Ashes of the Mind: War and Memory in Northern Literature, 1865-1900

Chapter 1. Cambridge Interiors: Lowell’s Commemoration Ode

1 Cambridge Interiors Lowell’s Commemoration Ode Well, this is the task before us, to accept the benefit of the War; it has not created our false relations, they have created it. It simply demonstrates the rottenness it found. We watch its course as we did the cholera, which goes where predisposition already existed, took only the susceptible, set its seal on every putrid spot, and on none other; followed the limestone, and left the granite. So the War. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals We will meet but we will miss him, There will be one vacant chair, We will linger to caress him When we breathe our evening prayer. “The Vacant Chair,” a popular song from the 1860s Two poems of moderate length, each remembered in a different way and mirroring the rise and fall and rise of its respective author’s literary reputation, appeared in the months immediately following the end of the Civil War. James Russell Lowell read the first version of his “Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration, July 21, 1865,” on the date memorialized in the poem’s title, and in November 1865 Walt Whitman published his brief collection Sequel to Drum-Taps (the first poem of which was “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”) along with the longer Drum-Taps collection, the latter having been withdrawn from publication by Whitman a few days after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. 29 Lowell, a respected Boston literary practitioner who had been a committed antislavery campaigner, had composed his Commemoration Ode in the shadow of a personal knowledge of the human cost of the Union victory : three of his nephews had been killed on active duty between 1862 and 1865.1 The invitation from Professor Francis J. Child, coordinator of the planning subcommittee for musical and literary presentations, to produce an appropriate elegy for the memorial ceremony reflected a recognition not only of his extended family’s sacrifice but also of Lowell ’s stature as a poet and professor of Romance languages and literatures at Harvard College. The social context for the emergence of Lowell’s poem offers a distinct contrast to the unofficial and fragile public reputation of his fellow poet Walt Whitman, and the irregular publication history of Whitman’s now more canonical and established elegy for Lincoln. Whitman, in contrast to Lowell and his largely placid relationship with his intellectual and social milieu, had already suffered the displeasure of one Washington politician, who fired him from the Department of the Interior that same summer of 1865 because of the “moral scandal” embodied in Leaves of Grass.2 During the 1850s and 1860s, Whitman had only rarely met with an expression of direct personal hostility followed by official sanction (and on this occasion he quickly found employment elsewhere with the federal government), but uncomprehending dismissal of his poetry was something with which he was more familiar.3 Henry James’s unsigned review of Drum-Taps in The Nation in November 1865, for example, was marked by a sarcastic impatience with Whitman’s poetic experiments. A lecture on poetry and the war by Oliver Wendell Holmes, delivered before a large audience in New York during the same month, did not mention a single poem by Whitman or give any indication that Holmes even knew of his existence .4 Such anecdotes underline, at the very least, that what today’s critical consensus would regard as a traditional exercise by a popular but ultimately derivative writer of verse (the Commemoration Ode) and a unique work by a powerfully original American poetic voice (“Lilacs”) occupied rather different niches in the cultural hierarchy of nineteenthcentury America. As the ebb and flow of canon formation has shown, those characteristics that confirmed the originality and stature of Whitman ’s work for readers in the twentieth century were precisely those that rendered it confusing and offensive for the greater number of his 30 c a m b r i d g e i n t e r i o r s contemporaries. To put it another way, the presence and relative absence of texts reveal, perhaps involuntarily, which strands of poetic history we as a society have consented to remember and which ones we find now slightly embarrassing to recall. James Russell Lowell’s principal poetic output, consisting of the four major public poems (the Harvard Commemoration Ode, “Memoriae Positum,” “An Ode for the Fourth...