From Battlefields Rising: How the Civil War Transformed American Literature (review)

Randall Fuller undertakes to show how the greatest American writers alive and writing during the Civil War—Emerson, Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman, and Dickinson come in for the greatest attention—were transformed by it. Lesser writers take the stage like minor characters, sometimes for surprisingly long appearances in an often engaging book that would be even better if it were more clearly organized. Fuller’s thesis will surprise no one—that the war darkened and complicated the visions of all these writers. In the most extreme case of all, the Civil War so “defeated Hawthorne’s imagination” that the reclusive Democrat who lacked the faith of his Republican neighbors in a war he sometimes saw as being fought to confirm old John Brown’s radical vision finally gave up writing altogether (184). In another house in Concord, Emerson the abolitionist also stopped writing much except for letters, journal entries, and final poems. In the case of the remaining three writers, the darkening of their vision was associated with a quickening of inspiration. Dickinson wrote some eight hundred poems during her “most creative phase” between 1861 and 1865 (86). Melville too was “reinvigorated,” shifting his focus from prose to the poetry he hoped would bring him the glory that had eluded him as a writer of fiction (184). Whitman was likewise darkened and deepened by the war, Fuller contends, and grew into our nation’s “good gray poet” (218).

The problem with this is the lack of evidence. The declines of both Hawthorne and Emerson as writers began before the war. The Marble Faun was published in 1860, well before the Civil War’s first shot was fired. This is a book with none of the imaginative power of either The Scarlet Letter or any of Hawthorne’s finest stories. If Hawthorne had written nothing better, he would have been justly forgotten. Like many other fiction writers, Hawthorne had a peak season before the bloom was off the rose. His literary imagination was already dying before any wounds of war may have added some final collateral damage. Fuller cites Emerson’s “Voluntaries,” a poem of 1863, to show how “sadness,” “uncertainty” and “ambivalence” (135) characterize his wartime work. But an uninspired poem from a writer past his prime is hardly the best evidence for a universally transformed American literature.

By the same token, Fuller’s suggestion that Melville turned from prose to poetry because he hoped “to become the poet laureate of the war” is a simplification (66). We have the testimony of Melville’s own wife that he turned to poetry in 1859. Nor did the war have the beneficent effect on the quality of Melville’s poetry that Randall suggests when he describes “Shiloh. A Requiem (April, 1862)” as “the best poem ever written about the battle” (68). For Randall himself soon adds, “The Battle of Shiloh produced comparatively little imaginative writing. . . . Shiloh seemed to stun and silence the literary imagination” (70). The truth is that Melville’s great and enduring gift was always prose. He never wrote great poetry about anything. Today, his war poems are no more valued, except by specialists, than when they were first criticized by a few readers and ignored by most in 1866. One of Melville’s two great prose masterpieces, Moby-Dick, was written long before the Civil War. The other, Billy Budd, was written long after. The darker of these two books is the one written before the war.

What is truly astonishing about the Civil War is how little demonstrable impact it had on American literature. The one great novel ever inspired by it was published thirty years afterward—Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage (1895). Whitman and Dickinson’s war poetry is no better or worse than the poetry they wrote before or after. Even the degree of darkness that separates their war poems from their others is nowhere near as deep...