largely Northern, literary figures.26 Poetry of the nineteenth century has been critically separated between popular and experimental, and the two are often figured in opposition. This study finds these terms inadequate for the subtle differentiations and overlapping practices between writers like Henry Howard Brownell, for example, a tremendously innovative poet who was one of the most popular writers of the war, and Herman Melville, who reached a narrow audience but shares many of the same concerns and aesthetic practices, and indeed was influenced by Brownell. I show that poets of all orientations responded to wartime events in order to forge a new understanding of the ways language can communicate under the conditions of mass media. What distinguishes writers like Dickinson, Whitman, and Melville from many poets of the period is a largely remote, often retrospective perspective that shifts attention away from war’s immediacies and toward its linguistic effects. Other poets seek to engage the conflict more directly, responding to events as they unfold. While I sometimes distinguish between popular and experimental poetry, in reality they form a continuum. Studying the poems of Dickinson, Whitman, and Melville alongside the work of other poets, many of them well known at the time but less so, if at all, today—Brownell, Elizabeth Akers Allen, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, George Boker, Amanda Jones, and many others—I explore what holds these kinds of poetry together, as well as what differentiates them.
By tracing networks of poetic practice, the study challenges the ways that critics have delineated starkly polarized, monumental forces in studies of Civil War literature: the North and the South. The treatment of the poetry surrounding the Battle of Fort Wagner, for example, shows both internal divisions and allegiances among African American soldiers and white civilians in the North. I raise questions about the difference that gender makes in poetic responses to the war, though the emphasis here is on how poets of both genders join in communal reactions to current events. The poetic networks I trace, moreover, sometimes cross sectional boundaries, even though there are significant differences between print circulation in the two sections that pose problems for extending this study to Southern poetry of the war period. While Northern readers witnessed an unprecedented expansion of mass media networks, Southerners experienced the war years as a struggle to compensate for the loss of the national information system they had depended upon before the war. There were twice as many newspapers in the North as in the South during the period, with four times the circulation.27 With few resources, and while their territory was under siege, the Confederacy sought to develop an independent communication system that could promote the ideals of a newly declared nation. I treat Southern Civil War poetry, then, when it marks a point of direct engagement with Northern poetry: in the first chapter, where images of Northern and Southern weather enter into dialogue, and especially in Chapter 4, which treats the strange parallelism between Northern and Southern expressions of violence against one another in the Siege of Charleston.
In order to map out networks of response, I organize the project, loosely chronologically, by specific events and the poetry that responds to them. A series of case studies, the chapters each treat a significant battle along with the tropes and formal practices that mediate them for readers. Remediating events via literary traditions, poets work through what to think and how to feel about current happenings. The responses accrue within a print network that quickly generates a tropic repertoire within a recognizable poetic field. Collectively and with a sometimes remarkable consistency, given the newness of the news, poems draw out key features and draw on common tropic practices to mythologize, commemorate, and consider the consequences of events. The lines of communication reach outward through newspapers and magazines to the poems of writers like Dickinson, Whitman, and Melville, who drew their inspiration from their peers’ practices and reconfigured them in ways that bear the traces of their engagements.
Chapter 1 examines the physical power of snow to disrupt, freeze, erase, and bury, as well as the power of the tropes that derive from these traits. A bombardment that can seem malevolent but is also just simply a part of an impersonal, ineffable system, snowstorms and battles bear strong resemblances that have been treated in a long poetic tradition, stretching at least back to the Iliad, that deploys snowstorms as a figure of war. Poets—Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Akers Allen among them—capitalize on this resemblance in order to figure war in a mass media age as a circulatory system that envelops both home and battle fronts. The chapter closes with a focused analysis of the Battle of Fort Donelson (February 11–16, 1862), during which a blizzard in Tennessee was as lethal for Union troops as Confederate fire. I read Melville’s poem “Donelson” to show that this poem and the others I discuss absorb material events and use them as a kind of necessary substrata for complex poetic transformations. The conclusion of the chapter addresses the way Confederate poet Henry Timrod adapts Northern climatic figures to offer an alternative grounded in the “SNOW OF SOUTHERN SUMMERS”: cotton.
Like snow, autumn has a long poetic tradition of associations with death and dying. Chapter 2 charts the ways this figure is adapted to address the issue of mass death after the Battle of Antietam, in which thousands of men died in a Maryland cornfield before Confederate troops retreated. The extreme irony of the enormous number of dead men destroying the corn at harvest time gave rise almost immediately, in the journalism as well as the poetry of the time, to the image of the ghastly harvest. I explore the ways romantic harvest imagery is transformed into gruesome, often surreal figurations of environmental devastation that open up the possibility of atheism and the annihilation of natural cycles. This chapter traces the circulation of the image of the ghastly harvest through eyewitness coverage of the event and numerous poetic treatments, from anonymous newspaper poets to Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman.
Chapter 3 takes up figurative practices of commemoration associated with the sonnet and the ode and places them in relation to popular traditions of song in order to make sense of the response to the unprecedented events of the Battle of Fort Wagner (July 18, 1863), one of the first times African American men fought in the war, proving their courage under fire. The battle gave rise to numerous poems seeking to commemorate the event in a way that would capture the democratic promise of racial equality. This chapter traces two conflicting traditions arising from that event. The first is affiliated with African American soldier songs, which celebrate collective agency and a new image of black military manhood. The second tradition focuses on white commander Robert Gould Shaw, whose memory is carried forward in odes and sonnets that elide black agency. Analyzing the powers of commemoration to carry events, selectively, through history, the chapter traces these two traditions through the end of the century’s unveiling of the Robert Gould Shaw monument on the Boston Common. A comparative study of the traditions and their interactions shows the commemorative capabilities and limitations of specific poetic forms. It also indicates the ways memorial traditions can come at the cost of historical knowledge. A diverse range of writers including Anna Quincy Waterston, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Private Frank Myers, Henry Howard Brownell, Marian Bigelow, James Russell Lowell, and Paul Laurence Dunbar help forge these commemorative traditions.
Chapter 4 explores the journalism and poetry surrounding the prolonged siege of Charleston, paying particular attention to the figure of the talking gun. As the center of Confederate intellectual culture and the first state to secede from the Union, Charleston was the focus of particular Union animus for symbolic even more than strategic reasons. The erection of the Parrott Gun, nicknamed the Swamp Angel, off the coast of Charleston made possible one of the first incendiary bombings of civilians in wartime. As communicators of state violence after verbal negotiations have halted, guns, cannons, and ammunition were frequently figured as engaging in a perverse form of speech. This chapter traces dialogues between the talking weapons in Northern and Southern poetry during the escalating violence of the siege. The excess of verbal violence in these poems conveys a sense of the limits of poetic expression when it comes up against the desire to become a weapon of lethal force. The chapter’s concluding section examines poetry by two writers—Henry Timrod and Herman Melville—who
