![]() ![]() It is the largest loss of life in the shortest period of time in all of American military history. The casualties in the Union Army alone, the Army of the Potomac, Grant’s army, from the first of May through the end of July 1864, in this horrible war of attrition and the stalemate it produced in Virginia, the casualties in that one army in about two to two-and-a-half months was 66,000 men. Grant’s Strategic Changes from the West to the East Like plants that flower ‘ere comes the leaf which storms lay low in kindly doom and kill them in the flush of their bloom.” Chapter 2. Each bloomed and died an abated boy, nor dreamed what death was, thought it mere sliding into some vernal sphere. But well the striplings bore their faded parts, the heaven all parts must assign. The anguish of maternal hearts must search for balm divine. Each slay his python caught, the maxims in his temple taught. Oh lavish hearts on whichever side of birth or bane or courage high, arm them for the stirring wars, arm them some to die, Apollo-like in pride. If woman in sight and duties show, though made the mask of Cane, or whether it be truth, sacred cause, who can aloof remain that shares youth’s ardor, uncooled by the snow of wisdom or sordid gain? Woe for the homes of the North and woe for the seats of the South, all who felt life spring in prime and were swept by the wind of their place in time. “Youth is the time when hearts are large and stirring wars appeal to the spirit which appeals in turn to the blade it draws. It’s called “On the Slain Collegians.” It’s timeless, it could be about any war, although collegians don’t go to war anymore very much in America. This was Melville’s meditation in poetry on the death of college students in the war. Our greatest death poet was, of course, Whitman more from him later.īut one little piece by Melville, because it’s about you. She became obsessed with the idea of the war, and if you read her closely enough it’s all over her wartime poetry. Don’t know if any of you are Emily Dickinson fans, but Emily, the Belle of Amherst, wrote between 9 poems in her life, and fully two-thirds of them in the four years of the war. Maybe our greatest writer of the nineteenth century also wrote a lot of poetry, and he wrote almost all of his poetry during the Civil War, as did, by the way, Emily Dickinson. ![]() He wasn’t very famous yet, as you know, for Moby Dick that was to come later. Herman Melville wrote a whole bunch of poems during the Civil War. and 89 to be exact is, I think, an unforgettable mediation by Sherman on the meaning of death and just what it means and why he in some ways enjoys it. ![]() Look especially for those journeys into Sherman’s own mind, Sherman’s psyche, those meditations of Sherman’s on death. In some ways, possibly the most brilliant inventions in this book are the slave characters, or the freedman characters, and what Doctorow does with them through this sort of anguished crucible of all out war. Most of the people in this book were real people, but there are some invented. Much of his fiction is often very historical and you’ll find, if anyone takes the time some day, that large chunks of the monologue you hear from William Tecumseh Sherman in this novel is directly out of his famous memoirs, and then every now and then Doctorow will embellish or add a few lines. Doctorow, as some of you must know, is a famous American writer for his historical fiction. Doctorow, a poet in prose, a poet in fiction. This week you’re reading a great poet, E.L. Most great poets don’t go to war, they write. Don’t kill the poets, because the poets had to be left to tell the story. I don’t know if this is true, but I love the idea, that no matter how much they slaughter themselves with broadswords and knives and whatever else those maniacs used, that they should always spare the poets. Professor David Blight: It used to be said that in the old wars fought by the Irish clans that they had an agreement. Introduction: Melville’s “On the Slain Collegians” The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877 HIST 119 - Lecture 19 - To Appomattox and Beyond: The End of the War and a Search for MeaningsĬhapter 1. ![]()
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