A Companion to American Poetry. Группа авторов

as well as chronicling her profound struggles with the full range of emotions about life’s most primal experiences.

      Dickinson was a modernist before her time, and her terse, often enigmatic, poems with staccato phrasing punctuated with dashes, syncopated rhythms, and few rhymes are the antithesis of the rigid rhymes and meters of nineteenth-century sentimental American poetry. Upending the Victorian moralistic interpretation that a peaceful, painless death indicates a Heavenly destination while pain and agony portend eternal damnation, Dickinson portrays death as a quotidian bodily process. In “I heard a Fly buzz” (#465; written c. 1862), she writes that “The Eyes around – had wrung them dry –/And Breaths were gathering firm” (p. 223, lines 5–6).

      Dickinson’s refusal to devalue life on earth in exchange for the promise of a Christian afterlife is threaded through her poems as can be seen in “To be alive – is Power –” (#677; written c. 1863):

      To be alive — is Power —

      Existence — in itself —

      Without a further function —

      Omnipotence — Enough —

      To be alive — and Will!

      ‘Tis able as a God —

      The Maker — of Ourselves — be what —

      Such being Finitude!

(pp. 335–336)

      After conquering her profound fear of death and its aftermath, Dickinson’s hard-won acceptance of mortality transmuted her anxiety into a powerful conviction that this life is all the more precious:

      Did life’s penurious length

      Italicize its sweetness,

      The men that daily live

      Would stand so deep in joy […]

(#1717, 1945,⁷ p. 697, lines 1–4)

      Dickinson’s poetry was boldly original, not only because she refused to write lines that were formulaically rhymed and metered but also because she wanted to capture the dynamic process of unfolding thought; this radical approach to writing poetry foreshadowed the early twentieth-century modernist stream of consciousness. Learning as she goes, the poet takes risks and confronts dangers in order to embrace each moment as fully as possible. The reward for taking this perilous journey is the hard-won emotional wisdom and balanced perspective gained from experience.

In the Civil War era, while a belief in the Christian afterlife remained prevalent, ideas about death and dying also encompassed ideas about heroism and nation. Mark Schantz notes that cultural notions surrounding death “made it easier to kill and to be killed […] They knew that their heroic achievements would be cherished forever by posterity […] They saw how notions of full citizenship were predicated on the willingness of men to lay down their lives” (2008, p. 2). In Whitman’s elegy mourning the assassination of Lincoln in 1865, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” (1865⁸), we see again that national leaders can serve as exemplars for how to live and how to be mourned. This was a trend in writing of the time: eulogies of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson when they both died on July 4, 1826 emphasize their “spirit of resignation” in the face of death (Schantz 2008, p. 23) that continued to be prized, and Schantz argues that such writing “provided Americans with scripts for how to confront, and embrace, death itself” (2008, p. 19).

The speaker’s grief in “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” is national in the sense that the speaker mourns not only for Lincoln—“Nor for you, for one alone,/Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring” (lines 46–47). Lincoln’s coffin becomes a symbol of the coffins of all men who were killed in the war and thus an expression of American unity in grief. Whitman recounts the “Coffin that passes through lanes and streets” (line 33) when Lincoln’s coffin was brought on a tour around the nation, and describes how Lincoln is grieved by crowds of mourners with a “thousand voices rising strong and solemn” (line 40). For Whitman, the act of mourning the deceased individual in the funeral importantly memorializes the significance of the person who has died. Perhaps such symbolic displays as that for Lincoln were comforting since these rituals were not always possible during the war. Whitman’s poem also recalls associations between patriotism and burial implicit in the rural cemetery movement. The rural cemetery was supposed to “elevate and strengthen patriotism” (French 1975, p. 81), especially by providing a sense of history (p. 89). The increased emphasis on the funeral was also reflected in the increasing importance of embalming, which facilitated Lincoln’s posthumous tour. During the Civil War, bodies were often embalmed to be shipped home to their families, and this practice grew increasingly popular after the war for logistical reasons (such as transporting the body of someone who lived far from family) as well as sentimental ones (Farrell 1980, pp. 158–159). Embalming continued as the funeral ceremony and celebration and preservation of the body became magnified in the modern era⁹ amid heightened anxiety about death.

Modernist rejection of religious and civic authority heightened skepticism about the concept of eternal life in Heaven after death. Like Emily Dickinson, the modernists emphasize this life on Earth as the only life there is. World War I (1914–1918) was the first war to involve so many nations that had access to such a high level of destructive technology (Hobsbawm 1994, pp. 22–23). These years also saw the 1918 flu pandemic, which resulted in more deaths than the war.¹⁰ With death so prevalent, and stripped of the comforting beliefs of earlier eras to modulate the fear of death or the grief at the loss of loved ones, modernist poets faced death with contradictory processes of acceptance, hopelessness, and denial.

      In a December 1934 essay in The Atlantic titled “Death is a Stranger,” M. Beatrice Blankenship argued that the loss of traditional rituals and beliefs made mourning deceased loved ones more challenging (cited in Samuel 2013, p. 25). By the 1930s, most people died in hospitals rather than at home. Death—a familiar presence in Puritan times—seemed distant except when it was too close: with longer lifespans than ever, people were less resigned to the idea that they or their children might die at any moment. People also had less interaction with the dead body than ever before. While most funerals were still held in the home during the first half of the twentieth century, to an increasing extent they took place in funeral homes (Farrell 1980, pp. 172–173). Meanwhile, care for the body had by then largely transitioned into the hands of professionals (Farrell 1980, pp. 148–157).

Increased secularization also brought changes in how people lived and thought about death. Wallace Stevens’ “Sunday Morning” (1923¹¹) centers lived experience in the world as a source of pleasure and meaning:

      Why should she give her bounty to the dead?

      What is divinity if it can come

      Only in silent shadows and in dreams?

      Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,

      In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else

      In any balm or beauty of the earth,

      Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?

      (lines 16–22)

      Life, Stevens argues, is more meaningful because of death, because it prevents us from taking for granted life’s fleeting pleasures: “[Death] causes boys to pile new plums and pears/On disregarded plate” (lines 73–74). This idea was similar to ideas found in the brief years of the “New Death” ideal. This movement began around 1910 and its advocates, like Winifred Kirkland, suggested that a realistic appraisal of death and its presence in everyday life might cause people to live better and face