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

Notes

295 NOTES introduction 1. For representative selections from this broad range of work, see “Words for the Hour”: A New Anthology of American Civil War Poetry (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005), which I coedited with Cristanne Miller. 2. I refer to the title of chap. 5 of Fussell’s The Great War in Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975): “Oh What a Literary War” (155–90). Though Fussell notes that the American Civil War was the first in which large numbers of literate men served as footsoldiers, he argues that British soldiers in World War I were not just literate but rather “vigorously literary” (157). Reading American writers of World War I, he argues that a lack of consciousness of “a national literary canon” makes American work about the war “spare and onedimensional ” (158). I would counter that it is precisely that lack of a national literary canon that allows American Civil War–era poets to draw freely from both English and American and from popular and literary traditions. 3. Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962). Wilson uses this oft-cited phrase to dismiss Melville’s Battle-Pieces in particular, though he applies the same criticism more broadly to much of the poetry produced during this era (479). For his discussion of Civil War poetry overall, see 466–507. Daniel Aaron devotes a book-length study to male Civil War writers both Northern and Southern, but like Wilson, he seems ambivalent about these writers’ accomplishments. He writes: “One would expect writers to say something revealing about the meaning . . . of the War. This book argues implicitly throughout that, with a few notable exceptions, they did not” (The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987]) xxii. 4. All four of these studies proved invaluable to me in my approach to Civil War poetry: Paula Bennett’s Poets in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women’s Poetry, 1800–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), Mary Loeffelholz’s From School to Salon: Reading Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), Eliza Richards ’s Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe’s Circle (Cambridge University Press, 2004), and Angela Sorby’s Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and 296 notes to pages 4–7 the Place of American Poetry, 1865–1917 (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2005). Joan Shelley Rubin’s Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007) offers a history of the cultural practices of reading poetry from the 1880s to the 1950s. The growing number of articles on Civil War poetry signals the increased interest in this body of work. A 2008 special issue of ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance focusing on poetry includes three important essays on Civil War poetry: Eliza Richards, “Correspondent Lines: Poetry, Journalism, and the US Civil War,” ESQ 54: 145–69; Jessica Roberts, “A Poetic E Pluribus Unum: Conventions, Imperatives , and the Poetic Call-to-Arms in Frank Moore’s Rebellion Record,” 171–97; and Mary Loeffelholz, “Anthology Form and the Field of Nineteenth-century American Poetry: The Civil War Sequences of Lowell, Longfellow, and Whittier ,” 217–39. 5. Timothy Sweet, Traces of War: Poetry, Photography, and the Crisis of the Union (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Elizabeth Young, Disarming the Nation: Women’s Writing and the American Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Alice Fahs, The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North & South, 1861–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Lisa Long, Rehabilitating Bodies: Health, History, and the American Civil War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Kathleen Diffley, Where My Heart Is Turning Ever: Civil War Stories and Constitutional Reform, 1861–1876 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992); and Shirley Samuels, Facing America : Iconography and the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). My analysis is particularly indebted to the work of Timothy Sweet. For a study that situates American Civil War writing in the theoretical context of trauma theory and human rights law, see James Dawes’s The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), especially chap. 1. Coleman Hutchison was working on his ground-breaking study of Confederate literature at the same time that I was writing this...