Poetry From Old Fields

The underlying tragic insight of Battle-Pieces is . . . the necessity for action in the face of the difficulty of knowing truth.

—Robert Penn Warren, Introduction, Selected Poems of Herman Melville

"All their elegies are sung." With this line Herman Melville ends "To the Slain Collegians," his elegy for the fallen young men from "the homes of the North" and the "seats of the South," in Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866). J. D. McClatchy in his anthology Poets of the Civil War (2005) omits "To the Slain Collegians," which Warren included in his Selected Poems (1971), but includes plenty of other elegies. There are also many well-chosen examples of other forms practiced in the nineteenth century: odes, hymns and anthems, letter poems, ballads, epitaphs, epigrams, brief narratives, hortatory verses, and other forms. There are also political poems on themes of rebellion, slavery, and tyranny. The poems wisely selected represent not only the main kinds of responses to the war but also the radically conflicting sympathies of the poets—with the Union cause or with the Confederacy—and the important postwar theme of reconciliation of North and South.

McClatchy's selection has not only breadth of representation but fine choices within forms, causes, and poets. His book is more selectively critical and much better annotated than Richard Marius's infelicitous The Columbia Book of Civil War Poetry: From Whitman to Walcott (1994). Marius makes many errors in his notes, errors even about the subjects of the poems. McClatchy's notes are helpful, and there are only one or two minor errors.

In the otherwise admirable introduction McClatchy reasserts a highly disputable commonplace about Civil War poetry—that Whitman and Melville are "the two great poets" of the war. Melville, alone, is the great poet of the war. There might well be more of his "battle-pieces" and "aspects of the war" as well as more of Margaret Preston, Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, Paul Hamilton Hayne, and others, while there should be less or none (except possibly for "O Captain! My Captain!") of Whitman. Melville's Battle-Pieces has not yet been recognized as the only genuine poetic masterpiece of the war, probably because it cannot be satisfactorily excerpted. To understand its virtues, one must read, study, and appreciate it as a whole because Melville conceived it as a unified work, as Stanton Garner treats it in his The Civil War World of Herman Melville (1993).

McClatchy offers a good selection from Melville, including "The Portent" on "weird" John Brown, "The March into Virginia, Ending in the First Manassas (July, 1861)," the exquisite "Shiloh, A Requiem (April, 1862)," the deftly ironic "Malvern Hill (July, 1862)," the splendid, richly detailed narrative "The Armies of the Wilderness (1863–1864)," "The College Colonel," the unconventional epitaph "Inscription for Marye's Heights, Fredericksburg," and the admonitory "A Meditation," on reconciliation, which Melville noted was written in the persona of a Northerner who had attended funerals of "a National and a Confederate officer (brothers)" mortally wounded late in the war. He omits "On the Slain Collegians" with its powerfully phrased and deeply meditative and honest lines about the "generous youth," who came from "homes of the North" and "seats of the South," who were "swept by the wind of their place and time," and each of whom "caught the maxims in his temple taught." He asks, "What could they else—North or South? / Each went forth with blessings given / By priest and mothers in the name of Heaven; / And honor in all was chief."

Contrast the depth of this acute depiction of the soldiers' honorable motives with Whitman's self- and sex-obsessed preoccupation throughout Drum Taps (1866) with the beauty of the deaths of handsome young men. Whitman seems to have adopted Edgar Allan Poe's romantic aesthetic in "The Philosophy of Composition" that the death of a beautiful woman is "unquestionably" the most poetical topic...