Faith. To Fight Aloud Is Very Brave: American Poetry and the Civil War. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2012. $27.95
Scholars have spent a surprisingly short period of time tending to Emily Dickinson's dynamic and characteristically oblique responses to the greatest historical trauma of her lifetime, the American Civil War. As recently as 1981, a critic as perspicacious as David Porter could claim that "there is no Civil War in the flood of poems from the war years" (115). Flowever, in the nearly 30 years since Shira Wolosky's extraordinary Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War, the "great internecine conflict" has become a dominant topic in the scholarly conversation around Dickinson's engagement with her own historical moment. (See especially Faith Barrett's "Public Selves and Private Spheres.")
One can imagine a number of reasons why it took Dickinson studies so long to come around to a topic of such clear critical interest-not least of which are assumptions about Dickinson's purported lack of interest in the world that never wrote to her. Yet, Dickinson is not the only poet whose Civil War era poetry has suffered long years of neglect. Indeed, until very recently there has been no book-length study of the poetry of the American Civil War. The first such volume, Faith Barrett's To Fight Aloud Is Very Brave, is both hugely winning and hugely important. Barrett has provided the critical framework through which Civil War poetry will be read for a generation or more. In the process, she has also made a signal contribution to the study of Dickinson, Whitman, Melville, and a host of other nineteenth-century American poets who mustered with the "Calvary of Woe."
Barrett's painstaking and much anticipated book highlights the "vital role" poetry played in "developing and disseminating the ideologies of national identity" during and immediately after the American Civil War. Fier unifying claim is that poetry became "the central literary...