Herman Melville's Civil War Poetry
Melville's "Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War" (1867) intersects two of my great interests: the Civil War and American literature. This collection of poetry has never been well-known and critical opinion about it has always been varied and mostly lukewarm. But I have returned to it many times for its meditative quality, for Melville's varied and conflicted insights about the Civil War, and for the tortuous quality of its poetry. This collection includes the full text of Melville's poems, including his notes to the poems and the prose essay, titled "Supplement", with which the book concludes. I find the book invaluable and eloquent in understanding the Civil War, contemporary reactions to it, and Melville himself.
In his short introduction, Melville tells the reader that the poems were almost entirely composed following the conclusion of the War. They were composed at different times and with no thought of unity in the collection. Thus they are not an epic or informed by a single theme (although the unfinished dome of the Capitol runs through them as a metaphor) but rather present a series of separate, disjointed thoughts on the war. Most of the descriptions in the book derive from journalistic reports, although Melville had more first-hand experience with the Civil War than is sometimes realized. The major part of the collection, "Battle-Pieces" begins with John Brown's raid and ends with a poem title "America" in which Melville ponders the changes the Civil War had already wrought, and would bring about in the future in the United States.
As a student of the Civil War, I find it valuable to read this book for Melville's depictions of conflicts, including Fort Donelson, Shiloh, the clash between the Monitor and the Virginia, Stones River, Antietam, Vicksburg, the Wilderness, Appomattox, and much else. He gives some details of the battles while reflecting on the courage of the soldiers, the terrible carnage of the War, the scourge of slavery that brought it about, and the uncertain and ambiguous future of the United States upon the War's conclusion. Melville realized that the War did not lead to clear conclusions or to false optimism. His poetry reflects the difficulty of a complex mind thinking about a terrible war. For this reason, the book has seemed pallid to some readers. But its lack of force is due to the depth of the struggle in Melville's mind to understand the conflict.
The book is written in verse with meters and rhymes that frequently are awkward. Here again, some readers take this as a sign that poetry was not a congenial form to a Melville burned-out from the effort of writing his novels. But for much of the verse, the awkwardness of the poetry reflects the difficulty of the War as Melville works to understand the conflict and to present differing perspectives. Some of the selections, including "The Portent", "Shiloh", "Rebel Colorbearers at Shiloh", the two poems about Stonewall Jackson, "Formerly a Slave", "On the Slain Collegians", and "America" seem to me to work as poetry. Other individual poems are, perhaps, more valuable for what they try to say than for Melville's poetical skills in saying it. On the whole, I think the quality of these jagged works is high. When read with Melville's notes, they have a quality of trying to communicate directly with the reader.
Most of the successful poems in this collection are short, but I found some of the longer ones, such as "Donelson," "The Armies of the Wilderness" and "Lee in the Capitol" cast important light upon their subjects. It is interesting that in much of the poetry and in the "Supplement" with which the book concludes, Melville took a reconciliationist view of the conflict and its aftermath. Brave committed Americans fought on both sides, Melville tells the reader, although one side had right with it, and he urged Americans and their leaders to put aside their differences and work towards reuniting the Nation. This view has come under deserved scrutiny in recent years, as many have questioned whether it did justice to the needs of freed African Americans. But it is valuable to be reminded of how contemporaries saw the issue, as reflected in the words of some highly complex and thoughtful minds.
Although Melville's Civil War poetry will never win widespread critical or popular appeal, I have gained a great deal from repeated readings of this work. Students of the Civil War and of American literature can only benefit from knowing and reflecting upon it.
Robin Friedman
