To Fight Aloud Is Very Brave: American Poetry and the Civil Warby Faith Barrett (review)

Coleman Hutchison

The Emily Dickinson Journal, Volume 22, Number 2, 2013, pp. 128-131(Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/edj.2013.0012

For additional information about this article

Access provided by username 'Azure' (27 Jul 2014 03:57 GMT)

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/edj/summary/v022/22.2.hutchison.html

The Emily Dickinson Journal, Vol. XXII, No. 2

128

Book Reviews

© 2013 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Coleman HUTCHison

Barrett, Faith. To Fight Aloud Is Very Brave: American Poetry and the Civil War. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2012. $27.95

scholars have spent a surprisingly short period of time tending to emily Dickinson’s dynamic and characteristically oblique responses to the greatest historical trauma of her lifetime, the American Civil War. As recently as 1981, a critic as perspicacious as David Porter could claim that “there is no Civil War in the flood of poems from the war years” (115). However, in the nearly 30 years since Shira Wolosky’s extraordinary Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War, the “great internecine conflict” has become a dominant topic in the scholarly conversation around Dickinson’s engagement with her own historical moment. (See especially Faith Barrett’s “Public Selves and Private Spheres.”)

One can imagine a number of reasons why it took Dickinson studies so long to come around to a topic of such clear critical interest—not least of which are assumptions about Dickinson’s purported lack of interest in the world that never wrote to her. Yet, Dickinson is not the only poet whose Civil War era poetry has suffered long years of neglect. Indeed, until very recently there has been no book-length study of the poetry of the American Civil War. The first such volume, Faith Barrett’s To Fight Aloud Is Very Brave, is both hugely winning and hugely important. Barrett has provided the critical framework through which Civil War poetry will be read for a generation or more. In the process, she has also made a signal contribution to the study of Dickinson, Whitman, Melville, and a host of other nineteenth-century American poets who mustered with the “Calvary of Woe.”

Barrett’s painstaking and much anticipated book highlights the “vital role” poetry played in “developing and disseminating the ideologies of national identity” during and immediately after the American Civil War. Her unifying

Book Reviews

129

claim is that poetry became “the central literary site for [an] exploration of the changing relationship between self and nation” during this “poetry-fueled war” (2-3). In building this argument, Barrett examines the “rhetorical platform” from which a diverse group of poets—Northern and Southern, male and female, white and black—addressed local, regional, and national audiences (2). In reading tensions between the collective “we” and the personal “I,” Barrett identifies a “new permeability between ‘civic’ and ‘private’ stances,” which, in turn, came to inform and inflect all subsequent American poetry (11).

This formally-minded study is particularly interested in those poetic “voice-effects” that render intelligible poetry’s “dual status as written and spoken word,” namely apostrophe, first- and second-person pronouns, repetitions, refrains, and the like (10). As Barrett rightly notes, that dual status ensured that poetry emerged as one of the preferred—if not the preferred—genre through which the Civil War was both experienced and expressed. The poems Barrett studies here were indeed “Words for the Hour.”

Throughout To Fight Aloud Is Very Brave, Barrett’s methodology is that of the case study and the comparison. With its beautifully contextualized close and comparative readings, the book is fundamentally dialogical or colloquial: with the exception of a final chapter on Herman Melville, all of the book’s chapters treat two, three, or four poets. While this produces a great number of moving parts, Barrett proves a refreshingly clear writer and an elegant rhetorician. There is no welter on these pages, in no small part because Barrett has a genius for choosing the right poem by representative poets.

The book’s strengths are, then, legion. Chapter One brilliantly sets up the “hand-in-glove relationship” between poetry and popular song. Although this chapter’s readings are the least original in the book—in truth, several other scholars have studied “Dixie,” “Let My People Go” (“Go Down, Moses”), and “Battle Hymn of the Republic”—Barrett makes a cogent case for the interdependence of poetic and musical cultures during this period. Similarly, Chapter Two’s treatment of soldiers’ poems reintroduces a woefully understudied topic and archive. In rescuing Obadiah Ethelbert Baker, Jasper Jay Stone, Lyman Holford, and George Washington Hall from the dustbin of literary history, Barrett argues persuasively for their amateur poetry’s innate interest and complexity. In Chapter Three, Barrett offers a definitive reading of Julia Ward Howe’s Civil War poetry; she also broaches a deft argument about Frances Harper’s “restlessness of perspective” (111). The treatment of Sarah Piatt’s dialogic stances in Chapter Five is similarly well wrought. Finally, in the book’s concluding chapter, Barrett rightly points out

The Emily Dickinson Journal, Vol. XXII, No. 2

130

Melville’s debt to contemporary discourses such as popular song, journalism, landscape and monumental architecture.

But it is Chapter Four—with its rich comparative reading of Dickinson and Whitman’s responses to the war—that will likely be of greatest interest to the readers of this journal. The Dickinson that emerges from these pages is conflicted, compelling, and at times nearly unrecognizable. Among other things, Barrett boldly puts Dickinson’s wartime verse in conversation with contemporary popular poetry and song. In looking at both well-known and obscure poems, Barrett does not shy away from those moments when Dickinson’s verse veers toward the sentimental and the conventional. Her summation is among the most sensible comments ever made about Dickinson’s wartime poetic output: “Just as the nation she addresses is divided then, so too is Dickinson subject to deeply divided aesthetic and political loyalties” (186). Barrett’s bravura reading of Dickinson will force all subsequent critics to acknowledge those divided loyalties.

Not surprisingly, the book’s weaknesses are few and far between. Barrett occasionally betrays an uneven interest in her poets. For instance, the discussions of Henry Timrod and Melville do not match those of Julia Ward Howe and Dickinson. More urgently, Barrett’s author-centric methodology is in some ways limiting, especially in light of the immense amount of anonymous and pseudonymous poetry that appeared in periodicals and anthologies during the war. Her otherwise excellent discussion of soldiers’ poetry would have opened up in interesting ways had she offered case studies not of individual poets but of regional or even regimental poetries. But readers in search of a more piebald collection of poetry needn’t look far: Barrett co-edited the best and most diverse anthology of Civil War poetry ever published, “Words for the Hour.”

As the above suggests, Barrett sees her project as one of recovery. And indeed, To Fight Aloud Is Very Brave makes a crucial contribution to an ongoing and robust reevaluation of nineteenth-century American poetry. In addition to treating many under- or never-read poets, Barrett asks us to read familiar figures like Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville in new ways. Her study thus builds on the important work of critics like Virginia Jackson and Cristanne Miller, who have questioned the stakes and status of lyric in the nineteenth century and labored to return Dickinson to her immediate literary, social, and historical context. Barrett’s excellent book will sit comfortably beside Jackson’s and Miller’s. More to the point, To Fight Aloud Is Very Brave will also inspire “Rank after Rank” of future scholars to read the neglected poetry of this cataclysmic conflict.

Book Reviews

131

Works CitedBarrett, Faith. “Public Selves and Private Spheres: Studies of Emily Dickinson and the Civil

War, 1984-2007.” Emily Dickinson Journal 16.1 (Spring 2007): 92-104. Barrett, Faith and Cristanne Miller, eds.“Words for the Hour”: A New Anthology of Civil War

Poetry. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2005.Porter, David. Dickinson: The Modern Idiom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1981. Wolosky, Shira. Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1984.

JINE WANG

Kang, Yanbin, Trans. No Rose, Yet Felt Myself A’bloom: Selected Dickinson’s Poems (不是玫瑰,如花盛开：狄金森诗选). Guilin: Lijiang Publishing House, 2013.

During the past half century, a variety of Chinese translations of Dickinson have appeared, invariably of selected poems and with their own strengths and characteristics, boosting and echoing an increasing enthusiasm for Dickinson scholarship in China. March 2013 witnessed the publication of another version of Dickinson translation in China: Yanbin Kang’s No Rose, Yet Felt Myself A’bloom: Selected Dickinson’s Poems (不是玫瑰,如花盛开：狄金森诗选).

Based on The Poems of Emily Dickinson edited by R. W. Franklin, Kang’s translation includes 900 poems, which is, to the reviewer’s knowledge, the largest number of poems to date selected for Chinese translation. Grouped into two parts—short poems with less than four lines and long poems—all 900 poems are arranged in chronological order. This juxtaposition of short and long poems helps to give ordinary Chinese readers as well as scholars easy access to the appreciation of Dickinson’s poetry.

one salient feature of this translation is Kang’s manifest Chinese perspective toward Dickinson, as revealed in the title of her preface “My Dickinson.” Most of the previous Chinese translations have focused on recurrent subjects in Dickinson’s poetry and highlighted an aesthetic appreciation of Dickinson’s idiosyncratic imagery and poetics. As one of the new generation of Chinese translators, Kang writes as a scholar who has published several essays on Dickinson, attempting to