Civil War Poetry Research Articles

Review: Battle Lines: Poetry and Mass Media in the U.S. Civil War, by Eliza Richards

Review: <i>Battle Lines: Poetry and Mass Media in the U.S. Civil War</i>, by Eliza Richards

Nancy Cunard and the 1930s Coalitional Anthology

AbstractThis essay addresses Pablo Neruda and Nancy Cunard’s Spanish Civil War poetry anthology Los poetas del mundo defienden al pueblo espanol alongside Cunard’s earlier anthology, her massive and eclectic Negro: Anthology (1934). I argue that when read alongside Cunard’s later, lesser-known collaboration with Neruda, Negro can be seen as one part of Cunard’s larger trajectory as an editor of coalitional anthologies. Los poetas, an understudied collection of modernist poetry deserving of recovery in its own right, also allows greater perspective of Cunard’s earlier anthology. Reading Negro alongside Los poetas makes clear that the stakes of the project, along with the current academic discourse surrounding Cunard, are rooted in questions of the possibility of coalition. Ultimately, I argue that these anthologies uniquely model within their aesthetic form the organization of the political coalitions they seek to produce. They are coalitional, with the goal of bringing disparate elements into productive harmony, in both aesthetics and praxis. I locate what I call coalitional aesthetics within each volume, simultaneously attesting to the disparity of its constituent parts and to their unity. Coalitional aesthetics do not smooth over incongruities between individual parts but rather emphasize them, insisting on their singularity even within the whole they comprise.

The Igbo Persona and the Agony of the Nigerian Civil War in Hyginus Ekwuazi’s That Other Country

The article contends that Hyginus Ekwuazi’s That Other Country addresses the Nigerian Civil War experience and the agonies of the Igbo persona. Being a latter third generation Nigerian poetry, the collection chronicles the connection between the agonies of the Igbo persona, the activities that led to the war, and the war experience itself. Unlike most Nigerian Civil War poetry, Ekwuazi’s That Other Country is influenced by the recent campaign and agitation for Biafra. The poetry does not only record a new version of the war experience, it reflects the Igbo persona’s disenchantment with the worsening socio-political situation of the Nigerian State. The poetry shows that the agony of the war glows, even though the war took place 50 years ago. The collection depicts that the agony of the war is fuelled by the inability of the Igbo persona to forget the horrible experience of his past. The article concludes that Nigerian Civil War poetry has continued to surface because successive Nigerian governments have been unable to provide a levelling ground for its people to melt away the tribal and ethnic mistrust that has become part of its national consciousness.

Animal-Human Compassion: Structures of Feeling in Dark Pastoral

Abstract This essay argues that animal-human compassion, defined as human fellow-feeling with (and not for) animals, is most urgently articulated at points of crisis in human history, such as the terrible bushfires and drought of the Australian summer of 2019–20. Literary history, particularly of pastoral literature, reveals animal-human compassion as a long-contested structure of feeling. The pastoral template established in classical literature, and refined in early modern literature, sets conventions for proper human-animal emotional relations. These ideals are radically destabilised in Andrew Marvell’s ‘dark pastoral’ civil war poetry. This troubled legacy flows through Australian settler-colonial writing about animals, particularly the kangaroo; Barron Field, Charles Harpur and Ethel Pedley strive to intervene in the patriotic myth-making associated with colonial settlement and Federation.

The Civil War Dead and American ModernityBattle Lines: Poetry and Mass Media in the U.S. Civil WarI Remain Yours: Common Lives in Civil War LettersThe Literature of Reconstruction: Not in Plain Black and White

The Civil War Dead and American ModernityBattle Lines: Poetry and Mass Media in the U.S. Civil WarI Remain Yours: Common Lives in Civil War LettersThe Literature of Reconstruction: Not in Plain Black and White

Zambrano and Dieste, Strange Centaurs.

The article proposes to analyze the points of contact between Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s book Sentimento do mundo, published in 1940, and the Spanish Civil War poetry, which arose in the period immediately prior. Our hypothesis is that the communist ideology and literature that spread from the Revolution of 1917 in the Soviet Union, and particularly during the Spanish Civil War, influenced the production of the Brazilian poet, and were decisive in the formulation of his work from that moment until the end of World War II.

Drummond and the Spanish Civil War.

The article proposes to analyze the points of contact between Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s book Sentimento do mundo, published in 1940, and the Spanish Civil War poetry, which arose in the period immediately prior. Our hypothesis is that the communist ideology and literature that spread from the Revolution of 1917 in the Soviet Union, and particularly during the Spanish Civil War, influenced the production of the Brazilian poet, and were decisive in the formulation of his work from that moment until the end of World War II.

The Living Child’s Place in Piatt’s Dead Child Poems

The Living Child’s Place in Piatt’s Dead Child Poems Jess Roberts (bio) Paula Bernat Bennett published her selected edition of Sarah Piatt’s poetry, Palace-Burner: The Selected Poems of Sarah Piatt (2001), over a century after Piatt’s last significant book publication, her two-volume Poems (1894). Recognizing the need to market Piatt in the twenty-first century, Bennett assembled poems whose aesthetic and political sensibilities would resonate with modern readers. The very qualities that rankled Piatt’s nineteenth-century contemporaries—her irony, ambiguity, and difficulty—are on full display in Palace-Burner and have animated and excited students of nineteenth-century women’s poetry.1 Despite her often adamant language, Bennett presents Palace-Burner’s version of Piatt as qualified. “It should be stressed,” she writes in the preface, “that this volume’s publication only marks the culmination of the first phase of Piatt’s recovery. Both the presentation of her life and the particular selection of poems should be viewed as provisional .… much still remains to be done before the full dimensions of her literary achievement and its significance can be assessed.”2 So even as she set Piatt before a new generation of readers, Bennett recognized that others needed to challenge and develop that initial vision in order to comprehend fully her work’s richness. [End Page 334] If Alexandra Socarides and Jennifer Putzi’s A History of Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry (2017) or Alfred Bendixen and Stephen Burt’s The Cambridge History of American Poetry (2015) are any indication, how we comprehend Piatt, and consequently nineteenth-century American poetry, is expanding. With Piatt now a household name, something that twenty years ago seemed all but impossible, scholars in these collections situate Piatt’s writing in the context of realism (Elizabeth Renker), children’s poetry (Angela Sorby), Southern women’s poetry (Bennett), and Civil War poetry (Faith Barrett).3 Elsewhere, Matthew Giordano examines Piatt’s engagement with and place in periodical culture; Mary McCartin Wearn charts how her poems concerning loss and motherhood evolved over her writing life; and D. Zachary Finch discusses her “ethics of maternal melancholy.”4 This scholarship makes visible the range and versatility of Piatt’s poetry and helps fashion an increasingly nuanced picture of nineteenth-century poetic culture and a significant maker of poems. While this analysis has complicated our understanding of Piatt and the world of print in which her poems circulated, the terms of Bennett’s recovery of Piatt—a recovery that values irony, anger, and subversion—potentially limit how we study her poetry. Such is the case with the study of Piatt’s poems about child death. In the introduction to Palace-Burner, Bennett describes the poet as “turning elegy into confessional” and “send[ing] up howls of pain … not to be matched again in women’s poetry until Sylvia Plath.” Later, Bennett writes, in characteristically powerful language, “Piatt’s poems on child death … fall within nineteenth-century sentimentality’s discursive parameters, but hers is a sentimentality turned in on itself, devouring itself in rage.”5 As Wearn has similarly demonstrated, Piatt’s sometimes furious rejection of the terms of sentimental consolation represents an important part of her literary agenda. However, the focus on that rejection has obscured the range of emotion [End Page 335] and response that Piatt’s dead child poems represent.6 Furthermore, existing studies of those poems have focused overwhelmingly on poetry the scholars date after Piatt’s children had died. Piatt lost children early and often: her unnamed infant in August 1873, almost ten-year-old Victor in July 1874, ten-year-old Louis in 1884, and her adult son Donn in 1914 just before her own death. But the writer’s personal experience of child death neither inaugurated nor concluded her self-conscious critical engagement with the conventions governing child elegies. This essay aims to expand and sharpen our understanding of Piatt’s dead child poems by foregrounding poems she wrote before and after the death of her son Victor. First, it considers a group of poems that appeared in an anthology entitled Little Graves (1876), a collection that is representative of the sentimental tradition of child elegies...

“Gorgeous Crime”: The Art of Violence in Women’s Civil War Poetry

“Gorgeous Crime”: The Art of Violence in Women’s Civil War Poetry

“You Talk Like a Book”: Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Civil War Poetry and the Regionalization of Speech

Constance Feminore Woolson’s poetic renderings of Civil War memory, most of them published in Appletons’ Journal from 1873 through 1877, examine the regionalization of speech as a factor bearing on national reconciliation—a concern that is largely absent from better-known commemorations by Melville, Whitman, Whittier, Lowell, and Piatt, and that remains underexplored in recent work in historical poetics. This essay finds Woolson participating in the cultural project of ballad reconstruction, employing vernacular modes and regional speech in the dramatic realism of her more successful dialogue-based poems. “Kentucky Belle,” popularized by actress Charlotte Cushman, marks the linguistic residue of antebellum sectionalism, which Woolson then formally subordinates to a national linguistic standard in the verse drama “Two Women” as well as “At the Smithy” and “Dolores.” While this standard offers an opportunity for the incorporation of oppressed minorities, it does not foster reconciliation between Northern and Southern whites. The terms of war memory favored regionalization. By contrast, Woolson’s genteel lyric commemorations in “Morris Island” and an unpublished poem on Gettysburg only mourn the war’s losses without the compensation of re-Union. Read as a collection, then, Woolson’s Civil War poems underscore the persistent visibility and audibility of Northern and Southern identities still shaped by war memory during the reconciliationist stage of the late nineteenth century.

A Reading of Walt Whitman’s Ocean Battles in Civil War Poetry

A Reading of Walt Whitman’s Ocean Battles in Civil War Poetry

Whitman, Walt. Drum Taps: The Complete Civil War Poems; Drum-Taps: The Complete 1865 Edition [review

Walt Whitman. Drum Taps: The Complete Civil War Poems. Introduction by James McPherson. Kennebunkport, ME: Cider Mill Press, 2015. 213 pp.Walt Whitman. Drum-Taps: The Complete 1865 Edition, ed. Lawrence Kramer. New York: New York Review of Books, 2015. xxiv + 170 pp.Two stand-alone editions of Walt Whitman's 1865 Drum-Taps hit bookshelves in 2015 beside score of commemorating the sesquicentennial of General Robert E. Lee's surrender and the end of the Civil War-an anniversary coinciding with the birthday of Whitman's war poetry collection. Both editions of Drum-Taps stand apart from the majority of those other books, celebrating one of the few collections of Civil War poetry written by an eye-witness. Cider Mill Press's Drum Taps: The Complete Civil War Poems offers visceral experience, integrating the poems with full-color and black-and-white historical images of battlefields, hospitals, and veterans. The result is collage attempting to present Whitman's poetry as documentation-eye-witness testimony to the bravery of soldiers and the savagery of war, with special emphasis on the eye. Drum-Taps: The Complete 1865 Edition, published by the press of the New York Review of Books, is text-only paperback, about one-third smaller in dimensions than Cider Mill's version, with back cover declaring this edition to be a revelation, allowing one of Whitman's greatest achievements to appear again in all its troubling glory. The differ dramatically not only in appearance but, more importantly, in the editorial approaches to the source material.Pulitzer-prize winning and New York Times bestselling author James McPherson, the renowned historian whose include Battle Cry of Freedom, introduces Cider Mill's Drum Taps (the missing hyphen in the title is the Press's own mistake) as [making] the war more real to readers of the poems and viewers of the photographs, [offering] stark portrait of the grim realities of war that confronted Whitman as he made his rounds of hospitals and battlefields (4). The editors have chosen fair balance of iconic and lesser known images of the period, including Currier and Ives lithographs, Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner photographs, and daguerreotypes of enlisted soldiers. A majority of the images are black-and-white or sepia, and are remarkably clear for book of this size. The color images, mostly artistic representations of the war, are equally stunning in their detail, testifying to the quality of Cider Mill's printing.Any book relying so heavily on illustrations runs the risk of encountering problems in formatting, especially when pulling those images from historical archives and collections. While most of the illustrations are full-page, smaller images require internal framing to fit the 6 x 9.2 book format. Some of these frames-mock-Victorian borders against stock-design backgrounds-contain images no bigger than 2 x 3.5, mostly horizontal images presumably reduced in size to fit the vertical dimensions of the book. Among otherwise full-page spreads, these frames are clunky and often interrupt the continuity of the reading experience. Photo information and credits are located at the back of the book, so, with nearly 200 images to contend with, the reader is forced to constantly flip back and forth between the pages. The presence of the frames might suggest the book's role as curatorial item, museum on the page, but the absence of localized, focused captions and the inconsistency of formatting detract from the maneuverability of the work as whole.Cider Mill internally divides their collection of Whitman's Civil War poetry into two books, the first of which is textually and structurally identical with the Drum-Taps cluster found in the final (1881) arrangement of Leaves of Grass, thus relying on Whitman's later ordering and edits. The two books are separated by an interlude-two prose pieces detailing the inauguration and death of President Lincoln taken directly from Whitman's Specimen Days, an attribution that does not appear anywhere within the book itself. …

Changing the Subject: Archives, Technology, and Radical Counter-Narratives of Peace

This article argues that performing the recovery of pacifist art and actions through archival research of the modernist era encourages students to engage in radical ethical inquiry. Based on four sections of a writing class at Haverford College, this article walks the reader through the construction of a student digital humanities and special collections exhibition, Testimonies in Art &amp; Action: Igniting Pacifism in the Face of Total War, which ran from October 6 to December 11, 2015 in Haverford College’s Magill Library. The exhibition placed archival materials in conversation with the major modernist pacifist documentary projects of Langston Hughes’s Spanish Civil War poetry and dispatches, Muriel Rukeyser’s “Mediterranean,” Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, and Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas. This undertaking was driven by the questions, “How does one respond ethically to total war?” and “How can archival and special collections research do the works of peace?” Built around the work of these classes and materials from Haverford’s Quaker &amp; Special Collections, Testimonies in Art &amp; Action allowed students to deeply interrogate a variety of pacifisms and become producers of a critical discourse that challenges the status quo position that violence is perpetually necessary and the most important aspect of world history.

From the Epic to the Allegorical Sublime: A Multilingual Reading of Spanish Civil War Poetry

This article examines poetry written during the Spanish Civil War that reflects on the modern character of the conflict: the novel tactic of aerial bombing civilian populations as it was disseminated through the mass media. A comparative reading of this body of poetry written by Spanish, British, and American authors allows for the examination of the range of aesthetic paradigms employed to represent the Spanish war in different languages, even as most writers shared a similar purpose of mobilizing readers. Such an approach permits the analysis of two tendencies in the representation of air raids: as an aggressive tactic to instill terror, and as a horrific vision of the resulting human carnage. In both, the civilian victim is represented by the figure of a child: a universal symbol whose death can constitute a sublime image, which is at times effective as propaganda to legitimate the struggle. The theme of Guernica illustrates the way the images of human destruction function as an allegory of a cruelly novel war that foreshadowed disasters beyond Spanish borders.

Peck, Garrett. Walt Whitman in Washington, D.C.: The Civil War and America’s Great Poet [review

GARRETT PECK, Whitman in Washington, D.C.: Civil War and America's Great Poet. Charleston, SC: History Press, 2015. 192 pp.Walt Whitman in Washington, D. C. will appeal to readers curious to see Whitman's life overlaid with the evolving urban history of the capital. book straddles the genres of biography and literary travel guide. Garrett Peck offers a narrative-driven portrait of Whitman seen through the overlapping frames of nineteenth- and twenty-first century D.C. author of Capital Beer: A Heady History of Brewing in Washington, D.C.; Prohibition in D.C.: How Dry We Weren't; and Potomac River: A History and Guide, Peck is first and foremost a writer concerned with the history of Washington. Peck's background as a tour guide with the Smithsonian Associates permeates his prose. This is much more an exploration of a city than of a poet.Attuned to general readers not already intimate with Whitman's life and work, this book focuses on the decade that Whitman lived in (1863-1873). Peck seeks to elevate the poet's place within the contemporary cityscape, and to illuminate the impact that the capital had on the trajectory of Whitman's life during and following the Civil War. begins with the premise that Whitman is most often associated with New York City, or, in his twilight years, with Camden, New Jersey. Aside from the Civil War, Peck argues, Whitman's has not entered the cultural zeitgeist:When people asked why I was writing this book, I explained that Whitman lived in Washington, D. C. for ten years. He did?! was the near universal response. They knew he served as a hospital volunteer during the Civil War, but not that he remained in and took a job as a federal clerk or that he wrote his Civil War poetry book Drum-Taps as a resident (14).While there is no other book devoted solely to Whitman's residency in the capital, this period has been extensively covered in the major biographies by Gay Wilson Allen, Justin Kaplan, Jerome Loving, and David S. Reynolds. Additionally, Robert Roper's Now the Drum of War: Whitman and his Brothers in the Civil War (2008) focuses primarily on this era, as does Roy Morris Jr.'s Better Angel: Whitman in the Civil War (2000). Both Roper and Morris are biographers writing, like Peck, for a general audience, although the scope of their projects is far greater. Kenneth M. Price's recent article, Walt Whitman and Civil War Washington (Leviathan 16, March 2014), and the interdisciplinary digital archive Civil War (civilwardc.org) are two integral sources for scholars seeking to understand Whitman's relationship to the capital.Readers already familiar with the above works will find no new discoveries in Peck's treatment of Whitman, though they may appreciate the author's knowledge of the District's landscape. Peck unites a collage of geographical and biographical material, juxtaposing archival photographs and correspondence with scenes from contemporary D.C. This book aims to reincarnate, visually and textually, the traces Whitman left on the city. Although the apartments he inhabited have all vanished, Peck follows Kim Roberts's footsteps in mapping Whitman's Washington. (Roberts's map of Whitman's boarding houses and work places, published in the Whitman Quarterly Review (2005), is another invaluable scholarly resource.) Peck also charts the locations where Whitman's words have been inscribed onto landmarks:Coming out of the north entrance of the Dupont Circle Metro station, you'll see part of Whitman's poem The Wound-Dresser carved into the giant stone that surrounds the entrance. . . . poem was carved into the station entrance in 2007. It echoes the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, when thousands of gay men were dying of the disease. Another Whitman poem is quoted at the Archives-Navy Memorial Metro Station, his Prayer of Columbus. Two more are carved in pink granite in Freedom Plaza, one from 1855, the other from 1888. …

The “Onanism of Poetry”

Lyric is onanistic: masturbation is the latent content of lyric poetry. This article counters queer theory with a turn to onanist theory, pointing out the centrality of masturbation to the work of Jacques Derrida, and suggesting that rather than consider masturbation the supplement to sex, we might consider the opposite. Modern man (the gendering is deliberate) has, according to Derrida, been mistaken in his metaphysics by a deluded fidelity to presence, an ontological error to which he has been attached as though to a lover; instead, modern man is guiltily onanistic. This article argues that the apostrophic intimacies of lyric and the longings held therein are masturbatory. To do so it reads Rob Halpern's Music for Porn as a deconstructive reading of Walt Whitman's Civil War poetry.

Herman Melville and Walt Whitman Write the Civil War: An Introduction

Herman Melville and Walt Whitman Write the Civil War:An Introduction Christopher Sten and Tyler Hoffman Although both Walt Whitman’s Drum-Taps and Herman Melville’s Battle-Pieces were met with confusion and sometimes open hostility at the time of their publication, Whitman’s volume has enjoyed a much more approving reception over the decades than Melville’s, to the point where Drum-Taps has become not only an established feature of the American canon but the single most representative collection of Civil War poetry by an American. By contrast, until recently, Battle-Pieces has been a marginal text in the history of American writing because of a longstanding critical failure to appreciate the complexity of Melville’s project and his eccentricity and sophistication as a poet or even his claims to being a poet at all. Whitman, who had been publishing poetry for a full decade before the appearance of his Civil War collection in 1865, was widely recognized as a poet, while Melville, who had not published for almost a decade (though he had worked on a volume of “Poems” [1860], now lost and never published), was recognized only as the author of several popular travel narratives and assorted works of fiction, but not as a poet. When Battle-Pieces was first reviewed, it was met with incomprehension of one kind or another, as when William Dean Howells, writing anonymously in the Atlantic Monthly (February 1867), told his readers the collection was “like no poetry you have ever read” (Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews, Ed. Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker [New York, Cambridge U P, 1995], 526–27) or when the anonymous reviewer in The Round Table (15 September 1866) faulted the author for “his disregard of the laws of verse” (Higgins and Parker 520). Starting in the 1970s, the historian Daniel Aaron, in The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War (1973), and literary critics, notably William H. Shurr, in The Mystery of Iniquity: Melville as Poet, 1857–1891 (1972), began to [End Page 1] pay attention to Melville’s philosophical, nuanced treatment of the war. Later, Stanton Garner, in The Civil War World of Herman Melville (1993), for the first time looked closely at the historical, biographical, and familial context of the poems, emphasizing Melville’s extensive knowledge of the war but also the distance between the author and his narrators. At the turn of this century, Helen Vendler and Rosanna Warren—a widely recognized authority on prosody and a highly accomplished poet, respectively—broke new ground in emphasizing Melville’s command of the Western poetic tradition and the inventive character of his prosody. Finally, in the past decade and a half, we have seen more extensive, searching treatments of Melville’s poetry, including the poetry in Battle-Pieces, and mounting evidence that Melville had been systematically studying, collecting, and writing poetry from early in his career, as argued by a number of critics, including the late Douglas Robillard and, more amply and emphatically, by Hershel Parker in Melville: The Making of the Poet (2008). With the Melville Society’s Ninth International Conference, “Melville and Whitman in Washington: The Civil War Years and After” (June 2013), the scholarly community has had an opportunity to examine Melville’s Civil War poetry in the context of the Civil War poetry of his great contemporary Whitman. That conference has generated several remarkably informed close readings of individual poems, clusters of poems, and other writings of the Civil War, including Melville’s controversial “Supplement” to Battle-Pieces, here examined alongside Whitman’s analogous finale or “Sequel” to Drum-Taps. Together, the essays gathered in this special issue of Leviathan constitute a representative sampling of the most illuminating contemporary assessments of Melville’s Civil War poetry and a match for a comparable set of essays on Whitman’s Civil War poetry forthcoming in November 2015 in Mickle Street Review: An Electronic Journal of Walt Whitman and American Studies, edited by Tyler Hoffman. Both sets of essays will be included in a volume that we are co-editing, titled “This Mighty Convulsion”: Walt Whitman and Herman Melville Write the Civil War. The first of the essays presented here, Thomas Nurmi...

All Astir

All Astir Mary K. Bercaw Edwards Much has happened since the last report of Melville Society doings in “All Astir.” From June 4–7, 2013, scholars of the work of Herman Melville and Walt Whitman gathered in Washington DC at the campus of George Washington University for the Ninth International Melville Conference, which was organized and directed with grace and generosity by the conference committee of Christopher Sten (George Washington University), Tyler Hoffman (Rutgers University-Camden), Joseph Fruscione (UMBC; George Washington University), Martin Murray (Washington Friends of Walt Whitman), Karen Karbiener (NYU); Neil Richardson (UDC), Matt K. Gold (CUNY Graduate Center), Kim Roberts (Beltway Poetry Quarterly), Wyn Kelley (MIT), and Dennis Berthold (Texas A&M). This issue of Extracts includes four conference reports from scholars who participated in the events: Hester Blum, Martina Pfeiler, Paul M. Wright, and Tomoyuki Zettsu. As the reporters note, the conference offered a remarkable range of media for understanding and re-imagining Melville and Whitman. The digital humanities, the visual arts, and musical performance all helped to immerse participants in the worlds of Melville, Whitman, and their Civil War poetry, from lightning talks on technology and exhibitions of the work of Matt Kish and Douglass Paisley to stirring performances of musical settings from Melville’s Battle-Pieces and Whitman’s Drum-Taps. We are fortunate to be able to reprint all four of the keynote addresses from the conference, each of which serves to transform and extend our knowledge of Melville and Whitman. The four keynote addresses symmetrically represented the conference topics: two eminent Melville scholars, John Bryant and Elizabeth Renker, discussed Melville’s fiction and poetry, and two eminent scholars of Walt Whitman, Ed Folsom and Kenneth Price, examined and contextualized Whitman’s experiences in Civil War Washington. Elizabeth Renker demonstrated that the story so often told about the perennial obscurity of Melville’s poetry must be reconsidered in light of the wider role that poetry played in nineteenth-century American literary culture. John Bryant took Melville’s representations of the Civil War beyond Battle-Pieces to Billy Budd, tracing the development of Melville’s “black consciousness” through the revision process of Billy Budd and outlining how the Melville Electronic Library can provide the resources for critics to develop revision narratives. Ed Folsom contextualized both Melville and Whitman in [End Page 51] relation to the “unwritten Reconstruction,” echoing Daniel Aaron’s “unwritten war,” making use in his discussion of the racialized images associated with the building of the new Capitol Dome and its crowning figure. Kenneth Price showed the significance of Washington DC for understanding Melville and Whitman, tracing the footsteps of Whitman around the nation’s capital and showing how, especially with regard to race, Whitman’s observations during the war are essential for understanding the trajectory of his thought and attitudes. As scholars gathered in Washington DC to remember the Civil War and study Melville’s and Whitman’s later careers, they also looked forward to the Tenth Melville Society International Conference, to be held in June 2015 in Tokyo, which will be organized by the Melville Society of Japan and its President (Arimichi Makino, Meiji Univ. emeritus) and Takayuki Tatsumi (Keio Univ.). In 1985, Prof. Makino established the Melville Study Center at Meiji University and inaugurated its annual journal Sky-Hawk. With the 2015 conference in mind, the Melville Study Center recently has been reorganized as The Melville Society of Japan, which held its first annual conference in Sept. 2012 and is publishing a new version of the journal, now titled Sky-Hawk: The Journal of the Melville Society of Japan. The first issue (the first in the new series, the 28th consecutive issue of Sky-Hawk) appeared in Dec. 2013. It contains a welcoming essay by John Bryant titled “Heiwa / Bungaku” (Peace / Literature) and three articles written by Prof. Makino, Joshua Petitto, and Kohei Furuya on the problem of translating Melville, a topic that will continue to be addressed at the 2015 Tokyo conference. The issue also contains Masahiro Uehara’s contribution to the debate about the Northwestern Newberry editors’ emendation to Ch. 114 of Moby-Dick, “The Gilder,” and David Farnell’s analysis of Melville’s portents of...

“The Earth to be Spann’d, Connected by Net-Work”: Walt Whitman’s Industrial Internationalism

AbstractUsing his post–Civil War poetry and prose, this essay investigates the role of industrialization in Walt Whitman’s internationalist thought. Reconsidering him as a Hegelian thinker, it explores his characterization of progress in the modern world as a product of the expansion of industry across the globe. Although Whitman saw this process as driven by American industrial progress, his views were not conventionally imperialistic. Instead, fusing materialist and idealist principles, he sought to transcend the nation in favor of an international order of cosmopolitan global communities, as depicted in his poetic descriptions of the urban crowd. The essay considers the implications of Whitman’s internationalism for American political theory, particularly in today’s rapidly globalizing world.

Melville and the Worlds of Civil War Poetry

Melville and the Worlds of Civil War Poetry