Lyrical Weapons of War: The Poet's Corner in Civil War Soldier Newspapers

Lyrical Weapons of War:The Poet's Corner in Civil War Soldier Newspapers James Berkey In a March 1865 column titled "Pen Sketches; Some Words to Contributors," the editors of the Army Argus and Crisis, a peripatetic Confederate newspaper with a large soldier audience, announced a surprising literary predicament. At that late and increasingly bleak moment in the South, the editors confessed: "Our drawer fairly groans under the weight of prose and poetic contributions." Aspiring to publish "an unrivalled news and literary journal," they offered both practical and poetic advice to potential contributors, beseeching those "who disfigure their compositions with heavy, unintelligible words" that "would puzzle a decipherer of Egyptian hyerogliphics [sic]" to use "plain and sensible" language ("Pen Sketches" 4). Such a difficulty would hardly have surprised the Argus and Crisis's veteran Confederate publishers, army printer William F. Wisely and Missouri fire-eater Joseph Tucker, who had been corralling soldiers' literary scribblings into print since launching the Missouri Army Argus as the organ of General Sterling Price's forces in 1861.1 The Army Argus and Crisis was scarcely alone in exercising sharp literary judgment. Lamenting the quality if not the poetic impulse of their contributors, the Union editors of the Army Mail Bag, in a piece fittingly titled "Poetry (?)," noted that "there is no end to the effusions called poetry which have emanated from soldiers," before observing that these "anxious candidate[s] for poetical honors" generally produced "a very long string of dogerel [sic], with rhyme but with out reason." The Cavalier, another Union sheet published in Williamsburg and Yorktown from 1862 to 1864, admonished hopeful authors about the aesthetic values guiding their selections. Rejecting one piece titled "Unfurl the Glorious Banner" for being "considerably below the poetical standard of the Cavalier," they implored the aspiring poet to "study the rules of [End Page 471] versification, and acquire a more extensive and thorough knowledge of some other branches of literature" ("To Our Contributors"). As an example of "true poetry," they elsewhere cited Schiller's "The Battle" for its "sublime majesty" and "real fire" ("Select Poetry"). In reprinting selections from such luminaries as Schiller (as well as prominent American poets like William Cullen Bryant and Oliver Wendell Holmes), the Cavalier. offered its pages as a pedagogical medium for the amateur poets filling its ranks. Poetry was an indispensable part of the Civil War print diet, as Alice Fahs, Eliza Richards, Faith Barrett, and others have shown, so it should hardly be surprising that soldier newspapers would become sites of poetic aspiration and inspiration for their soldier-readers.2 Scholars like Barrett and Cristanne Miller have painstakingly recovered Civil War soldiers' unpublished poetry, and others have examined the patriotic amateur poetry that appeared in popular periodicals and contemporaneous collections like Frank Moore's The Rebellion Record. But soldier newspapers have yet to be exhumed for their vital role in what Fahs aptly describes as the "war as a literary event" (4). Amidst the incessant drumbeat of war news, many papers continued the practice of the poet's corner, although seldom so named, by placing original and selected poetry in the upper left-hand corner of their front pages. The Soldier's Letter of the Ninety-Sixth Illinois Regiment in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, and the Union Volunteer in Louisville christened their poet's corners, respectively, as "The Songs We Sing" and "Poems of the Hour," establishing a shared lyric culture for soldiers and civilians through the reproduction of popular songs and anthems like "The Battle Cry of Freedom," "The Star-Spangled Banner," "The Red, White, and Blue," "The Flag of Our Union," and "Marching On!" Soldier papers also actively partook of the nineteenth century's "culture of reprinting" (McGill), parodying and rewriting such wartime anthems as "Dixie" and "The Bonnie Blue Flag."3 In addition to these popular national songs, soldier-editors filled their columns with reprinted poetry and fiction by popular American authors like T. S. [End Page 472] Arthur, Ethel Lynn Beers, George Boker, Ned Buntline, Mary Denison, Bret Harte, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, George Root, Lydia Sigourney, Artemus Ward, John Greenleaf Whittier, Bryant, and Holmes. Soldier-editors also took pains, as the musings...

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