Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War

by MELVILLE, HERMANCOX, RICHARD HOWARD

• ISBN13: 9781573928939
• ISBN10: 1573928933
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2001-05-01
• Publisher: Prometheus Books

Summary

This reprint of an 1866 volume of poems by the author of Moby Dick and Billy Budd includes four essays showing why Melville's verse with its unconventional linking of literary form and political-military history remains misunderstood and neglected. Princeton University historian James M. McPherson's preface thoughtfully discusses the import of Melville's book as a Civil War document. The introduction sketches Melville's pre-war concern with slavery in Moby Dick (1851) and Benito Cereno (1856). The seventy-two deeply moving, austerely beautiful lyrical poems about the Civil War include works on the hanging of John Brown, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and the battles at Donelson, Shiloh, and Gettysburg. Harvard University critic Helen Vendler's essay argues that Melville's innovative manner of transforming this epic matter of history into a new kind of lyric poem makes for arresting and wholly original poetry. For Boston University poet Rosanna Warren, the irregularity of Melville's verse forces readers to participate in the process of arriving at a dark knowledge of war. According to Richard Cox, the organization of Melville's poems conveys that the passions of the war will not cease and yet they seem to continue Abraham Lincoln's task of binding the nation's wounds. Paul Dowling reveals how the poet reshaped the war, distorting history to moderate wartime passions and to imitate Shakespeare's philosophical (but unpopular) dramas. Students and scholars of American literature and history, as well as Civil War enthusiasts, will welcome this outstanding new publication of a long-neglected volume of political poetry by one of America's classic novelists.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	11	(13)
Foreword	13	(2)
James M. McPherson
Introduction: Poetry and Politics	15	(24)
Richard H. Cox
Paul M. Dowling
A Note on the Text of Battle-Pieces	39	(2)
Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (Reprint of the 1866 Text)	41	(310)
Interpretive Essays
Melville and the Lyric of History	249	(20)
Helen Vendler
Dark Knowledge: Melville's Poems of the Civil War	269	(26)
Rosanna Warren
A Careful Disorderliness: The Organization of Battle-Pieces	295	(30)
Richard H.Cox
Melville's Quarrel with Poetry	325	(26)
Paul M. Dowling
Bibliography	351	(4)
Contributors	355