When Edmund Wilson dismissed the poetry of the
Civil War as “versified journalism” in 1962, he summed up a common set of
critiques: American poetry of the era is mostly nationalist doggerel, with
little in the way of formal innovation. On the contrary, argues scholar Faith
Barrett. In her new book,
To Fight Aloud Is Very Brave,
Barrett contends that a broad range of 19th-century writers used verse during
the Civil War to negotiate complicated territory, both personal and public.
Taking its title from a
poem by Emily Dickinson,
Barrett’s book also argues that Civil War poetry was much more formally
destabilizing than scholars have traditionally acknowledged.
The book explores work by Northern writers such as
Emily Dickinson,
Walt Whitman, and black abolitionist poet
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, along
with amateur “soldier-poets” and several Southern poets, including the so-called
poet laureate of the Confederacy,
Henry Timrod.
Barrett devotes a chapter to
Herman
Melville’s little-read postwar collection
Battle-Pieces, and
another to the close connection between poetry and songs during the war.
Barrett co-edited a 2005 anthology of Civil War poetry called
Words for
the Hour, and her own published poetry includes a 2001 chapbook,
Invisible Axis. She spoke with the Poetry Foundation from Appleton,
Wisconsin, where she teaches English and creative writing at Lawrence
University.
You write that the Civil War was a “poetry-fueled war.” What do you
mean by that?
Poetry in mid-19th-century America was ubiquitous in a way that it just isn’t
now. It was everywhere in newspapers and magazines, children were learning it in
school…. Americans were encountering poetry on a weekly basis, if not a daily
basis, in the Civil War era, and that’s a profound difference from contemporary
poetry and its place in our culture.
There are so many accounts in newspapers of
soldiers dying with a poem in their pockets, poems written on a scrap of paper
folded up inside a book; so many accounts of songs or poems being sung or read
to political leaders at particular moments. For example, after
Lincoln announced the second call for a draft
...
James Sloan Gibbons wrote this song
poem called “
Three Hundred Thousand More,” which he
supposedly sang to Lincoln in his office one day. So there’s a kind of immediacy
of impact, that poetry is actually, I suggest, shaping events, not just
responding or reflecting on them.
The technological development of the railroad and then also the increasingly
affordable technologies of printing and reproduction had the result of
dramatically increasing the speed with which poetry could move around. ...
Harper’s [Weekly] featured poetry pretty regularly. It’s the equivalent
of readers seeing poetry in a magazine like
Newsweek or
Time,
or maybe even
People magazine. ... Then also it’s a shorter genre, it
can be more quickly written; it can be written in response to immediate
events…
.
You say that it’s hard to find poetry arguing against the war;
why?
There was very strong support for the war from both North and South. ... You
do see, starting in 1863 and of course continuing through the last year and a
half of the war, poems where people register horror and shock at the vast
numbers of soldiers that are dying. Dickinson and Melville both register that
shock in their poetry. But writers who were well known didn’t want to attach
their names to work that was anti-war.
If we think of “Civil War poetry” as a genre, what did it look like
formally?
There’s a lot of variety and a lot of range. One of the reasons why this body
of work has been neglected by scholars until fairly recently is there was this
assumption that the work is all formally so regular as to be monotonous:
singsong, rocking-horse rhythms. Regularity of meter makes this work more
difficult for us to approach.
But one thing I’ve noticed in my years of working on Civil War poetry is that
there’s just phenomenal formal range. There’s lots of experimentation; there’s
lots of variety in terms of the formal commitments the poets are working with.
So you have lots of ballads, not surprisingly, lots of story poems, poems
written with traditional commitments to the ballad form, and also elegies. You
have poets experimenting with pushing beyond rhythmic and metrical patterns that
are formal. ... I would actually say that maybe half the poets writing in this
era are doing interesting and unexpected things with form even though they’re
not yet writing free verse.
Do you see wildly different things coming from Northern and Southern
poets?
The similarities between Northern and Southern poems far outweigh the
differences. ... Both sides are arguing that God is on their side. Both
sides—and this is particularly startling to us as 21st-century readers—are
arguing they’re fighting for independence, although obviously they’re using that
word quite differently with quite different meanings.
You write that popular song and poetry became closely connected in a
new way during the war years. Are poets writing specifically with the idea that
their poems would quickly be turned into songs?
It goes both ways. In some cases you have composers
taking up poems and saying, “I like this a lot—let me set it to music.” And then
in other cases, as in
Julia Ward Howe’s case
[with “
The Battle Hymn of the Republic”], you have a
poet saying, “This ‘John Brown’s Body,’ that’s an interesting poem. Let me see
if I could do a different kind of approach to it in my lyrics.” And it’s clear
that Howe hoped that her lyrics would be sung, but also that she intended to
circulate it as a poem. So its first appearance is in the
Atlantic
Monthly, where it appears on the page as a poem, but then it’s quickly put
into sheet music so people can play it at home and soldiers can sing it.
Yes, it still has this huge cultural pull. Think about all the ceremonies
after 9/11 where “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” was performed. It’s a song
that has extraordinary cultural staying power. ...
First of all, the song that she’s imitating, “John Brown’s Body,” is a very
interesting song in which you have soldiers basically performing their bravado
about how many of them will die in battle, and that’s all right. So the refrain
of that song is “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave, but his soul
goes marching on.”
So it’s a very typical kind of marching song for soldiers, saying, “Many of
us are going to die, and we don’t care!” Howe takes that tune and lifts the
lyrics up to a more lofty, less graphic tone. ... [But] the overwhelming
argument of that song, verse after verse, is that God supports our violent
actions. That’s why I find it so deeply disturbing culturally that it’s in such
wide use now.
You’ve talked about how lots of Civil War poetry is unfairly
dismissed as overly conventional, but in contrast to that, you actually see
Emily Dickinson as more traditional in some ways than her critical reputation
suggests. Can you explain that?
The first scholars to approach Dickinson potentially as being a war poet—I’m
thinking of the ’80s and ’90s—tended to read Dickinson as a poet who’s deeply
skeptical about nationalistic ideologies and deeply skeptical about the rise of
militarism and patriotic rhetoric in the Union. ...
I’m of the opinion that she does both things: that she thinks skeptically and
quizzically about the war, the nationalist rhetoric and patriotic fervor that
sort of drove the nation to war; but I think she also writes poems of grief and
mourning that suggest that death in battlefield is a noble and good thing. In
this sense I think she really belongs to her community of Amherst. She writes to
and from that community, and these poems of grief and mourning that are supposed
to offer consolation to herself, to her family, to others, not surprisingly
share in some of the sentiments of that community. But it’s an unusual reading
of Dickinson to suggest she’s participating in that kind of sentimental
rhetoric.
Dickinson and Whitman are sometimes taken as the only “interesting”
poets of the war years. Is the broad range of Civil War poetry under appreciated
by contemporary scholars?
Edmund Wilson was very influential in dismissing this work as “versified
journalism.” ... It’s also the case that scholars were reluctant to approach
this body of work because the “But is it any good?” question persists much more
strongly with poetry than it does with prose texts. If we pick up the dime
novels that were written in the Civil War era, the political thrillers about
female spies, we don’t expect those works to have the kind of narrative or
linguistic complexity of
Moby-Dick, but we still find them interesting
and worthy of study.
You propose that mid-19th-century poets—beyond Dickinson and
Whitman—influenced modernist preferences for things like skepticism,
introspection, and fragmentation. But that influence, too, has gone mostly
unacknowledged.
Another feature of Civil War–era poetry that has made scholars very
uncomfortable in approaching it is all those national commitments writ large in
the poetry. The fact that people took up their cause and proclaimed for it is
something that has made critical approaches to the work more challenging, more
difficult. ...
Undergraduates often find it very moving and powerful. They don’t have the
whole trained scholarly apparatus to think, “Well, this is boring and
uninteresting because of its formal regularity.” Instead, they read the poems on
their own terms on the page and still find a kind of power in them that
19th-century readers found in them.
Do you see a way for poetry to get back to that point of engaging
directly with political issues of the day, and being heard when it does
so?
I don’t think that contemporary poets are
disengaged politically. On the contrary. ... The issue is that the cultural
position of poetry is quite dramatically changed. In a way, the readership of
poetry is a much narrower segment of the reading population. These days I think
we think—not me as part of that “we,” but a lot of people—if you asked people,
“In what literary genre do you think the most important philosophical questions
of the 21st century are being debated?,” people would say right away, “The
novel. You have to go to that weighty, hefty, complex genre to really grapple
with important political issues.” I don’t think that’s true at all. ...
Myung Mi Kim is [a] poet I would cite as someone
who is really thinking about global identity, about the political legacies of
violence and nationalism, as an ongoing preoccupation for her in her work.
George Moses
Horton. First, his life story is just so fascinating. The idea that someone
who was an enslaved African American could have made a living [as a poet]—and
that is what Horton did, made a living for himself a poet while still
enslaved.
And then the work is just astonishing. Horton’s work has been unfairly
dismissed as being imitative, as being facile. He does do all sorts of things
stylistically. So he imitates Romantic poetry in some cases, he imitates
neoclassical poetry in other cases. As a young man, he supports himself by
writing love poems made to order for young white male students at the University
of North Carolina.
I think the work holds up very well for
contemporary readers. There’s such a mix of ideas and commitments. There’s this
poem “
Weep,” which is lamenting the downfall of the
South, the devastation of the South, but it’s also just lamenting how deeply
divided the nation has become, and the devastation of war. This is a poem that I
think about in relation to our contemporary political context, where we have
such deep divisions and so much anger on both sides, and so little common
ground, seemingly, between the right and the left.
. The History Press, Charleston, SC. 2012. 155 pages, 129 pages of text, index, bibliography, notes, b/w photos, 1 map. ISBN 9781609492830, $19.99.
James M. Schmidt has earned a reputation for quality Civil War writing whether it be his medical column in Civil War News
will expect nothing less than the expert treatment given to the Ursuline nuns, who despite potential danger to themselves treated the sick and wounded on both sides. While opinions were mixed their convent was offered to the Confederates to be used as a field hospital by Mother Saint Pierre Harrington, leader of the Galveston Ursuline nuns. 
educator,
and Antietam park ranger John Hoptak comes an exciting new book on Gettysburg. 
is a new book from author Steven L. Warren. 
Thanks go out to the good folks at 
. 
and 
. Faith Barrett is associate professor and chair of English at 