"Words for the Hour": A New Anthology of American Civil War Poetry

PREFACE

PREFACE During the American Civil War, people from all walks of life—famous, unknown , scholarly, and uneducated—and from all segments of the population in the United States responded to the war by writing poetry.Thousands of these poems , representing a variety of perspectives and commemorating various events, were published in newspapers and magazines; others were written in letters, diaries , and scrapbooks. Beginning only shortly after the end of the war and continuing through the present, editors gathered hundreds of these poems and songs—sometimes collecting only texts written during and explicitly about the conflict and sometimes ranging more broadly. William Gilmore Simms must have begun collecting poems for his War Poetry of the South immediately following the war to achieve publication in ; Emily V. Mason published The Southern Poems of the War in ; and in his  volume The Civil War in Song and Story, –, Frank Moore reprinted much of the short fiction and poetry he had published so far in The Rebellion Record, a twelve-volume “diary” of Civil War documents, newspaper accounts, and literature put out by Moore between  and . The  Bugle-Echoes: A Collection of the Poems of the Civil War Northern and Southern, edited by Francis F. Browne, aims to present “a record of the feelings and experiences of that heroic epoch” through poetry, as Browne puts it; in the  compilation The Blue and the Gray: The Best Poems of the Civil War, Claudius Meade Capps, its editor, similarly selects what he regards as the best of the poetry published in earlier collections; and the  Columbia Book of Civil War Poetry: From Whitman to Walcott, edited by Richard Marius and Keith W. Frome, includes over a century of poetic responses to the war. Especially these, and other, early volumes have been useful to us in making our own compilation of Civil War poetry, which focuses on the period from  to —including a handful of both antebellum poems on issues leading up to the war and postbellum responses to the war’s conclusion. While we, too, aim in part to present “a record” of responses to the Civil War and to collect the best of the poetry written during the war years, our volume has both a larger and a more complex intent. In our experience, volumes of Civil War poetry tend to focus on poems of heroism or battle, with a few very famous and popular exceptions. In ours, by contrast, we attempt to include poetry written by women as well as men, noncombatants as well as soldiers or veterans, and pacifists as well as supporters of both the North and the South.Similarly,whereas some editors lean toward popular representations of the war and others toward the work of xv more canonical poets, we have tried to balance presentation of what a contemporary reader would have found in popular periodicals and newspapers with a generous selection of the work of major poets writing extensively in response to the war, sometimes in dedicated volumes—not just Walt Whitman, with his Drum-Taps, and Herman Melville, with his Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, but also Southern poets such as George Moses Horton and Henry Timrod. Additionally, we include generous selections of poems by writers rarely regarded as Civil War poets, either because they did not publish volumes of poems explicitly dedicated to the war—for example, Sarah Piatt—or because they did not publish during the period —such as Emily Dickinson, who published only ten poems during her lifetime , and Obadiah Baker, whose work is first published here. Hundreds of poems were set to music and sung in public gatherings or sung by troops, in camp and while marching to and from battle, during the war. Many songs were also later published as poems. While we have not attempted a representative sample of Civil War songs as such, we do include here a few of the best known, and many of the poems we reprint were put to music and became popular as songs during the war. Dan Emmett’s song “I Wish I Was in Dixie’s Land” became so highly identified with the Confederate cause that it served as a popular national anthem, especially after it was performed at Jefferson Davis’s inauguration as president of the Confederacy. Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” was almost equally popular in the North, although it was first published as a poem in a prestigious literary journal. The African...