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1 results

  • 6 - The Civil War Ballad and Its Reconstruction

  • from Part I - The Blind Ruck of Event
  • Edited by Kathleen Diffley, University of Iowa, Coleman Hutchison, University of Texas, Austin
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Civil War and Reconstruction
    Published online:
    04 August 2022
    Print publication:
    18 August 2022, pp 88-102

  • Summary

    The chapter examines Walt Whitman’s and Frances Harper’s engagements with vernacular forms, especially ballad stanza and dialect verse, in their Reconstruction-era poetry. For both poets, using such forms marked a departure from usual practice. Whitman turned to the familiar ballad form in moments of national uncertainty, particularly addressing the president’s assassination and issues of race during Reconstruction. The ballad’s conventional racialization of voice, however, represented a challenge for Harper. Before the war, Harper worked primarily in the elevated register of standard written English. Her Aunt Chloe poems, originating in her tour of the south during Reconstruction, mark an important divergence from her earlier work and an important intervention into the ballad tradition. Here she brought a new vernacular voice to an old vernacular form.