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 INTRODUCTION “Words for the Hour” Reading the American Civil War through Poetry F B In September of , twenty-three-year-old Obadiah Ethelbert Baker left his wife and home and enlisted in the Second Iowa Cavalry Volunteers. Baker fought in the Union army for the next three and half years, taking part in battles in Mississippi , Missouri, Louisiana, and Tennessee, before being honorably discharged in April of . During the war years, Baker kept detailed accounts of daily events in the form of journal entries, which he addressed and regularly sent to his wife; by the war’s end, he had filled thirteen volumes of pocket diaries with his responses to the war, responses that include journal entries and long poems, as well as the lines of verse he sometimes used to close out journal entries.1 Over the next forty years, Baker would continue drafting and revising his poetry; between  and the s, he wrote about two hundred poems, many of which respond either directly or indirectly to his experiences on Civil War battlefields and in military hospitals. Baker’s example is instructive insofar as it underlines the crucial role that poetry played in American culture by the middle of the nineteenth century. The American Revolution had prompted an outpouring both of patriot ballads and of poems in praise of Washington and other military heroes. With the rise of public education in the s and s, the centrality of poetry to American cultural life was effectively codified as part of schoolroom practice. Children across the United States memorized and recited patriotic poems both for the classroom and for I thank Cristanne Miller, first for proposing the idea of this anthology and then for offering to coedit the volume with me. Her expertise and advice have been essential and inspiring at every stage of the project. I am particularly grateful for her generous and helpful responses to this essay. I also thank the students in my Civil War literature courses at California State University at Pomona and at Lawrence University for their suggestive responses to many of the poems I discuss here. . The papers of Obadiah Ethelbert Baker are housed at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. public performances. Poetry—recited by both adults and children—was also regularly included as part of the lectures and meetings organized by church leaders, abolitionists, temperance and women’s rights activists, and other reformers of the nineteenth century. Poets like Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote civic-minded occasional poems for events such as the unveiling of the Revolutionary War monument at the Concord Bridge in Massachusetts.Emerson’s“Concord Hymn”was distributed as a broadside and sung at the dedication of the monument on July , ; it then went on to circulate in newspapers and achieved widespread popular acclaim because of the numerous occasions on which it was recited by schoolchildren. The example of Emerson’s “Concord Hymn” underlines how ubiquitous poetry was in American life at this time, both in oral performance and in print. Americans not only heard poems at many civic events, but they also read poetry in broadsides, pamphlets, daily newspapers, and magazines, as well as in books and anthologies. The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed explosive growth in the number of newspapers and magazines available to American readers , and publishers delighted in the equally rapid growth in their subscriber base. Poems that appeared in newspapers and magazines were read aloud after dinner around the fireplace,copied into album books of favorite poems,and sent through the mail to family and friends. Not surprisingly, many Americans also wrote poetry as a pastime or a hobby. These poems celebrated births and birthdays, addressed sweethearts, mourned losses, and reflected on American history and heroes; some writers sent their poems to newspapers and magazines. Far more, however, contented themselves with circulating their work through letters to friends and relatives and reading it aloud at social gatherings. If we consider Obadiah Ethelbert Baker’s output of two hundred poems in its historical context, his achievement becomes not something exceptional but rather a representative example of a wider cultural practice. The national crisis of the Civil War did nothing to lessen Americans’ interest in poetry; because poetry was seen as an integral part of American political culture, the war only heightened Americans’ commitment to the discursive strategies of poetry. Yet the onset of war wrought changes—some subtle, some pronounced —in the landscape of that poetry. Boundaries between once-distinct...

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