A detailed account of Herman Melville's life during the Civil War, as well as study of his war epic, Battle-Pieces.

Melville is not now widely regarding for his poetry, but these lyrics on the subject of the devastating American Civil War are considered to be some of the best that period, and that conflict ever produced. Some of his political views may seem a bit naive today, but his was a powerful Yankee voice. Leverton Publishing. We have the World's Books.

Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) is the first book of poetry published by American author Herman Melville. The volume is dedicated "To the Memory of the Three Hundred Thousand Who in the War For the Maintenance of the Union Fell Devotedly Under the Flag of Their Country" and its 72 poems deal with the battles and personalities of the American Civil War and their aftermath.

When ocean-clouds over inland hills Sweep storming in late autumn brown, And horror the sodden valley fills, And the spire falls crashing in the town, I muse upon my country's ills— The tempest bursting from the waste of Time On the world's fairest hope linked with man's foulest crime. Nature's dark side is heeded now— (Ah! optimist-cheer disheartened flown)— A child may read the moody brow Of yon black mountain lone. With shouts the torrents down the gorges go, And storms are formed behind the storm we feel: The hemlock shakes in the rafter, the oak in the driving keel.

Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) is the first book of poetry published by the American author Herman Melville. ... Also included are Notes and a Supplement in prose in which Melville sets forth his thoughts on how the Post-war Reconstruction should be carried out.

Herman Melville (1819-1891) stopped writing fiction after the publication of The Confidence Man: His Masquerade ] in 1857; as he entered his forties, he turned to poetry as his literary avocation. His first published book of poems was Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866), a meditation on the Civil War in short lyric and narrative verses, and a work as ambitious and rich as any that issued from his pen. Melville was well acquainted with the war. He made many trips south to visit his cousin Henry Gansevoort, a Union officer--on one such trip, he was active in an unsuccessful pursuit of Confederate raider John Mosby. He had met Abraham Lincoln in Washington, and called upon General Ulysses S. Grant in Virginia in 1864. And his position within his family, whose members were involved in almost every aspect of the war, was close enough to allow him a rare vantage point on this country's greatest conflict.

This reprint of an 1866 volume of poems by the author of "Moby Dick" and "Billy Budd" includes four essays showing why Melville's verse remains misunderstood and neglected. The 72 lyrical poems about the Civil War include works on the hanging of John Brown, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and on the battles at Donelson, Shiloh, and Gettysburg.