journalistic reports but through poetry. When Confederates fired on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, and Union troops surrendered, Union poets were forced to admit an embarrassing defeat. In Harper’s Weekly, a poem entitled “The War” muses on the event:
Fort Sumter taken! and its siege will fill
No bloody chronicles in after-time.
It was a tame bombardment, if you will,
But in its consequences how sublime!
The first boom of the cannon sent a thrill
Not through the North alone, for every clime
Where liberty is prized, struck with deep sorrow,
Mourns for to-day, and fears the dread to-morrow.15
Notable in the poem is the lack of heroicization of the event. It would be difficult to turn such an anticlimactic defeat into stirring legend, and the speaker says as much. With an obligation—newly felt—to adhere to the facts, the speaker turns to the moment’s implications for “liberty” rather than commemorating an unlikely battle. With mixed feelings, the poem combines the political promotion of Union ideals with an adherence to journalistic facts in order to supplement news reports. This journalistic fidelity combined with an editorial function grounds much of the poetry of the period. Journalism’s influence on poetry is evident in a new fascination with facticity; poetry of the Civil War explores the incantatory, gripping power of facts in aesthetic configurations (fig. 3).
But the very conditions that bring together poetry and events also foreground the difference between them. The intense relations between poetry and the news in a mass media war register in a range of formal and topical ways that this study will explore. Alongside Holmes, poets insist that wartime “impressions” literally imprint themselves on the minds of readers, generating new mental states. The necessity of figuration in the translation of the physical event to verbal sign becomes the subject of inquiry, as writers seek to articulate the ways that lines of communication convey the shocks of war to readers. Civil War poetry tests figurative language’s capacity to forge correspondences between writing and fighting. Because “perpetual intercommunication” generates a direct line between distance and presence, violence and inscription become exchangeable. At its most extreme, the equation makes writing lethal and war articulate in the print culture of the period. Mass media networks destabilize the relation between figure and ground, and poetry explores the consequences of this instability. Socially constructive rather than purely “literary,” poems articulate correspondences among different parts of the informational system, generating an interface to the war for readers at home via trope. Tropic practices are unsettled and reconfigured as a result. Figurative language is not the privileged realm of poetry, of course, as Holmes’s essay shows, but poetry offers a crucial vehicle to explore transformations in figuration and their implications. Poems formulate a transitive relation between language and event to quite various ends; those formulations are a heritage of the period, even if much of the poetry has been forgotten.
Figure 3. Anon., “Iron on Iron—A Monitor Song,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, May 23, 1863, 133. The song tells the story of the First Battle of Charleston Harbor, which took place on April 7, 1863. In spite of high hopes for the U.S. fleet of ironclads, the nine ships were unable to penetrate the harbor’s line of defenses. Like many other poems of the Civil War period, “Iron on Iron” was published soon after the battle and offers an interpretation of the conflict in historical and nationalist terms. Courtesy of HarpWeek.
Receiving news bears a troubled relation to making news in U.S. Civil War poems. The conjunction of a new mass media network with the mass death that resulted from a full-scale war foregrounded the gap between vicarious and direct experiences of the conflict. For strangers and loved ones alike, reading the news may have been analogous to receiving a battle wound—Dickinson warned that “‘twill riddle like a shot”—but it certainly wasn’t the same.16 Even so, reading the news was an experience in itself, and many Civil War poems mark the difference.17 Poems enforce a difference between direct and indirect forms of experience while nevertheless positing relations between them. In doing so they mark productive distinctions between the distant suffering on the battlefield, reports of that suffering, and readers’ reception of those reports.
Meditating on these lines of connection, popular Civil War poet George Boker envisions newsprint as a circulatory system, or a system of recirculation, for the blood of the dead. War news animates, nourishes, and brings together readers over a common, luridly fascinating topic. He connects lines of print to arteries opened on the battlefield:
Blood, blood! The lines of every printed sheet
Through their dark arteries reek with running gore;
At hearth, the board, before the household door,
‘Tis the sole subject with which neighbors meet.
Girls at the feast, and children in the street,
Prattle of horrors; flash their little store
Of simple jests against the cannon’s roar,
As if mere slaughter kept existence sweet.18
Like Holmes, Boker imagines a national body connected through lines of mass communication. Stressing the continuity between the physical conflict and the talk about it, between the “cannon’s roar” and the “flash” of “jests,” large-scale killing and the “prattle of horrors,” he is critical of the vicarious pleasure that derives from the remote reception of violence. He also acknowledges that such a dynamic is unavoidable, for he cannot possibly exclude his own poetic lines from his condemnation; the “dark arteries” of his “printed sheet” also “reek with running gore.” Or not—his metaphor shows that people on the home front are feeding on bloody impressions, not blood; their vicarious pleasure depends upon print’s removal from physical violence. The horror that Boker seeks to convey is one of abstraction. There seems to be no way around it; a compulsive circulation of violent figures animates the public, who forge community from the dead without understanding the cost. When battle lines become headlines or lines of poetry—and they must because the conflict is on everyone’s mind—animating force is transferred from the dead to the living at the cost of understanding. The transitive relation between physical violence and verbal expression means that people on the home front appropriate soldiers’ sacrifice while overlooking it.
While poets adapted their skills in order to render themselves useful during the national crisis, their participation was by no means uniform. Foregrounding the difference between the bloody conflict and its verbal representations raised questions about how properly to write about wartime experience. Poets had the complex task of discovering or creating the purpose of art in wartime. Not everyone was as assuredly evenhanded as Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who, in his “Letter to a Young Contributor” in the Atlantic Monthly of April 1862, insists that “It is not needful here to decide which is intrinsically the better thing, a column of a newspaper or a column of attack, Wordsworth’s ‘Lines on Immortality’ or Wellington’s Lines of Torres Vedras; each is noble, if nobly done, though posterity seems to remember literature the longest.”19 An officer in the war who was wounded, a man of action as well as words, Higginson balances literary and military pursuits against each other, using the words “column” and “line” for orders of both type and people, emphasizing the difference between them but valorizing both. Higginson suggests that while poets may in earlier times have been considered “pleasant
