How did the American Civil War affect Emily Dickinson’s poetry?

Although Emily Dickinson wrote very little directly about the American Civil War, her awareness of the conflict's widespread tragedies served to empower her poetic drive.1

During the war years, her work shifted from expressing immediate pain or exultation toward a celebration of self-command and achievement. While she continued to explore themes of human desire and the search for the absolute, the war influenced her to write with increasing frequency about self-reliance, personal triumph, and hard-won liberty. Ultimately, the perfect transcendence she had previously associated with heaven became linked in her poetry to a vision of supreme artistry. As she noted regarding wartime bereavements, the intensity of the era made life feel "mightier" and expanded her sense of what she had the power to be.1