For the Confederate and Union Dead: Reflections on Civil War Poetry

Surveying the glut of Civil War literature published before 1930, James Thurber sketched a modest proposal in his New Yorker piece "No More Biographies." To prevent writers from overpopulating the market with war books in the future, he suggested that a federal "Bureau of Publishing Statistics and Biographers' Permits" be established to enforce a system of quotas, permits, and fines. According to one character, the situation had grown exceedingly dire: "Twenty-five million volumes a year were flooding the country." If all these volumes "were laid end to end, they would cover the entire surface of the United States, ten times over." Worried that "a war of aggression and conquest," comparable to the Civil War, might be necessary "to get space for all the books," Thurber proposed fining authors according to the popularity of their subjects: $5,000 for Grant, $4,000 for Jackson, $3,250 for Stuart. "A maximum fine of fifty thousand dollars and two years' imprisonment or both" would be imposed on authors who wrote about Lincoln. Writers who tried to circumvent the rules by writing books with titles such as If Lincoln Had Shot Booth, If Booth Had Hit Mrs. Lincoln, or If Mrs. Lincoln Had Shot Mrs. Booth would face prosecution by the Supreme Court.

As Thurber's satire made clear eight decades ago, the Civil War has been written about so often that it is in danger of becoming a cliché. "The three most written-about subjects of all time," a historian recently declared, "are Jesus, the Civil War, and the Titanic" (New Yorker, April 16, 2012). Reflecting on the Titanic disaster, another cataclysmic event being commemorated this year, Daniel Mendelsohn recently speculated: "The inexhaustible interest suggests that the Titanic's story taps a vein much deeper than the morbid fascination that has attached to other disasters. . . . If the Titanic has gripped our imagination so forcefully for the past century, it must be because of something bigger than any fact of social or political or cultural history. To get to the bottom of why we can't forget it, you have to turn away from the facts and consider the realm to which the Titanic and its story properly belong: myth." The same could be said about the Civil War. The mythic aspect of the conflict grips our imaginations with irresistible force. But to what mythic paradigm does the Civil War conform? Was the war a tragedy in which heroes pursued ideals with the hubris that left the stages of Greek and Shakespearean tragedies littered with carnage? Or did the war resemble a classical comedy—a conflict ending happily in liberation and reunion?

Although Confederates and Unionists met at veterans' reunions after the war and worked to heal a politically divided country, from a twenty-first-century perspective it is hard to envision the Civil War's mythos as comedic rather than tragic. Wounds still persist. Having plunged into an inferno, America floundered through the purgatorio of postwar reconstruction and counter-reconstruction. A harmonious union remained an ideal evoked in vacuous political rhetoric at odds with reality. As we look back at the Civil War, feelings associated with the "tragic sublime"—horror and awe— prevail rather than the joy elicited by comedy's reconciliations.

Scholars have not been alone in considering the Civil War in terms of a tragic mythos. Some of the war's most famous participants, such as Robert E. Lee, thought of the war as a tragedy with a predestined outcome even while battling ferociously to affect that outcome. Having studied Longinus's On the Sublime, the epics of Homer and Virgil, and other classical literature as a cadet at West Point, Lee was well prepared to view the war through literary as well as military lenses. On May 5, 1861, a few weeks after hostilities had commenced at Fort Sumter, he sounded like Virgil's Sybil at Cumae warning Aeneas of his bloody future: "I foresee that the country will have to pass through a terrible ordeal, a necessary expiation . . . for our national sins." One of the national sins was slavery. Lee had...