Battle Lines. Eliza Richards

Figure 3. Anon., “Iron on Iron—A Monitor Song,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, May 23, 1863, 133. The song tells the story of the First Battle of Charleston Harbor, which took place on April 7, 1863. In spite of high hopes for the U.S. fleet of ironclads, the nine ships were unable to penetrate the harbor’s line of defenses. Like many other poems of the Civil War period, “Iron on Iron” was published soon after the battle and offers an interpretation of the conflict in historical and nationalist terms. Courtesy of HarpWeek.

      Receiving news bears a troubled relation to making news in U.S. Civil War poems. The conjunction of a new mass media network with the mass death that resulted from a full-scale war foregrounded the gap between vicarious and direct experiences of the conflict. For strangers and loved ones alike, reading the news may have been analogous to receiving a battle wound—Dickinson warned that “‘twill riddle like a shot”—but it certainly wasn’t the same.¹⁶ Even so, reading the news was an experience in itself, and many Civil War poems mark the difference.¹⁷ Poems enforce a difference between direct and indirect forms of experience while nevertheless positing relations between them. In doing so they mark productive distinctions between the distant suffering on the battlefield, reports of that suffering, and readers’ reception of those reports.

      Meditating on these lines of connection, popular Civil War poet George Boker envisions newsprint as a circulatory system, or a system of recirculation, for the blood of the dead. War news animates, nourishes, and brings together readers over a common, luridly fascinating topic. He connects lines of print to arteries opened on the battlefield:

      Blood, blood! The lines of every printed sheet

      Through their dark arteries reek with running gore;

      At hearth, the board, before the household door,

      ‘Tis the sole subject with which neighbors meet.

      Girls at the feast, and children in the street,

      Prattle of horrors; flash their little store

      Of simple jests against the cannon’s roar,

      As if mere slaughter kept existence sweet.¹⁸

      Like Holmes, Boker imagines a national body connected through lines of mass communication. Stressing the continuity between the physical conflict and the talk about it, between the “cannon’s roar” and the “flash” of “jests,” large-scale killing and the “prattle of horrors,” he is critical of the vicarious pleasure that derives from the remote reception of violence. He also acknowledges that such a dynamic is unavoidable, for he cannot possibly exclude his own poetic lines from his condemnation; the “dark arteries” of his “printed sheet” also “reek with running gore.” Or not—his metaphor shows that people on the home front are feeding on bloody impressions, not blood; their vicarious pleasure depends upon print’s removal from physical violence. The horror that Boker seeks to convey is one of abstraction. There seems to be no way around it; a compulsive circulation of violent figures animates the public, who forge community from the dead without understanding the cost. When battle lines become headlines or lines of poetry—and they must because the conflict is on everyone’s mind—animating force is transferred from the dead to the living at the cost of understanding. The transitive relation between physical violence and verbal expression means that people on the home front appropriate soldiers’ sacrifice while overlooking it.

      While poets adapted their skills in order to render themselves useful during the national crisis, their participation was by no means uniform. Foregrounding the difference between the bloody conflict and its verbal representations raised questions about how properly to write about wartime experience. Poets had the complex task of discovering or creating the purpose of art in wartime. Not everyone was as assuredly evenhanded as Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who, in his “Letter to a Young Contributor” in the Atlantic Monthly of April 1862, insists that “It is not needful here to decide which is intrinsically the better thing, a column of a newspaper or a column of attack, Wordsworth’s ‘Lines on Immortality’ or Wellington’s Lines of Torres Vedras; each is noble, if nobly done, though posterity seems to remember literature the longest.”¹⁹ An officer in the war who was wounded, a man of action as well as words, Higginson balances literary and military pursuits against each other, using the words “column” and “line” for orders of both type and people, emphasizing the difference between them but valorizing both. Higginson suggests that while poets may in earlier times have been considered “pleasant triflers,” at the present moment, the “pursuits of peace are recognized as the real, and war as the accidental.”

      Another Atlantic Monthly poet, Julia Ward Howe, would certainly disagree with Higginson’s valorization of the peaceful pursuit of literary ideals untouched by war. In a poem entitled “Our Orders,” published in July 1861, she calls on poets to sharpen their words into swords, or to accept their total irrelevance:

      And ye that wage the war of words

      With mystic fame and subtle power,

      Go, chatter to the idle birds,

      Or teach the lesson of the hour!²⁰

      If the war of words is to help the Northern cause, poets must purge themselves of personal ambition and purely aesthetic aspirations and enlist their services in the cause of wartime propaganda. And indeed, Howe was highly successful in lending her verbal power to the physical struggle. Her poem “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” first published in the Atlantic Monthly in February of 1862, became an unofficial Union anthem set to the melody of “John Brown’s Body,” one that Howe enjoyed imagining the soldiers singing in unison: “I knew, and was content to know, that the poem soon found its way to the camps, as I heard from time to time of its being sung in chorus by the soldiers.”²¹

      Other poets were less certain than Howe that words