Poet's Choice

The Library of America has just published Poets of the Civil War , edited by J.D. McClatchy. In an excellent introduction, McClatchy points out that our greatest and most violent national cataclysm produced "no one great sweeping poem -- no American Iliad ." Novelists like Henry James and Mark Twain, he notes, also avoided the subject of the war. Photography and prose, in elegies like Lincoln's second inaugural or Whitman's Specimen Days , were the arts that dealt most memorably with the great, terrible subject.

McClatchy goes on to suggest that poems like those he collects, considered together, may be the closest we can come to an epic of the Civil War. In the anthology's mosaic, poets of varying skills appear along with Emerson, Whittier, Longfellow, Whitman and Dickinson. Northerners and Southerners, propagandists and apologists, patriots of conflicting views -- all add their voices. This collection offers another way to think about the relation between art and politics, with specific examples.

It is striking to read abolitionist poems alongside the impassioned, rhetorically elevated verses of Confederate poets like Henry Timrod (1828-1867), whose "Carolina" begins:

The despot treads thy sacred sands,

Thy pines give shelter to his bands,

Thy sons stand by with idle hands,

Carolina!

He breathes at ease thy airs of balm,

He scorns the lances of thy palm,

Oh! who shall break thy craven calm,

Carolina!

The lines make me think of the poet George Moses Horton (1797-1883), who lived most of his life as a slave in North Carolina. In "Division of an Estate," Horton describes what happens to a farm and its livestock when the owner dies and the heirs take over -- like countless, cool stars when the great sun goes down, he suggests. He closes with a description of the slaves contemplating the auction platform: