Battle Lines. Eliza Richards

      “How News Must Feel When Traveling”

      How News must feel when traveling,

      If News have any Heart.

      Alighting at the Dwelling

      Twill enter like a Dart!

      In these lines, Emily Dickinson implies that though news may not have “any Heart,” poems do, and it is their duty to imagine the emotions that the news generates in people while it circulates, even if they are excruciating. The autonomy and anonymity of Dickinson’s news, along with its travels and seemingly random, violent visits to homes, emphasize mass circulation networks over more intimate circulatory modes, like gossip, or epistolary exchange. Alternative lines for the first stanza, noted at the end of the manuscript, affiliate the poem more closely with wartime violence: “Advancing on the Transport /’Twill riddle like a Shot.” The riddling of the mind, aligned with a body riddled with bullets, are so perfectly analogized they present as one experience in the poem. These terse lines begin to lay out the process I will explore in this book.

      Battle Lines charts transformations of American poetry during the U.S. Civil War, which, I argue, are fueled by a symbiotic relationship between the development of mass media networks and modern warfare. A syncretic conjunction of new technologies and catastrophic events stimulated the development of news into a central cultural force. Reacting to the ascendance of the news, poets articulated an urgent need to make their work not only relevant, but immediately responsive to current happenings. Poetry’s compressed forms traveled more easily than stories, novels, or essays through ephemeral print media, allowing it to move alongside and rapidly respond to news reports. Civil War–era poets took on the task of imagining what correspondent mental states arose for readers upon receiving news from the war front: how to think and what to feel about the mass violence of modern warfare happening elsewhere, but brought close with new intensity via mass media networks. Newspaper and magazine poetry had of course long editorialized on political happenings: Indian wars, slavery and abolition, prison reform, women’s rights. But the unprecedented scope of what has been called the first modern war, and the centrality of the issues involved for national futures, generated a powerful sense of single-minded collectivity among readers and writers, which altered the terms of poetic expression.¹

      Writers of the time thought about the ways that new communication technologies affected individual and collective states. In an essay entitled “Bread and the Newspaper,” published in the September 1861 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. dubs the Civil War communications network “our national nervous system.” Dr. Holmes speculates that the “iron nerve pathways” of the newspaper and telegraph and the “iron muscles” of the railroad, along with the animating force of the war, have created a superhuman national body. These “new conditions of existence”: “make war as it is with us very different from war as it has been. The first and obvious difference consists of the fact that the whole nation is now penetrated by the ramifications of a network of iron nerves which flash sensation and volition backward and forward to and from towns and provinces as if they were organs and limbs of a single living body. The second is the vast system of iron muscles which, as it were, move the limbs of the mighty organism one upon another.” The nervous network binds the nation (which is specifically the Union, for Holmes) into a living, responsive entity that acts on impulses: a central aggressive force with a single aim coordinates the massive technological body to enact state violence. Once the iron nerves send their messages, the iron muscles respond, resulting in a mass mobilization that Holmes hopes will win the war. He offers an example of perfect military coordination: “What was the railroad-force which put the Sixth Regiment in Baltimore on the 19th of April but a contraction and extension of the arm of Massachusetts with a clenched fist full of bayonets at the end of it?”²

      The nervous network that powers troop movements extends to civilians, who are kept in a constant state of excitement by what Holmes calls “perpetual intercommunication.”³ Being wired into a force so much larger and more powerful than individuals takes a toll. For Holmes, the impact of news circulation upon noncombatants results in a version of the “war fever” contracted by soldiers. Associating the absorption of shocking events with troop movements, he tells readers that thinking about news ages the brain prematurely: “When any startling piece of war news comes, it keeps repeating itself in our minds in spite of all we can do. The same trains of thought go tramping round in a circle through the brain like the supernumeraries that make up the grand Army of the stage show. Now, if a thought goes round the brain a thousand times in a day, it