"Belligerent Muse" by Stephen Cushman

“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.

Longfellow, Whitman, Wheatley: Whatever Happened to Patriotic Poems?

In a collection of stories, letters, poems, and speeches, I happened across “Paul Revere’s Ride” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It immediately brought a smile, evoking a memory of class memorization from elementary school, which occurred longer ago than I care to think. I can hear myself and my fellow fifth graders reciting in unison, some of us (overachiever Mary Ellen comes to mind) reciting louder to show mastery of the poem, while a few others mumbled to disguise what they hadn’t learned. I was somewhere in the middle but leaning in the direction of Mary Ellen’s loudness. 

After I reread the poem, remembering some of the stanzas, I checked back with a Tweetspeak Poetry post from last year, which took a look at “America’s most patriotic poem.” The Atlanticpublished Longfellow’s poem in January 1861, long after Revere’s famous ride (although much about that ride remains in historical dispute today). And then I went looking for what was happening when Longfellow wrote and published that poem.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1860, about the time he wrote “Paul Revere’s Ride.”

Using Poetry to Reflect Upon the Civil War – Part 3: Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) is known as “America’s Poet,” and for good reason. His poetry captured the spirit of a country that was growing, expanding, tearing down, and building up, while still carrying the weight of its past. 

Whitman may also be known as the poet of America’s Civil War. He wrote some 71 poems about the conflict, both during the war and after. Many of these poems were incorporated into various editions of Leaves of Grass. The first edition of Leaves of Grass was comprised of 12 poems and published in 1855. He kept revising, edited, and adding until the final edition had more than 400 poems, including many of the ones he wrote about the Civil War.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Van Wyck Brooks’ “The Times of Melville and Whitman”

Van Wyck Brooks published three related works of literary history over the span of about a decade (while he was publishing other works as well). The World of Washington Irving depicted U.S. literary culture, and some history, in the first 20 years or so of the 19^th century. The Flowering of New England 1815-1865 showed the seeds that were being planted for a national literary culture, although it was still largely a regional phenomenon.  New England Indian Summer 1865-1915 concerned the lingering influence of New England on national literary culture, but a major shift was underway.

We are more than familiar with the writers and poets who emerged from New England during the 19^th century described in these books, because they became part of the American literary canon. Irving. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Emily Dickinson. Henry David Thoreau. Henry and William James. And many more.

But the geographical center of the country was shifting, and the literary cultural center was shifting at the same time. As the United States expanded westward, its writers and poets followed.

T

Mark Twain

his is the world described by Brooks in The Times of Melville and Whitman (1947). It is the world of pre-Civil War San Francisco, which drew writers like Bret Harte and Mark Twain. This is the world of Herman Melville, whose Typee: A Peek at Polynesian Life captivated readers across the country and well beyond to Europe, years before he wrote Moby Dick. This is the world of Walt Whitman, whose Leaves of Grass transformed American poetry forever.

Twain, Melville, Whitman: America’s writer, the Great American Novel, America’s poet. Between them, they created what became known as an American literature.

Herman Melville

Brooks particularly highlights the role of Twain. “Mark Twain, with his fathomless naivety prepared the ground, as Whitman did, for a new and unique American art of letters,” he writes, “in a negative way with The Innocents Abroad, in a positive way with the Western writings in which he contributed to establish and foster this art.” Those “Western writings” included Roughing It, Life on the Mississippi, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and Huckleberry Finn.

But the new national culture still had its New England influence. Melville was influenced by Nathaniel Hawthorne (and also by Shakespeare, especially in Moby Dick, Brooks says). And Whitman’s poetry, as heavily influenced by his political work, his newspaper work, and the growth of trade and industry as it was, was also influenced and promoted by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Walt Whitman

Literary culture broke out of the essential regionalism of New England and simultaneously become more geographically western and national.  

Brooks wrote a time when there was still a sense of national consciousness among the political, literary, cultural, and business elites. Six decades later, that sense is largely gone. In academia, the idea of a literary canon is considered quaint and rather prehistoric, and would likely result in protests by students and professors alike.

But to read a work like The Times of Melville and Whitman from today’s vantage point is to see how much has been lost. And we are the poorer for it.

Related:

Walt Whitman Built Free Verse and Freedom into His Poetry – Investors Business Daily.

Walt Whitman in Brooklyn – Newspapers and “Leaves of Grass” – Tweetspeak Poetry.

Top illustration: The great comic scene of the buffalo climbing the tree in Twain’s Roughing It.

Walt Whitman in Brooklyn: Reporting and “Leaves of Grass”

When we read a poem, or a collection of poetry, we rarely make a connection to the poet’s geography, unless the poems are specifically about a place or a historical event, like Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Robert Frost and New England, or Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.”

When we consider Walt Whitman (1819-1892), we might think of Washington, D.C., where he worked in the hospitals during the Civil War, or perhaps Camden, New Jersey, where he spent the last days of his life. And yet if there is one location that had a powerful influence on Whitman and his poetry, it was Brooklyn, New York.

Born on Long Island, Whitman was not quite four years old in 1823 when his father moved the family to Brooklyn, where they settled in a rental house on Front Street, according to Walt Whitman: A Life by Justin Kaplan. At the time, Brooklyn was the third largest city in the United States and exploding with growth, which Whitman’s father hoped to get a piece of.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Illustration: The drawing of Whitman used in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass.

I Hear America Singing, Still

When I attended high school, the English curriculum was rather fixed. Ninth grade was introduction to British and American literature. Tenth grade was introduction to world literature, although we studied Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar that year. Junior year was American literature in depth. And senior year was British literature in depth, although the administration got rather daring that year and required that one six-week period be devoted to a masterpiece of non-English literature, which is how I met Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes.

My junior English class was taught by a wild woman. She was tall, flamboyant, and given to theatrical gestures and outbursts. Everything about her was an exaggeration. She made no secret of what she believed to be the greatest work of American literature ever published – Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann. (No one in the class took that seriously, not even the people who hated to read.)

One good thing (there were others) that she did was to introduce us to American poetry. I can still remember her standing in front of the class, wearing lots of large, colorful, flowing scarf-like dresses, and reading poetry, especially that of Walt Whitman, whose work often seemed to fit her flamboyance. (She often wore turbans, too, that matched her flowing clothes.) She’d read – and often act – poems like this one:

I Hear America Singing

By Walt Whitman

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand
singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as
he stands,
The wood-cutter's song, the ploughboy's on his way in the morning,
or at noon intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work,
or of the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day--at night the party of young
fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

With a nod to Whitman, and for the sheer creativity and inventiveness he brought to poetry, I would submit this (I should probably offer apologies, too):

I Hear America Singing, Still

I hear America singing still, songs
both shallow and deep; not the
songs by Whitman sung, less bursting
with manifest confidence, more a
timidity of tentativeness, as if we have
walked into a room of no lights, no windows,
no mirrors to reflect, only darkness, darkness
to experience, darkness to feel our way forward.

I hear the songs of the Greek choir, as they beckon
us to Odysseus’s rocks; the songs of the preacher
preaching a revival of prosperity, as if naming gave
you a claiming right. Those songs, too, join the exodus 
of the deafening songs, the roaring songs, the songs of 
steam and noise and bellows and gears and furnaces
and fires as they escape into a silence
made in China.

Only two songs heard now, only two: the distant yet
approaching, small but consuming song of the prairie
fire, the song of destructive lament; and the light trill of
the sailing, soaring dove, the song of undeserved hope.

A bit dark, perhaps; I’ve been paying to much attention to government and politics lately.

This poem about a poem I know is connected to today’s Random Act of Poetry (RAP) over at the High Calling Blogs. I have a short article and prompt posted, for next week’s RAP (I’m subbing for our usual RAPster, L.L. Barkat). The prompt is based on a recent experience I had after tweeting a Poem of the Day, “Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats. Take a look and join in.