Civil War Poetry And Prose

Poems, letters, and prose from the war years include "O Captain! My Captain!" "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," "Adieu to a Soldier," and many other moving works.

Poetry, prose, photos, and songs of the Civil War. The authors range from hawks to doves. In the former category, James Madison Bell wrote: "The pleasing duty still remains / To sing a people from their chains."

A superb selection of poems from both sides of the American Civil War features more than 75 inspired works by Melville, Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, Whitman, and many others.

This book is the first to offer a comprehensive selection of Walt Whitman’s Civil War poetry and prose with a full commentary on each work. Ed Folsom and Christopher Merrill carry on a dialogue with Whitman (and with each other) as they invite readers to trace how Whitman’s writing about the Civil War develops, shifts, and manifests itself in different genres throughout the years of the war. The book offers forty selections of Whitman’s war writings, including not only the well-known war poems but also his prose and personal letters. Each are followed by Folsom’s critical examination and then by Merrill’s afterword, suggesting broader contexts for thinking about the selection. The real democratic reader, Whitman said, “must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay—the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start or frame-work,” because what is needed for democracy to flourish is “a nation of supple and athletic minds.” Folsom and Merrill model this kind of active reading and encourage both seasoned and new readers of Whitman’s war writings to enter into the challenging and exhilarating mode of talking back to Whitman, arguing with him, and learning from him.

Deeply affecting and diverse in perspective, The Poetry of the American Civil War is the first comprehensive volume to focus entirely on poetry written and published during the Civil War. Of the nearly one thousand books of poetry published in the 1860s, some two hundred addressed the war in some way, and these collectively present a textured portrait of life during the conflict. The poets represented here hail from the North and the South, and at times mirror each other uncannily. Among them are housewives, doctors, preachers, bankers, journalists, and teachers. Their verse reflects the day-to-day reality of war, death, and destruction, and it contemplates questions of faith, slavery, society, patriotism, and politics. This is an essential volume for poetry lovers, historians, and Civil War enthusiasts alike.

This reprint of an 1866 volume of poems by the author of Moby Dick and Billy Budd includes four essays showing why Melville's verse with its unconventional linking of literary form and political-military history remains misunderstood and neglected. Princeton University historian James M. McPherson's preface thoughtfully discusses the import of Melville's book as a Civil War document. The introduction sketches Melville's pre-war concern with slavery in Moby Dick (1851) and Benito Cereno (1856). The seventy-two deeply moving, austerely beautiful lyrical poems about the Civil War include works on the hanging of John Brown, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and the battles at Donelson, Shiloh, and Gettysburg. Harvard University critic Helen Vendler's essay argues that Melville's innovative manner of transforming this epic matter of history into a new kind of lyric poem makes for arresting and wholly original poetry. For Boston University poet Rosanna Warren, the irregularity of Melville's verse forces readers to participate in the process of arriving at a dark knowledge of war. According to Richard Cox, the organization of Melville's poems conveys that the passions of the war will not cease and yet they seem to continue Abraham Lincoln's task of binding the nation's wounds. Paul Dowling reveals how the poet reshaped the war, distorting history to moderate wartime passions and to imitate Shakespeare's philosophical (but unpopular) dramas. Students and scholars of American literature and history, as well as Civil War enthusiasts, will welcome this outstanding new publication of a long-neglected volume of political poetry by one of America's classic novelists.

Descendants of Vietnam veterans and refugees confront the aftermath of war and, in verse and prose, deliver another kind of war story. Fifty years after the Vietnam War, this anthology by descendants of Vietnam veterans and refugees—American, Vietnamese, Vietnamese Diaspora, Hmong, Australian, and others—confronts war and its aftermath. What emerges is an affecting portrait of the effects of war and family—an intercultural, generational dialogue on silence, memory, landscape, imagination, Agent Orange, displacement, postwar trauma, and the severe realities that are carried home. Including such acclaimed voices as Viet Thanh Nguyen, Karen Russell, Terrance Hayes, Suzan-Lori Parks, Nick Flynn, and Ocean Vuong, Inheriting the War enriches the discourse of the Vietnam War and provides a collective conversation that attempts to transcend the recursion of history. “Each unique work in Inheriting the War embraces a collective that aims to engage through some daring and passionate truths calibrated by bravery.” —Yusef Komunyakaa, from the foreword

Excerpt from Stories of the Civil War in Prose and Poem However, when I enlisted in the army of the United States the condition of the National Government seemed to require that the number of able bodied men asked for by the War Department should quickly respond. I there fore did not consider the act of enlisting a contradiction to my earlier predilection. In relation to my experience and observations during three years and five months, which is the period of time I gave my country in fulfilment of my enlistment agree ment, this little book I now present to my friends will briefly tell in part. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.