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Civil War Poetry (Dover Thrift Editions)

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During the mid-Nineteenth Century, poetry was a public form of expression with a broad appeal to Americans of different backgrounds and levels of education. For example, Abraham Lincoln had written poetry as a young man and retained a love of the art throughout his life. Thus, it is not surprising that Americans, both North and South, wrote an extensive amount of poetry during the Civil War Era. Some of this poetry is of high quality but, regardless of its literary merit, this poetry is important because it shows the many ways in which Americans of the Civil War era viewed this momentous event in our history.

This Dover Thrift Edition offers a good selection of Civil War poetry at a budget price. It consists of over 70 poems by 29 poets representing a wide variety of attitudes and feelings about the Civil War. In its short compass, it includes works both familiar and unfamiliar. Julia Word Howe's anthem, the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" appropriately opens the collection, but it is accompanied by two less familiar works which show a spirit of conciliation. Her poem "Robert E. Lee" offers a highly sympathetic account of the Confederacy's great general, and her poem "Pardon" is about John Wilkes Booth and the need for forgiveness. These poems are worthwhile in themselves and cast a new light on the famous "Battle Hymn".

Walt Whitman and Herman Melville were the greatest of the Civil War poets, and both are well-represented in this anthology. The collection includes 12 poems by Whitman including his great elegy on Lincoln, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" and an equal number of poems by Melville, whose poetry still suffers from obscurity. One of Melville's poems, titled "Formerly a Slave" is a reflection on the direction that race relations in the United States would take following Emancipation. I would like to quote it here.

The sufferance of her race is shown,
And retrospect of life,
Which now too late deliverance dawns upon,
Yet is she not at strife.

Her children's children they shall know
The good withheld from her,
And so her reverie takes prophetic cheer--
In spirit she sees the stir

Far down the depth of thousand years,
And marks the revel shine,
Her dusky face is lit with sober light,
Sibylllne, yet benign.

Several poems in this volume describe individual battles, particularly the Battle of Gettysburg. I enjoyed Will Henry Thompson's once well-known poem, "The High Tide at Gettysburg" which commemorates Pickett's Charge on the third day of the battle. Of the Southern writers, Henry Timrod, the "Poet Laureate of the Confederacy", Sidney Lanier, and Francis Orberry Ticknor, among others, are represented, while the Northern poets include Longfellow, Whittier, Bryant, and many more.

The American Poets Project of the Library of America has recently issued an anthology of "Poets of the American Civil War." This anthology is slightly longer and more expensive than the Dover and includes some overlap in works. (The volumes offer alternative readings of one poem, Henry Timrod's "Ode at Magnolia Cemetery.") But there are many fine poems in each of the volumes that are not found in the other. For those readers interested in exploring the Civil War in poetry, this volume and the Library of America volume make excellent introductions.

Robin Friedman.

The concept of ' war' and the concept of 'poetry ' somehow do not go together. At times it must seem that the only real human response to the suffering , sacrifice and above all cruelty of war is silence.
But people speak to their reality , and war is certainly one of the great human realities. This group of poems contains most of the well- known poems written by Americans about ' the great Civil War.' It does not contain the greatest poem written about that war, as that poem was not written as a poem but as a kind of memorial speech on a field of battle. "The Gettysburg Address" is the great poem of the American Civil War. It reflects in the deepest way America's understanding of itself, its faith. It contains the deepest reflection of all on the experience of the War and its meaning.
In this collection there is a great poem , the poem written by America's greatest poet, Whitman, about the person who in some way more than any other embodies America to Americans, Abraham Lincoln. The poem is " When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed"
Most of the poems in the collection are verse, which express sincere feelings . I was somehow struck rereading the 'Battle Hymn of the Republic' which I sang in school many years ago. Rereading how different and how slogan- filled it seems without that larger sense of the suffering of both sides which Lincoln so nobly displayed in the 'Gettysburg Address'
In any case this is a fine collection.