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History, Language and God Public and Private, Language and God in Emily Dickinson’s War Poetry Shira Wolosky Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his essay “The Poet,” declared that “The poet is representative. He stands among partial men for the complete man, and apprises us not of his wealth, but of the common wealth.” Within the norms of the nineteenth-century, this would seem to relegate women poets entirely to the status of “partial men.” In the much accepted division of life into separate spheres, women were barred access to the “common wealth” as public space Instead, women remained officially restricted to the domestic sphere – what De Toqueville describes as “the narrow circle of domestic interests and duties” – while men found their places in the “public” world. Women thus could seemingly never achieve Emerson’s representative stance – neither in its often overlooked sense (but the one most fully realized by Whitman) of the poet as public figure; nor in the more familiar sense of a rich and powerful autonomous subjectivity, which, however, finds and asserts itself in speaking for and to the wider community. In contrast, women seem at most to reflect in their work their own domestic imprisonment and its costs. In this circumscribed state, the woman poet seems cut off from history, more or less idle and more or less impotent with regard to the public course of events. She thus seems unable to address herself, as poets should, to a surrounding community, representing its true nature and direction; while also, lacking that strong sense of self and of identity which gives the poet his authority – what makes him, in Harold Bloom’s quite conscious phrase, the central man, whose words can represent his world. In the case of Emily Dickinson, these assignments seem almost hyperbolically justified. If ever there were a private poet, surely it is she: a woman famous in her own lifetime for reclusion, accompanied by a full array of seductive, eccentric concealment