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The Columbia Book of Civil War Poetry: From Whitman to Walcott

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If you want to find out what a tremendous event was all about--famine, pestilence, war--read the poems written about it. Ever since Homer, or the book of Judges, war poems have been written to tell us what happened, to whom, why. Richard Marius's fine selection, with his introduction to it, opens today's reader to the Civil War's horror, pathos, loss, and the emotions which are easy to forget, or worse still, to romanticize. It's a broad selection, from "John Brown's Body" and "Dixie" to today's meditations, in Derek Walcott's "Arkansas Testament," on the legacy of hostility toward blacks, North and South: the Civil War, to Walcott, is still to be won. Meanwhile a selection of photographs brings those terrible four years even closer. Even at a remove of 140 years, this collection of poems allows us to be moved by them and the passions which still haunt all of us.

The scar of the Civil War seems mostly healed now, but memories of the pain linger, and shame, and inspire. We relive the war in films -- "Gone With the Wind," say, or "Glory." We still read novels of red badges and killer angels. Brady's photos still take us to the battlefields, though he arrived some hours after the worst carnage, usually. In the carte-de-visite photos of forebears and their brothers in the regiment, we look for -- ourselves. Paintings and dioramas capture the terror and bloodletting and nobility -- showing more of the latter than the former -- on the canvases. Though as the years pass we hear less often "The Battle Cry of Freedom" or "Tenting Tonight" or "The Vacant Chair," the "Battle Hymn" still quickens our hearts. On Memorial Day and Dr. King's Birthday, we remember the war's legacy. Yet still we want "more," for in the clash of blue and gray, the burnished rows of steel, and the buckets of blood and limbs in the surgeon's tents, we ponder war and peace and equality and justice, for us and for humanity.

For some of that "more," turn to this volume. From the time of the first battles, American poets wrote out their own images, their own stories, their own broken and divided hearts, their own horrors, in lines on the page. Here are the words of Melville and Whitman and Howe and Longfellow and Whittier, who saw the war themselves. Here are Masters and Dunbar and Warren and Lindsay and Sandburg and Hughes, who knew the war from hearing the stories, reading the tales, and feeling the heartbeats of their countrymen. This rich anthology runs back and forth in time, crosses the broken terrain of emotions, reaches up Little Round Top and down into the crater, aches for the dreams of north and south (neither come true), and looks at the men at war and the monuments that honor them. Editors Richard Marius and Keith Frome chose well.

Did you see the movie "Glory"? Test your literary grasp against the poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar, William Vaughn Moody, John Berryman, and Robert Lowell on the St. Gaudens monument on Boston Common. And contemplate what Will Henry Thompson meant, writing of Pickett's charge at Gettysburg, by the word "Glory."

And if you've a mind to ponder Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan, read Canto VII of William Vaughn Moody's "Ode in Time of Hesitation" (1900), one of the poems inspired by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. Do not "fluent men of place and consequence" still "intone their dull commercial liturgies"? And whose heart cannot jump when the words from Moody's pen leap into our century -- "We are our fathers' sons: let those who lead us know."

Buy the book. Savor the poems. Think on then, and now, and times to come.

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