"Sounding the Wilderness": Representations of the Heroic in Herman Melville's Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War

In August of 1866 Herman Melville surprised his reading public by publishing a book of poetry entitled Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War. A parenthetical statement of purpose prefaces this collection:

[With few exceptions, the Pieces in this volume originated in an impulse imparted by the fall of Richmond. They were composed without reference to collective arrangement, but, being brought together in review, naturally fall into the order assumed.

The events and incidents of the conflict—making up a whole, in varied amplitude, corresponding with the geographical area covered by the war—from these but a few themes have been taken, such as for any cause chanced to imprint themselves upon the mind.

The aspects which the strife as a memory assumes are as manifold as are the moods of involuntary meditation—moods variable, and at times widely at variance. Yielding instinctively, one after another, to feelings not inspired from any one source exclusively, and unmindful, without purposing to be, of consistency, I seem, in most of these verses, to have but placed a harp in a window, and noted the contrasted airs which wayward winds have played upon the strings.] (Battle-Pieces, n.p.)

Not surprisingly, Melville, a notoriously private author, marks the end of his seven-year literary silence with parentheses. He uses punctuation to hide his entrance into the realm of social commentary. Melville's reference to "an impulse imparted by the fall of Richmond" suggests that this work is an attempt to counteract the harsher forces of Reconstruction and a "revolt from acting on paper a part any way akin to that of the live dog to the dead lion" (Battle-Pieces, "Supplement," 264). ¹

The subordination of purpose that begins Battle-Pieces emphasizes two contradictory impulses at work here. At the same time that Melville wishes to shelter his public reappearance, this work wishes to impact the post-war political scene by representing it. Timothy Sweet, in his seminal study Traces of War, argues that whereas Whitman and the Civil War photographers draw a pastoral and picturesque frame around the war, Melville's Battle-Pieces reflects critically on the attempt to naturalize the violence of this war and its ideological implications (Sweet, 7). Building upon the foundation articulated by Sweet, this essay takes a closer look at Melville's representations of the heroic. It contends that Battle-Pieces, released the same year as George Barnard's Photographic Views and Alexander Gardner's Photographic Sketch-Book of the Civil War, weighs the power of the written word against the act of representing this historical moment photographically. Ultimately, as these poems juxtapose literary and photographic images of General U.S. Grant, they argue that the written word is needed to inscribe a sense of personal and national responsibility onto the history told by the photograph's superficial image. In a substantiation of this claim, the article begins with a brief analysis of the deliberately written nature of Melville's preface. It then turns to a biographical explanation of Melville's relationship to the camera and to "modern" technology, and to an examination of how photographic expectations caused reviewers to see this work as a "failure." The essay concludes with a reading of this collection's "schizophrenic" form and suggests that Melville uses the figure of General Grant to argue for the importance of remembering history with words and not surface visual images.

In a conceit reminiscent of Coleridge's "The Eolian Harp: Composed at Clevedon, Somersetshire," Melville's prefatory paragraph tells his reader that the version of the Civil War that emerges from this volume has been written by nature. ² It is, in short, a composite and universal history that is available to any generic and open "mind." In a collection of "moods variable," of "contrasted" dramatic...