… doomed to watch a strife we may not share
With other weapons than the patriot’s prayer,
Yet owning, with full hearts and moistened eyes,
The awful beauty of self-sacrifice,
And wrung by keenest sympathy for all
Who give their loved ones for the living wall
Twixt law and treason,—in this evil day
May haply find, through automatic play
Of pen and pencil, solace to our pain,
And hearten others with the strength we gain.22
The war has caused Whittier to think that, for better or worse, the sword outweighs the pen: writing cannot provide the necessary solace for the suffering of wartime. The speaker offers the “automatic play / Of pen and pencil” as his insufficient contribution. Whittier suggests that solace might be found by submitting to the play of a medium unconscious of its message, and by sharing that message with those who need it most. Though he went on to write such patriotic classics as “Barbara Frietchie” (published in the Atlantic Monthly in October 1863), at the outset of the war Whittier could not imagine an effective way to make writing an agentive force. The resigned solipsism of poetic self-comfort, extended to others to “hearten them,” is especially striking because Whittier had already spent years as a public poet speaking out against the evils of slavery. The war has presented a challenge that requires a realignment of poetry’s functions and forms.
While Howe and Whittier offer more or less practical meditations on the question of how to adapt poetry writing to wartime, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem on the subject presents a mystical riddle. In “The Test, Musa Loquitur,” published anonymously in the Atlantic Monthly in January 1861, when the war was imminent, Emerson displays the kind of “mystic fame and subtle power” ridiculed by Howe:
I hung my verses in the wind;
Time and tide their faults may find.
All were winnowed through and through;
Five lines lasted sound and true;
Five were smelted in a pot
Than the South more fierce and hot.
These the Siroc could not melt.
Fire their fiercer flaming felt, And their meaning was more white
Than July’s meridian light.
Sunshine cannot bleach the snow, Nor Time unmake what poets know.
Have you eyes to find the five
Which five thousand could survive?23
Emerson—or the muse, who speaks—casts the change wrought by war as primarily stylistic. Like enlisted men, the poet’s lines must stand the test of intense violence; they survive only if they pass trial by Southern fire. Like weapons and ammunition, the lines are smelted and forged to stand up to the tests of warfare. Always condensed and runic, Emerson’s poetry, he suggests, must become—is becoming in this poem—even more so to stand the tests of the current moment and still “survive” across time. The last lines of the poem tell us only five of the lines on the page before us will pass the test; like men in battle, it is impossible for the reader to predict which lines will continue to live on. War is metaphoric in this poem. The figuration suggests that language production should undergo harsh conditions analogous to the equipment and men used in fighting the war.
These three poems call for very different poetic responses to war: engaging directly with the fight, providing emotional support for suffering, and adapting stylistically in order to create something cryptic, but able to carry the weight of contemporary knowledge into the future. As even three poems from the same magazine suggest, the sense of poetic vocation varied widely, and this study will range over the breadth of response. But however different their approaches, Howe, Whittier, and Emerson divorce poetic utterance from personal expression and attribute the necessity of this shift to the vicissitudes of war.24 Howe serves the collective voice of Northern wrath, Whittier abnegates personal expression in favor of the automatic play of the pen, and Emerson lets the muse speak without interference; it speaks the truth of war’s necessities (Emerson’s impersonality is of course a trait that precedes the war). That general turn to what might be called the affective, impersonal, collective mode is a feature of the poetry in the Northern newspapers and magazines of the period with a national circulation.
But while I explore the changes wrought on poetic tradition by the war, I emphatically do not claim that a certain kind of poetry originated out of these cataclysmic events.25 In fact, the more catastrophic the events, seemingly the more important literary inheritance becomes. The writers in this study work within traditions and modify them thoughtfully and with great effort to render current circumstances affectively legible. It is precisely the familiarity of the tropes, forms, and rhetorics—the materials the poets inherit—that enable them to craft differences for readers to recognize, allowing them to process wartime events and place them within broader historical contexts. I will explore a range of these transformations by focusing on specific events and the revisions of convention they demand.
In analyzing these shifts in figural, formal, thematic, and perspectival emphases, I contend that it is no accident that experimental poetic practices emerged from what is often called the first “modern” war. I further argue that this shift, while marked in Dickinson, Whitman, and Melville, is culture-wide, and that we undervalue the variety and historical and aesthetic significance of much of the poetry of the time by continuing to focus on a small number of “major,” largely Northern, literary figures.26 Poetry of the nineteenth century has been critically separated between popular and experimental, and the two are often figured in opposition. This study finds these terms inadequate for the subtle differentiations and overlapping practices between writers like Henry Howard Brownell, for example, a tremendously innovative poet who was one of the most popular writers of the war, and Herman Melville, who reached a narrow audience but shares many of the same concerns and aesthetic practices, and indeed was influenced by Brownell. I show that poets of all orientations responded to wartime events in order to forge a new understanding of the ways language can communicate under the conditions of mass media. What distinguishes writers like Dickinson, Whitman, and Melville from many poets of the period is a largely remote, often retrospective perspective that shifts attention away from war’s immediacies and toward its linguistic effects. Other poets seek to engage the conflict more directly, responding to events as they unfold. While I sometimes distinguish between popular and experimental poetry, in reality they form a continuum. Studying the poems of Dickinson, Whitman, and Melville alongside the work of other poets, many of them well known at the time but less so, if at all, today—Brownell, Elizabeth Akers Allen, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, George Boker, Amanda Jones, and many others—I explore what holds these kinds of poetry together, as well as what differentiates them.
By tracing networks of poetic practice, the study challenges the ways that critics have delineated starkly polarized, monumental forces in studies of Civil War literature: the North and the South. The treatment of the poetry surrounding the Battle of Fort Wagner, for example, shows both internal divisions and allegiances among African American soldiers and white civilians in the North. I raise questions about the difference that gender makes in poetic responses to the war, though the emphasis here is on how poets of both genders join in communal reactions to current events. The poetic networks I trace, moreover, sometimes cross sectional boundaries, even though there are significant differences between print circulation in the two sections that pose problems for extending this study to Southern poetry of the war period. While Northern readers witnessed an unprecedented expansion of mass media