The 'mysteries dimly sealed': Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and the Civil War

The Civil War was the most important public event of nineteenth-century America because it severely challenged the principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution. Contemporary writers responded to the events surrounding the war and to the war itself in their prose, fiction and poetry—and Walt Whitman and Herman Melville joined this literary symphony. Several critical works have provided insightful discussions of the Civil War writings of Whitman and Melville. My dissertation fills a void in this scholarship, however, by taking as its focus the curious fact that both Whitman and Melville switched genres to express their feelings about the Civil War. Both men, when faced with the war, turned away from their “home” genres—poetry and fiction, respectively—to embrace different modes of expression. After initially responding to the war with Drum-Taps (1865), a collection of Civil War poems, Whitman would eventually turn to lengthy, autobiographical prose in Memoranda During The War (1875). And Melville would immediately turn his back on his fiction and embrace poetry with Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866). The purpose of this study is to contribute to our understanding of Whitman and Melville by analyzing why these two important authors made this genre switch, what literary effects they achieved in doing so, and how both the war and experience of switching genres affected them as artists.; This study contends that Whitman's decision to generate prose accounts of his experience as a Civil War hospital volunteer sprang from his desire to record a picture of the war that was more graphically realistic than the images and scenarios presented in his Civil War poems. Facing a failing career as a fiction writer, Melville turned to poetry as a way to explore his personal feelings of fragmentation and brokenness about the nation's conflict in a new, refreshing medium. In sum, Whitman switched genres to make others understand the reality he knew, while Melville switched genres in an attempt to understand his own reality. And because of the experience, both writers would have new colors added to their artistic pallets. Indeed, as the war would redefine the nation, it would also produce two re-born writers.