Chapter 14 - American Poetry Fights the Civil War

Summary

The Civil War witnessed an extraordinary outpouring of poetry by men and women from all walks of life. In the poetry of this era, both amateur and professional writers confronted a crisis of representation, as they sought to define the changing meanings of family, home, and nation in wartime. While canonical writers like Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Herman Melville might address this crisis more explicitly, studying the full spectrum of poetry from this period makes clear that popular writers, women poets, and African Americans also grappled with important representational and aesthetic challenges in their poems. This chapter considers that full spectrum, ultimately arguing that Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville all responded dialogically to the work of their poetic contemporaries. The Civil War and the years immediately preceding it proved to be a time of extraordinary variety in the range of techniques African American poets employed in support of abolition.