Battle-Pieces and Vernacular Poetics

Abstract

Positing that the poetic commemoration of the Civil War offered Melville an opportunity to reconstitute the readership he had lost with Pierre and The Confidence-Man , this essay argues that with Battle-Pieces , Melville envisioned himself in the role of national bard. For Melville, the project of reconstituting a fragmented nation meant engaging not with the interior subjectivity of emergent modernist lyric but rather with the possibilities for public address offered by vernacular forms such as ballad, hymn, and epitaph. Melville’s engagement was often critical, disclosing and disrupting the ways in which vernacular forms have been vehicles for discourses that legitimate violence. While Battle-Pieces includes some nostalgic poems in undeviating hymn or ballad stanza, as well as pentameter poems deriving from an elite tradition, the volume’s baseline form is that of the hymn, ballad, or epitaph in the process of becoming something else. Where vernacular poetics traditionally voices patriotism as the nation’s cooptation of interiority, Melville thus explored a patriotism of supplementation, in which interiority remains unspecified and citizens are constituted by means of critical engagements with established forms.

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