Anthological Form of Unity : Herman Melville's Battle-Pieces(Kanto Review of English Literature)

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  • Anthological Form of Unity : Herman Melville's Battle-Pieces

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By publishing his first collection of poetry, Battle-Pieces, immediately after the Civil War in 1866, Melville aimed to become a national bard who would help reshape the memory of his Northern readers. To do this, he collected ephemeral materials from a then-popular compendium called The Rebellion Record. Though previously underestimated, as recent critics have demonstrated, the Records influence on Melville was not limited to mere references to details of incidents; rather, significantly, the compendium, as an anthology of multiple poets and as a war chronicle, conditioned and affected his arrangement of the poetry collection. Both the variety of prosodies (like an anthology) and chronological arrangement of events (like a chronicle) in Battle-Pieces seem to have a structural affinity with the Record. In other words, Melville turned the chronological continuity of historical events into a spatial simultaneity of individual voices. Significantly, Melville's juxtapositional (and thus chronological) placement of many voices seems to have a political purpose expressed in the prose supplement of the collection, that is, sectional reconciliation. Though a Northerner himself, Melville avoided refashioning a popular redemptive narrative of the war from the victor's viewpoint. Rather, through the poetic techniques of recomposing war history, he interrupted it from being subsumed into a master narrative. Without creating a war story with cause and effect, Melville leaves gaps between events open for the future, and in doing so, he challenges the authorized and monolithic understanding of history as told by the victors.

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