My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson
by Alfred Habegger
Random House, 764 pp., $35.00
Among the 295 poems that Emily Dickinson is believed to have written during 1863, at the height of the Civil War, are several arresting short lyrics that address the subject of art as a response to inflicted pain. “Essential Oils—are wrung—,” she writes in one poem. “The Attar from the Rose/Be not expressed by Suns—alone—/It is the gift of Screws.” And in another, less frequently quoted:
Must be a Wo—
A loss or so—
To bend the eye
Best Beauty’s way—
But—once aslant
It notes Delight
As difficult
As Stalactite—
Here the form of the poem—stalac- tite-thin iambic dimeter, dangling downward from the opening line, from which a lopped-off “It” or “There” still sticks to the roof of the cave—mirrors its subject of “difficult delight.” So do the rhymes, “aslant” like their subject: the “eye” bent toward Beauty’s “way.” In “Must be a Wo,” we see Dickinson working out an idea best expressed in one of her most familiar poems, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes,” where “formal” refers not only to the need for ceremony in response to pain (“the Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs—”) but also to the satisfactions of aesthetic form. As Robert Frost, her fellow poet of Amherst, put it: “Anyone who has achieved the least form to be sure of it, is lost to the larger excruciations.”
As biographical “evidence,” reliable documentation of a life lived, a poem like “Must be a Wo” is both everything and nothing. Everything, because what possible events in Emily Dickinson’s life could matter more to us than the roughly two thousand poems she wrote and then carefully placed, most of them unread by anyone but herself, in her bedroom drawer? Nothing, because the poem is silent about what specific “loss or so” (deaths in the Civil War? disappointments in love? eye troubles?) this speaker is talking about, let alone whether we are meant to identify the speaker as Emily Dickinson at age thirty-two. In one of her rare directives on how her poems were to be read, Dickinson echoed many other poets in warning that “when I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse—it does not mean—me—but a supposed person.” This statement would seem to “dissolve any linkage,” as Alfred Habegger notes in his new life of Dickinson, between her first-person speakers and herself.
Emily Dickinson is better known for her privations—her “woes” real or imagined—than for her advantages, and it is partly to right the balance that Habegger has written My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson. Neither the wars nor the books are what Walt Whitman had in mind when he claimed that “the real war will never get in the books.” Although Dickinson wrote nearly half of her 1,789 known poems during the Civil War, and stitched many of these into little manuscript booklets for safekeeping, she had little to say about the …
