Abstract
Melville’s Battle-Pieces is an intractable work, but this is part of his purpose. Melville had been driven to poetry after a decade that began with the dazzling success of his novels of South Sea adventures, but traced his course of increasing failure as a writer, in exact ratio as his novels became more serious and artful.1 By the time of the Civil War, Melville had retreated into the custom house office job (no. 75), whose bureaucratic enclosure he had dreaded all his life. The urgencies of the war pressed him to write what he hoped would become part of the common discourse of Civil War verse, which was at the time wildly popular. Nevertheless, what he wrote was a poetry he generally called “eminently adapted to unpopularity.”2 His “Battle Pieces” not only refused the side-taking partisanship that enlisted other writers and readers, but also unraveled the very grounds for doing so. Their outstanding feature is their resistance to interpretation. As a fierce encounter with contemporary culture, the poems are centered on not only history, but also the effort to construe it. Interpretation is at the crux: the compulsion toward it, and beyond even its impossibility, its endless pitfalls.
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Notes
Robert Penn Warren “A Note on this Book” Selected Poems of Herman Melville (New York: Random House, 1967, p. vii,
A. Robert Lee, ed., Nineteenth Century American Poetry (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1985), p. 128;
Daniel Aaron describes Battle-Pieces as “variations on the theme of order against anarchy,” The Unwritten War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 79.
George Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War (New York Harper, 1965), p. 185.
William Shurr divides the volume into a cycle of law and a cycle of evil in The Mystery of Iniquity: Melville as Poet (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1972), p. 14.
Joyce Sparer Adler, the poetry presents the war as an “historic tragedy” illustrating the “metaphysics of an evil universe” War in Melville’s Imagination (New York: New York University Press, 1981), p. 133.
Catherine Georg Ondaki, American Transcendental Quarterly 1:1 (1987), 21–32:
Carolyn Karcher, Slavery, Race, and Violence in Melville’s America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980),
Eric Sundquist, “Slavery, Revolution and the American Renaissance” The American Renaissance Reconsidered ed. Walter Benn Michaels and Donald Pease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).
James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (New York: Ballantine, 1988), pp. 653–663.
See Daniel Aaron on Milton’s importance in Civil War writings, The Unwritten War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 343.
Henry F. Pommer, Milton and Melville (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1950).
Helen Trimpi, Melville’s Confidence Men and American Politics in the 1850’s (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1987), p. 24.
Melville, The Civil War World of Herman Melville (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1993), p. 392.
William Bysshe Stein in The Poetry of Melville’s Late Years (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1970),
David Herbert Donald Liberty and Union (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978), p. 72.
Cf. Donald Pease, Visionary Compacts (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), p. 267.
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© 2010 Shira Wolosky
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Wolosky, S. (2010). Fragmented Rhetoric in Battle-Pieces. In: Poetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230113008_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230113008_8
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