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"They answered him aloud": popular voice and nationalist discourse in Melville's Battle-Pieces.(Herman Melville's Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War)

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From: Leviathan
Date: 20071001
Author:Barrett, Faith

In Battle-Pieces, Herman Melville examines the possibilities poetic voice offers for speaking to and for the divided nation. While scholars often approach the poems thematically, focusing on Melville's engagement with post-war ideologies of reconciliation, I argue that Melville is as interested in the discursive functions and formal properties of poetry as he is in post-war debates about Unionism. (1) The volume's full title, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, already gestures toward the splitting of the nation, evoking a proliferation of vantage points or "aspects" on that ...

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