To Fight Aloud Is Very Brave: American Poetry and the Civil War

1. Shaping Communities Through Popular Song

17 chapter one SHAPING COMMUNITIES THROUGH POPULAR SONG During the early years of the Civil War, three American songs became essential anthems for the communities that adopted them, and each of these songs helped define and affirm the bonds that constituted those communities. These three songs were Dan Emmett’s “I Wish I Was in Dixie’s Land,” the Sorrow Song “Let My People Go: A Song of the ‘Contrabands ’” (now better known under the title “Go Down, Moses”), and Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” a variant version of the popular soldiers’ song “John Brown’s Body.” Underlining the powerful legacy of Civil War culture, all three songs continue to shape conflicting versions of American identity today. Describing the ways that language works to establish the “imagined community” of the nation, Benedict Anderson emphasizes the centrality of poetry and song to that dynamic process, noting that the singing of the national anthem, for example, allows participants an experience of “contemporaneous community”; collective singing of anthems links disparate participants through an experience of simultaneity and selflessness that Anderson calls “unisonance.”1 Given the centrality of singing to American public rituals of the nineteenth century—songs were routinely and collectively sung in church, before and after lectures, and as part of school-based ceremonies—it is no surprise that songs played such a central role in defining and disseminating Civil War–era ideologies. While analysis of the full range of popular song of the Civil War period lies beyond the scope of this project, an examination of the writing and revision of these three representative  chapter one 18 songs will foreground the parallels between the circulation of song and the circulation of poetry during the war. Readings of these three songs will thus serve as a prologue to my analysis of Civil War poetry, underlining the extraordinary ideological flexibility that both song and poetry offered writers, singers, readers, and listeners in this era. Reading the three songs alongside one another reveals how their skillful layering of pronouns maximizes the number of readers and listeners who can identify with the national constituencies the lyrics propose. In performing, a singer inhabits a song physically, drawing breath and calling notes and words out of his or her body; the memorizing and reciting of poetry requires an analogous process of physically inhabiting a text and making it one’s own. What these two closely related genres offer then is a physical experience of connection to a text. Because of its comparative brevity, its emotional intensity, and also its sonic components, the genre of poetry lends itself particularly readily to this experience of shared feeling. While reading a poem aloud or singing a song can be a powerful experience for an individual, the intensity of that experience is often heightened when the recitation or singing is collective. Many of the poets this project will consider are clearly invested in writing the kind of poems that could create a powerful experience of shared community. Popular song played a crucial role in reshaping poetry’s audiences, offering writers proliferating avenues for reaching wartime readers. Poems written to be performed or sung in public resist easy categorization as “literary,” “popular ,” or “political” texts because of the broad range of audiences they were able to reach. In forging communities out of those audiences, such poems worked to smooth over or conceal underlying differences that threatened to turn the experience of unisonance into dissonance; the highly permeable boundary between poetry and song enabled both genres to perform this unifying function. The three songs I will consider all speak to the issues of race and regional allegiance that propelled the nation toward war. Moreover, these songs also foreground the fluid ease with which preexisting compositions —either the music or the lyrics to a song—could be reappropriated for different political purposes, a frequent occurrence in popular song writing of this era. Proliferating variant versions of song lyrics resulted in what might be called a pentimento effect: traces of the earlier version of shaping communities through popular song 19 the song would remain in the singer’s or listener’s memory as he or she sang or heard the variant version, shaping the song’s underlying ideological commitments. The permeable boundary between poetry and song worked to sustain this effect by enabling multiple lyrics to be written for the same popular tunes. The...