In Battle Lines: Poetry and Mass Media in the U.S. Civil War, Eliza Richards places American Civil War poems at the intersection of mass warfare and mass media, making the case that we should understand poetry as one of the war’s crucial print genres. She shows how poets’ engagements with the news drove them away from the kind of emphasis on personal subjectivity we might generally associate with post-Romantic lyric and toward approaches that could express both the factual particulars of events and a sense of collective affect. As Richards analyzes in detail, Union and Confederate poets sought to invoke and adapt established poetic tropes and forms in order to place contemporary events in historical perspective as well as to communicate more readily with a mass public that was also reading the news, sometimes in the same publications as it read poems. In her account, even the wartime poetic experiments and innovations of writers such as Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman emerge out of these engagements between poetry and mass media. Indeed, Richards argues for and demonstrates the rewards of reading the work of canonical poets alongside the kinds of poetry that less insightful critics might dismiss as popular, traditional, or merely topical.
The first chapters of Battle Lines examine how war poetry returned to and updated two topics of weather and seasonality that earlier poets had invoked as figures for adversity, death, or change: the snows of winter and the harvests of autumn. In familiar and beloved English poems from the previous century—James Thomson’s The Seasons and William Cowper’s The Task—the suffering of others in the cold and snow offers a test of the sheltered speaker’s and audience’s capacity for sympathy at a distance. Richards outlines an antebellum strain of poetry that transplants this tradition to the severer winters of New England and examines the snow up close rather than contemplating it from afar. Yet with its thematics of distance, distress, transformation, and collectivity (all of those flakes descending one after the other), snow poetry would also offer a productive scaffolding for Dickinson’s presentation of snowfall as battle, for the Confederate poet Henry Timrod’s polemical conversion of the snow of Northern winters into the cotton of warm Southern summers, and for Melville’s reflections on suffering, sympathy, and mediation in his poem on the Union’s capture of Fort Donelson in Tennessee.
In a less diffuse way, poets could also turn to the tradition of autumnal pastoral as a mournful and ironic counterpoint to the harvest of dead soldiers, notably in response to the Battle of Antietam in September 1862, which is still the bloodiest single-day battle in American history. Richards traces representations of the carnage in Antietam’s cornfields from reportage and illustration in periodicals to unsigned newspaper poetry as well as to the work of John Greenleaf Whittier, John James Piatt, and others. In an ambitious reading of the poems in Whitman’s Drum-Taps, Richards argues that sentimental, abstract pastoral lyrics counterpoint poems of war in a kind of mimicry of the multifariousness of wartime print culture itself. For Richards, Dickinson’s poems of autumn and death suggest a different aspect of that culture: how readers and writers actively synthesize multiple traditions and media in order to make sense of events—sources ranging from the daily news, to the histories of literature and art, to the new medium of Mathew Brady’s wartime photography.
One of the climaxes of Battle Lines is a riveting chapter on the memorialization of the Massachusetts 54th, the Union’s first regiment of Black soldiers. Here Richards shows how writers turn to distinct poetic traditions as they attempt to reconcile idealization or uplift with historical detail, and as they choose the perspective around which to center representation and memory. In one tradition, a variety of poems principally by African American writers (some of whom actually served in the Massachusetts 54th) draw on the tradition of song to emphasize the role of Black soldiers. These poems by writers such as Fanny Jackson, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and the soldier-poet Frank Myers draw attention to the collective bravery of the volunteers while also recognizing the more troubling realities of the situation: the dubious motives of Abraham Lincoln and the white government in permitting African Americans to enlist, the continuing reality of racism in the army as well as outside it, and the possibility that white America would forget the soldiers’ sacrifices for the nation and continue to deny their rights after the war. At the Battle of Fort Wagner, the Massachusetts 54th proved its mettle even in the midst of defeat. But this event also initiated a second tradition of memorialization that partly displaced the first—and helped to confirm its worries about white America’s amnesia. Killed alongside his troops and buried in a mass grave with them, the regiment’s leader, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, becomes a white martyr for the causes of America and abolition in elegiac poetry as well as in Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s turn-of-the-century Shaw Memorial in Boston Commons, a different kind of public medium. But the soldiers’ song has an afterlife, as well: Richards demonstrates that Paul Laurence Dunbar responds to both traditions in his song-poem “The Colored Soldiers” and sonnet “Robert Gould Shaw.”
Other chapters of Battle Lines trace the conceit of the talking gun and the fate of the naval ballad in the emerging age of the ironclad. As Richards delineates, the talking-gun trope allowed both Union and Confederate poets not only to send off literary fusillades during the long siege of Charleston but also more thoughtfully to explore the relationships between the ethics of writing and the violence of war. And the clash between the ironclad CSS Virginia and the Union’s wooden warships did not just announce a new age of naval combat; Richards shows that it also challenged poets to refit the naval ballad. The process and the results become particularly rich and compelling in her readings of Henry Howard Brownell’s “The Bay Fight”—a poem that Brownell claimed to have composed even as he was assisting Admiral Farragut at the Battle of Mobile Bay—and of Melville’s “The Battle for the Bay,” which Richards reads as a direct response to Brownell and an attempt to hold a regard for the facts alongside attention to the realities of mediation.
War under the conditions of mass media puts language and form under stress or even damages them, argues Richards. One of the great strengths of Battle Lines is her close analyses of tone and tactics, which often prove unexpectedly complex and equivocal even when poems are incorporating elements that might seem familiar. Richards is particularly adept at reading the momentary gambits of an unfolding poem as they are reinforced, changed, or abandoned from one line or stanza to the next, and to do so without feeling a reflexive need to emphasize formal reconciliation or coherence. Indeed, in her accounts, Civil War poetry often reproduces something of the open-endedness of events that are still unfolding: the ongoingness of a war in progress, of the daily news, or of the struggle to update older forms and languages so that they might become collective tools for understanding modern war and mass mediation. Richards’s suggestive epilogue to the book reads Stephen Crane’s war poetry of the 1890s as driven by a similar imperative to mediate martial events by incorporating collective, impersonal perspectives. Only now, in light of the continued growth of mass print and the fracturing of poetry’s audiences, Crane lacks his predecessors’ belief in a broad readership for the poems that would perform these acts of mass mediation. In contrast to some other studies of the nineteenth century’s literature and its media, Battle Lines turns to this conjunction not to affirm the continuity between that era and the twentieth or twenty-first century but to mark its historical distinctiveness.
University of California Press