Did Emily Dickinson write about the war? Does it matter?

When looking through Dickinson’s poems I find it quite hard to tell if she’s writing about the war. Some are more obvious than others, but quite a lot of her poems certainly have suggestions of war.

In Poem 596 as Dickinson uses war-related words such as ‘victory’, ‘bullets’, ‘imperial conduct’ and ‘braveries’. If it were not for these words I wouldn't have known the poem was about war. In poem 656, Dickinson constantly writes about blood and death. As well as mentioning the actual word ‘blood’, she also uses words such as ‘artery’, ‘vein’, ‘shower of stain’, ‘scarlet rain’, ‘ruddy pools’ and ‘vermilion’. Although war is not the only aspect connected to blood and death, we can assume that this poem was written about the war because of the time it was written. Also, as Emily Dickinson isolated herself and as a woman could not fight in the war, there was no way she could have known what it was like, other than what was in the media at the time. Like most people, possibly the first thing that came to Dickinson’s mind when thinking about the war was death and blood. This shows that poem 656 must be about the war.

Does it matter that Emily Dickinson wrote about the war? I think it does, especially to Dickinson herself. As we can tell by reading her poems, she was emotionally affected by the war.  I think it is important for people to express their feelings in any way possible; in Dickinson’s case it is poetry.