“You Talk Like a Book”: Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Civil War Poetry and the Regionalization of Speech

Constance Feminore Woolson’s poetic renderings of Civil War memory, most of them published in Appletons’ Journal from 1873 through 1877, examine the regionalization of speech as a factor bearing on national reconciliation—a concern that is largely absent from better-known commemorations by Melville, Whitman, Whittier, Lowell, and Piatt, and that remains underexplored in recent work in historical poetics. This essay finds Woolson participating in the cultural project of ballad reconstruction, employing vernacular modes and regional speech in the dramatic realism of her more successful dialogue-based poems. “Kentucky Belle,” popularized by actress Charlotte Cushman, marks the linguistic residue of antebellum sectionalism, which Woolson then formally subordinates to a national linguistic standard in the verse drama “Two Women” as well as “At the Smithy” and “Dolores.” While this standard offers an opportunity for the incorporation of oppressed minorities, it does not foster reconciliation between Northern and Southern whites. The terms of war memory favored regionalization. By contrast, Woolson’s genteel lyric commemorations in “Morris Island” and an unpublished poem on Gettysburg only mourn the war’s losses without the compensation of re-Union. Read as a collection, then, Woolson’s Civil War poems underscore the persistent visibility and audibility of Northern and Southern identities still shaped by war memory during the reconciliationist stage of the late nineteenth century.