Reading Drum-Taps and Battle-Pieces

Gordis
ENG BC3180
Spring 2007

READING DRUM-TAPS AND BATTLE PIECES

To close the semester, we’ll look at Civil War poetry by two writers we’ve already studied: Walt Whitman and Herman Melville. We’ve already talked about the war’s opening and some of its key events as context for our reading of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. (Refer to your notes for details.) When the Civil War ended with the surrender of Confederate forces at Appomattox, its survivors were left to cope with tremendous destruction and damage. The Civil War was a phenomenally bloody war, producing more American fatalities than any war before or since. More than a quarter of a million Confederate soldiers and more than 360,000 Union soldiers died. The south was left in ruins; most southern cities sustained tremendous damage, and two thirds of southern railroads were completely destroyed.

Even more positive changes caused upheaval. With the ratification of the thirteenth amendment in December 1865, slavery and involuntary servitude were outlawed. This meant that enormous numbers of individuals found that their legal status had changed suddenly and dramatically. Moreover, this change dramatically altered the southern agrarian economy.

Whitman’s and Melville’s poems were published in this period of upheaval. Whitman went to Washington in 1862 to find his brother George, who had been reported wounded. Whitman stayed in the camp where he found his brother, and when he returned to the city of Washington, he rented a room, found a job as a copyist, and started visiting Brooklyn soldiers in the hospital. Drum-Taps, published in 1865, explores varied responses to the war, ranging from jingoism to realism. After Lincoln was assassinated, Whitman delayed the publication of Drum-Taps until 1865 so that it could include as a sequel Memories of President Lincoln, in memory of the person whom he described in Specimen Days as America’s "greatest, best, most characteristic, artistic, moral personality" (NA 4^th ed. 2178). As you read the selections from Drum-Taps, consider Whitman’s representation of the war. What does he describe in these poems? What attitude does he take toward it? Does any pattern or trajectory emerge in the sequence of poems? What continuities or differences do you see between these poems and other Whitman texts we’ve studied this term? Does Whitman’s view of the United States seem to have been changed by his experiences during the war?

Melville spent most of the war period in New York, though he traveled to Virginia to see the battlefields in 1864. He published Battle-Pieces and Aspects of War in 1866 to unenthusiastic reviews and poor sales. (For discussion of reviews and sales, see Robert J. Scholnik, "Politics and Poetics: The Reception of Melville's Battle-Pieces and Aspects of War," American Literature 49.3 [November 1977]: 422-30.) As you read his poems, compare his vision of the war with Whitman’s. How similar are their tones? Do they write about the same things? The prose "Supplement" to Battle-Pieces urged the North to treat the South generously and to avoid vindictiveness. Is this view reflected in Melville’s poems, and if so, how? What seems to be Melville’s sense of the nation’s prospects? Do you see continuities between the poems and Moby-Dick?

We’ll close by looking back at the beginning of the course, and comparing the United States in 1800 with the United States in 1870. How has the literary landscape changed? What issues seem to endure?