“The past is never dead,” wrote William Faulkner in Requiem for a Nun. “It’s not even past.” One hundred and fifty-eight years after the last battle and the final surrender, it seems we’re still living with the effects of and trying to understand the American Civil War.
Poet and English professor Stephen Cushman has been fascinated with the Civil War since childhood. He understands that any historical event, like a war, is understood generations later through the writings of those who lived it and then those who wrote about it. The subtitle of his 2014 book explains what he was about when he wrote it – Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Out Understanding of the Civil War.
The ”belligerent muse” in this case is war. Cushman points out that “war destroys, but it also inspires, stimulates, and creates.” The Civil War brought destruction, especially in the southern states, but it continues to be the source of an enormous outpouring of memoirs, reports, journals, historical texts, biographies, and fiction. In this book, Cushman says that we should not simply see these writings as “transparent windows opening into the past, but also as literary engagements with the momentous events of the war itself. In other words, they were writing to understand themselves the events they were living through.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.
Some Wednesday Readings
The Axis of the Human Heart – Rod Dreher.
Civil War Art: Antietam by James Hope – Kevin Pawlak at Emerging Civil War.
A Conductor at Twilight: Michael Tilson Thomas’ Last Days – Teez Rose at The Imaginative Conservative.
Meet Meredith Angwin, the grandmother changing the energy industry – Emmet Penney at The Spectator.
Somewhere in England, a short story by Glenn McGoldrick (and it's a dark one), is free to download on Amazon today and tomorrow.
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