What Like a Bullet Can Undeceive?

Abstract

In the days after the World Trade Center attacks in September 2001, Robert Pinsky—the former poet laureate and creator of the “America’s Favorite Poems” project—appeared on television reading poems of consolation. This seemed to many people a natural thing to do, I’m sure. Art is commonly thought to have a redemptive task in difficult times. The poem that I will discuss here, Herman Melville’s “Shiloh,” was written in New York at a similar time of violent crisis. The poem clearly answers to the expectation of redemption through art. But consolation and redemption are precisely what I’d like to avoid here. What is most interesting about the poem to me is a paradox in its redemptive language—one that says much about how violence comes to be scandalous, about the traps of redemption, and about the dilemmas of liberal culture. “Shiloh” refers to an 1862 battle in the Civil War, the first of the colossally destructive battles that stunned participants on both sides by the scale of mechanized killing. Melville probably wrote the poem in 1864 or shortly after and published it in 1866 in Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, his first and best book of poetry, written after his novelistic career had essentially ended in failure. It is an unaccountably beautiful poem, building up to an extraordinary single line, which it shudders away from and contains in parentheses: “(What like a bullet can undeceive!).”1