Herman Melville and Walt Whitman Write the Civil War: An Introduction

Although both Walt Whitman’s Drum-Taps and Herman Melville’s Battle-Pieces were met with confusion and sometimes open hostility at the time of their publication, Whitman’s volume has enjoyed a much more approving reception over the decades than Melville’s, to the point where Drum-Taps has become not only an established feature of the American canon but the single most representative collection of Civil War poetry by an American. By contrast, until recently, Battle-Pieces has been a marginal text in the history of American writing because of a longstanding critical failure to appreciate the complexity of Melville’s project and his eccentricity and sophistication as a poet or even his claims to being a poet at all. Whitman, who had been publishing poetry for a full decade before the appearance of his Civil War collection in 1865, was widely recognized as a poet, while Melville, who had not published for almost a decade (though he had worked on a volume of “Poems” [1860], now lost and never published), was recognized only as the author of several popular travel narratives and assorted works of fiction, but not as a poet. When Battle-Pieces was first reviewed, it was met with incomprehension of one kind or another, as when William Dean Howells, writing anonymously in the Atlantic Monthly (February 1867), told his readers the collection was “like no poetry you have ever read” (Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews, Ed. Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker [New York, Cambridge U P, 1995], 526–27) or when the anonymous reviewer in The Round Table (15 September 1866) faulted the author for “his disregard of the laws of verse” (Higgins and Parker 520). Starting in the 1970s, the historian Daniel Aaron, in The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War (1973), and literary critics, notably William H. Shurr, in The Mystery of Iniquity: Melville as Poet, 1857–1891 (1972), began to pay attention to Melville’s philosophical, nuanced treatment of the war. Later, Stanton Garner, in The Civil War World of Herman Melville (1993), for the first time looked closely at the historical, biographical, and familial context of the poems, emphasizing Melville’s extensive knowledge of the war but also the distance between the author and his narrators. At the turn of this century, Helen Vendler and Rosanna Warren—a widely recognized authority on prosody and a highly accomplished poet, respectively—broke new ground in emphasizing Melville’s command of the Western poetic tradition and the inventive character of his prosody. Finally, in the past decade and a half, we have seen more extensive, searching treatments of Melville’s poetry, including the poetry in Battle-Pieces, and mounting evidence that Melville had been systematically studying, collecting, and writing poetry from early in his career, as argued by a number of critics, including the late Douglas Robillard and, more amply and emphatically, by Hershel Parker in Melville: The Making of the Poet (2008).

With the Melville Society’s Ninth International Conference, “Melville and Whitman in Washington: The Civil War Years and After” (June 2013), the scholarly community has had an opportunity to examine Melville’s Civil War poetry in the context of the Civil War poetry of his great contemporary Whitman. That conference has generated several remarkably informed close readings of individual poems, clusters of poems, and other writings of the Civil War, including Melville’s controversial “Supplement” to Battle-Pieces, here examined alongside Whitman’s analogous finale or “Sequel” to Drum-Taps. Together, the essays gathered in this special issue of Leviathan constitute a representative sampling of the most illuminating contemporary assessments of Melville’s Civil War poetry and a match for a comparable set of essays on Whitman’s Civil War poetry forthcoming in November 2015 in Mickle Street Review: An Electronic Journal of Walt Whitman and American Studies, edited by Tyler Hoffman. Both sets of essays will be included in a volume that we are co-editing, titled “This Mighty Convulsion”: Walt Whitman and Herman Melville Write the Civil War.

The first of the essays presented here, Thomas Nurmi...