“It is certain that since the time of Homer the deeds and circumstances of war have not been felicitously sung.” So began an anonymous reflection on wartime poetry in the July 1862 issue of theAtlantic Monthly.The Civil War was little more than a year old, and its literary output already seemed as unimpressive as the early performances of Union armies in the field. No matter what the historical moment in which they were contested, wars seemed only “to inspire the same rhetoric in every age, and to reproduce the same conventional set of war-images.” And sadly, American poets,...

Although Civil War poets frequently used the war as a convenient sounding–board for their ideas concerning society, religion, man’s place in the universe, a considerable number strove to capture something of the immediacy of war and its impact on soldiers and their families. Very few of the poems which resulted from this effort, however, approach a vivid realism, since poets, in keeping with the sentimental and melodramatic temper of their era, characteristically employed a highly colored diction in describing the war scene.

The clash of arms provided one of the more popular subjects. Some poets poetically described specific battles...

Some poets, at least in a portion of their war verse, portrayed the war in natural rather than in supernatural terms. But nineteenth century American society was not pre-eminently humanistic; it was pre-eminently Christian. And since religion loomed large in the life of society, poets, adapting the war to the attitudes of the time, more often than not gave the war a religious reading. In conceiving their war as a Holy War poets and society were following a pattern familiar throughout the course of Western civilization. Homer and the ancient Hebrews alike had dramatized the advisability of Divine aid in...

Most Civil War poetry inclined toward the sentimental or melodramatic. Poets, regardless of their subject, ordinarily interpreted the war as a colorful, dramatic, emotional spectacle, as a pageant designed to bring to the surface hitherto submerged heroics. But a minority voice insisted on a hearing. A handful of poets, North and South, adopting a more hard-headed attitude toward than their peers, had the audacity to suggest that war, far from bringing out the divine and heroic in man, brought to light what the seventeenth century poet, Anne Bradstreet, had called man’s “unregenerate part.” This minority group excoriated their society variously,...

Poets North and South were convinced that the Civil War resulted from clearly defined forces over which man had, or should have had, control. From this attitude grew an intensely vitriolic verse. And, since vitriol is vitriol, wherever one finds it, it is not surprising that Northern and Southern poets employed identical epithets. A favorite label of opprobrium, knowing no geographical boundaries, wasTyranny.The Northern poet Dexter Smith, and the Southern poet Cornelia J. M. Jordan, similarly charge the opposition with Tyranny in the poems which follow. Smith’s poem is fromPoems(Boston, 1868); Jordan’s poem is fromCorinth and Other...

The long verse narrative—sentimental, melodramatic, moralistic—constituted one of the mid–century’s most popular poetic genres. These poetic counterparts of the sentimental novel frequently conformed, as did their sisters in prose, to a rather inflexible formula. Most came equipped with spotless hero, virtuous heroine, and consummate villain, all of whom were expected to move according to established patterns of conduct. The hero and heroine, desperately in love, were allowed to discuss that love only in Platonic terms. The duty of the villain was to separate hero and heroine and to keep them apart. Unless the villain happened to be...