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Battle Lines. Eliza Richards
Читать онлайн.Название Battle Lines
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780812295580
Автор произведения Eliza Richards
Жанр Языкознание
Издательство Ingram
In order to map out networks of response, I organize the project, loosely chronologically, by specific events and the poetry that responds to them. A series of case studies, the chapters each treat a significant battle along with the tropes and formal practices that mediate them for readers. Remediating events via literary traditions, poets work through what to think and how to feel about current happenings. The responses accrue within a print network that quickly generates a tropic repertoire within a recognizable poetic field. Collectively and with a sometimes remarkable consistency, given the newness of the news, poems draw out key features and draw on common tropic practices to mythologize, commemorate, and consider the consequences of events. The lines of communication reach outward through newspapers and magazines to the poems of writers like Dickinson, Whitman, and Melville, who drew their inspiration from their peers’ practices and reconfigured them in ways that bear the traces of their engagements.
Chapter 1 examines the physical power of snow to disrupt, freeze, erase, and bury, as well as the power of the tropes that derive from these traits. A bombardment that can seem malevolent but is also just simply a part of an impersonal, ineffable system, snowstorms and battles bear strong resemblances that have been treated in a long poetic tradition, stretching at least back to the Iliad, that deploys snowstorms as a figure of war. Poets—Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Akers Allen among them—capitalize on this resemblance in order to figure war in a mass media age as a circulatory system that envelops both home and battle fronts. The chapter closes with a focused analysis of the Battle of Fort Donelson (February 11–16, 1862), during which a blizzard in Tennessee was as lethal for Union troops as Confederate fire. I read Melville’s poem “Donelson” to show that this poem and the others I discuss absorb material events and use them as a kind of necessary substrata for complex poetic transformations. The conclusion of the chapter addresses the way Confederate poet Henry Timrod adapts Northern climatic figures to offer an alternative grounded in the “SNOW OF SOUTHERN SUMMERS”: cotton.
Like snow, autumn has a long poetic tradition of associations with death and dying. Chapter 2 charts the ways this figure is adapted to address the issue of mass death after the Battle of Antietam, in which thousands of men died in a Maryland cornfield before Confederate troops retreated. The extreme irony of the enormous number of dead men destroying the corn at harvest time gave rise almost immediately, in the journalism as well as the poetry of the time, to the image of the ghastly harvest. I explore the ways romantic harvest imagery is transformed into gruesome, often surreal figurations of environmental devastation that open up the possibility of atheism and the annihilation of natural cycles. This chapter traces the circulation of the image of the ghastly harvest through eyewitness coverage of the event and numerous poetic treatments, from anonymous newspaper poets to Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman.
Chapter 3 takes up figurative practices of commemoration associated with the sonnet and the ode and places them in relation to popular traditions of song in order to make sense of the response to the unprecedented events of the Battle of Fort Wagner (July 18, 1863), one of the first times African American men fought in the war, proving their courage under fire. The battle gave rise to numerous poems seeking to commemorate the event in a way that would capture the democratic promise of racial equality. This chapter traces two conflicting traditions arising from that event. The first is affiliated with African American soldier songs, which celebrate collective agency and a new image of black military manhood. The second tradition focuses on white commander Robert Gould Shaw, whose memory is carried forward in odes and sonnets that elide black agency. Analyzing the powers of commemoration to carry events, selectively, through history, the chapter traces these two traditions through the end of the century’s unveiling of the Robert Gould Shaw monument on the Boston Common. A comparative study of the traditions and their interactions shows the commemorative capabilities and limitations of specific poetic forms. It also indicates the ways memorial traditions can come at the cost of historical knowledge. A diverse range of writers including Anna Quincy Waterston, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Private Frank Myers, Henry Howard Brownell, Marian Bigelow, James Russell Lowell, and Paul Laurence Dunbar help forge these commemorative traditions.
Chapter 4 explores the journalism and poetry surrounding the prolonged siege of Charleston, paying particular attention to the figure of the talking gun. As the center of Confederate intellectual culture and the first state to secede from the Union, Charleston was the focus of particular Union animus for symbolic even more than strategic reasons. The erection of the Parrott Gun, nicknamed the Swamp Angel, off the coast of Charleston made possible one of the first incendiary bombings of civilians in wartime. As communicators of state violence after verbal negotiations have halted, guns, cannons, and ammunition were frequently figured as engaging in a perverse form of speech. This chapter traces dialogues between the talking weapons in Northern and Southern poetry during the escalating violence of the siege. The excess of verbal violence in these poems conveys a sense of the limits of poetic expression when it comes up against the desire to become a weapon of lethal force. The chapter’s concluding section examines poetry by two writers—Henry Timrod and Herman Melville—who seek a way out of this tragic end game.
The final chapter addresses the adaptation of ballads to the conditions of modern naval warfare. Wooden sailing ships have long been a central figure in sea ballads. The invention of the ironclad muddled those terms of representation while radically changing the conditions of naval warfare. Clashes between wooden sloops and ironclads served as occasions for reconfiguring ideas about what constitutes heroism. The highly visible and vulnerable captains and crew of sailing ships were long figured as iconic images of heroic bravery; in the new ironclads, in contrast, the crew was completely hidden from view, operating within protective shells of steel. The confrontations between these two kinds of ships staged dramas between the traditional and the modern, the past and the future, the legendary and the immediate. This chapter takes up two noteworthy naval engagements—the Battle of Hampton Roads and the Battle of Mobile Bay—in order to explore the ways that poets negotiate the symbolic disruptions and new figurative and formal possibilities opened up by the fights. Poets identify the limitations of inherited ballad forms and adapt them through an acute attention to the new forms of naval warfare. The chapter includes an extensive comparison of Henry Howard Brownell’s eyewitness poem about the Battle of Mobile Bay, written while an officer aboard the Hartford, and Melville’s “Battle for the Bay,” which, I argue, engages intensively with Brownell’s poem.
The epilogue turns to the end of the nineteenth century to explore the question of Civil War poetry’s legacy by taking up the work of Stephen Crane. Though Crane is often positioned as a future-oriented poet, I argue that his work is permeated by a sense of loss of the collective poetic practices enabled by the conditions of the Civil War. Whereas poetry held a central place in the war, circulating to a national readership and sharing a common sense of mission, Crane expresses a sense of isolation predicated on the absence of such conditions for the turn-of-the-century poet. Writing at the time of other, less culturally central wars, publishing in magazines that reached a highly selective readership, Crane searches for ways to speak to and for the people even while acknowledging that they may not be listening. This crisis of social belonging, commonly understood as an anticipation of modernism—has strong roots in an awareness of poetry’s earlier central role in the Civil War.