UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Sentimental Poetry of the American Civil War Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4m34b5p3 Author Trapp, Marjorie Jane Publication Date 2010 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Sentimental Poetry of the American Civil War by Marjorie Jane Trapp A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctorate of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Mitchell Breitweiser, Chair Professor Dorri Beam Professor David Henkin Fall 2010 Abstract Sentimental Poetry of the American Civil War by Marjorie Jane Trapp Doctorate of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor Mitchell Breitweiser, Chair In her book The Imagined Civil War, Alice Fahs makes a compelling case that Daniel Aaron's seminal claim about the Civil War --- that it was unwritten in every meaningful sense --- misses the point, and, in so doing, looks in the wrong places. Fahs, along with Kathleen Diffley, claims that the American Civil War was very much written, even overwritten, if you look in the many long-overlooked popular periodicals of the war years. I will take Fahs's and Diffley's claims and push them farther, claiming that the Civil War was imaginatively inscribed as a written war in many of its popular poems and songs. This imagined war, or the war as imagined through its popular verse, is a war that is inscribed and circumscribed within images of bounded text and fiction making, and therefore also within issues of authorship, authority, sure knowledge, and the bonds of sentiment. I will look closely at some of what I consider to be the more interesting topoi found in these war poems in order to think through what is being said and why in this huge amount of understudied and underread material. A number of critics have charged that American sentimental writing of the nineteenth century utterly elided the Civil War (Godey's Lady's Book's failure to mention the war even once is held up as the most prominent example of this lacuna). I am proposing that, more than mention the Civil War, these popular sentimental poems made it a text to be bound and read again and again. I submit that not only was the war exceedingly written, it was very often written with writing explicitly in mind, with tropes of reading and writing playing a large part in the imagery of these poems. These popular, anonymous, and forgotten poems image forth the war as a readable text, using highly text-based images (letters sent home, letters found on dead soldiers' bodies, casualty lists read aloud, "unjustified" injured bodies, epitaphs, 1 engraven hearts, bloody feet leaving lines to be read on the land), and, after the war, anthologist after anthologist claims in prefatory material to be making meaning of the war through making a book of the war's poems. I will show how this war was not only written, but written in such a way as to make the war and its sacrificed bodies texts themselves, texts that would be deployed postwar in an effort at reconciliation and bonding through rereading. I will look at ways the mode of sentimentality intersects with war concerns, with the new concerns of this war (e.g., ways of getting and reading news, ways of memorializing the dead who die and are buried far from home, ways of being on the home front, ways the land absorbs bodies, ways bound books can bind their readers together as citizens). The violence of war is sentimentalized and domesticated in these popular poems. Violence (toward bodies, toward the land, and toward comforting notions of family and country) actually becomes a text (something bound, contained, codified, and interpretable). The radical upheaval and violence of the war becomes a poem, and within the poems the violence becomes letters, lists, lines on the land, and bodies that can be read and (re)traced. This verse made meaning of the war by translating the inexplicability of war into bounded and (largly) explicable texts. 2 Dedication I would like to dedicate this dissertation to Elsie Trapp and Marjorie Albright --- two amazing women who have always shown me both the joy of hard work and the value of a good laugh. i Acknowledgements I am grateful to Professor Elizabeth Young for sparking this project in a thoughtful email exchange. I owe a debt of gratitude to my advisor, Professor Mitchell Breitweiser, who steered me toward many avenues of inquiry I would not have thought to look for on my own. This dissertation benefited greatly from his sound advice and thought-provoking questions. I would like to thank Professor Dorri Beam and Profesor David Henkin for helping me to tighten some parts of my argument, while offering suggestions to expand other parts. The work for this dissertation began in earnest when I learned of the looming deadline of the birth of my daughter, Violet, and the end came more sharply into view once I learned of my daughter Trudy’s imminent arrival. I want to thank both my daughters for providing me with the impetus of natural deadlines, and, more importantly, I want to thank them for arriving and being the fascinating, funny, fetching, and amazing people they are. If it were not for them I would not have started or finished this dissertation with such zeal, and they have given me the perspective to see that this work is important, and at the same time very happily unimportant. I want to thank my husband, Seth, for making everything I do possible. I quite simply would never have been able to do this without him, and I cannot think of enough words or ways to thank him. I am incredibly lucky to know such a kind, generous, smart, helpful, encouraging, supportive, and understanding person. Thank you for everything, and then some, Seth. ii Introduction: The Bonds of Sentiment and Civil War Poetry In her book The Imagined Civil War, Alice Fahs makes a compelling case that Daniel Aaron's seminal claim about the American Civil War --- that it was unwritten in every meaningful sense --- misses the point, and, in so doing, looks in the wrong places. She writes, The issue of the quality of Civil War literature has long troubled literary critics who have written about the war. Although the idea that the war produced no "great" literature first appeared during the war itself, it has also haunted twentieth-century appraisals of Civil War literature. Edmund Wilson, for instance, spoke of the "mediocre level of the poetry of the Civil War," complaining that the war drove "into virtual hiding the more personal kind of self- expression which had nothing to do with politics or battles, which was not concocted for any market and which, reflecting the idiosyncracies of the writer, was likely to take on an unconventional form." Applying modernist aesthetic standards to war poems, Wilson almost inevitably found them lacking. Daniel Aaron, too, commented that though "one would expect writers, the 'antennae of the race,' to say something revealing about the meaning, if not the causes, of the War," with "a few notable exceptions, they did not." Yet looked at from a different set of angles, popular war literature is revelatory....Its existence...reminds us that the Civil War took place within a larger Victorian culture, both North and South, which valued poetry as part of significant public events. (15) Those who would claim that America's Civil War produced no great literature have been doing so since the war itself. Oliver Wendell Holmes, in his 1865 lecture "The Poetry of the War," begins his remarks by defending himself against all the war literature's critics: "I have announced my subject as The Poetry of the War....Now there may be those who would save me all trouble by the assertion that there has been no real poetry produced during the war. I hope to convince you that there has been a great deal of good readable verse, and some genuine poetry written during the past four years, under the inspiration of the times through which we have passed." That the Civil War was a barren, uninspiring time for literary output is a critical chestnut that seems to have been accepted without question since the years of the war itself. Yet the poems of the war, according to Holmes, were indeed good, as well as written in abundance: "They were written by soldiers, by the wives, sisters, parents, children, friends of soldiers. Many of them tremble with emotion, and the paper that held them was blistered with tears." Fahs, along with Kathleen Diffley, claims that the American Civil War was very much written, even overwritten, if you look in the many long-overlooked popular periodicals of the war years. As Diffley writes, "The guns that opened on Fort Sumter have echoed for historians since April 1861, when South Carolina rebelled and the Civil 1 War began. For literary critics, however, those first reverberations have long been so faint that the Civil War has seemed largely 'unwritten.'" (Where My Heart Is Turning Ever xi) Diffley looks at long-unread popular magazine stories written during the war to make the point that the American Civil War was indeed meaningfully written. She writes, "Contemporary writers were not, however, silent about the crisis....At issue is the assumption that the Civil War imaginatively vanished, that the tensions it released were suppressed or ignored by contemporary writers and the publishing industry they fueled." (xii) I will take Fahs's and Diffley's claims and push them farther, claiming that the Civil War was imaginatively inscribed as a written war in many of its popular poems and songs.