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The Reception of Battle-Pieces
Yet this I do affirm, that from all which I have written I never receiv’d the least Benefit, or the least Advantage, but, on the contrary, have felt sometimes the Effects of Malice and Misfortune.
Abraham Cowley, Preface to Cutter of Coleman-Street
Melville must have had great expectations at the publication of Battle-Pieces, thinking his volume had the potential to become successful and turn him into an acknowledged poet. However, with the first reviews he realized his poems would “never
… really touch the common heart” (Henry Gansevoort in Parker 2002: 601). Considering his verse was “pregnant but not artistic” (in Parker 2002: 618), most reviews agreed that “[n]ature did not make him a poet” (in Maden), going as far as to criticize the specific words Melville had made to rhyme in his poems.53 Differently, William Dean Howells criticized Battle-Pieces as a detached portrayal of the war,54
53 Melville’s decision to make “law” and “Shenandoah” rhyme turned him into an object of ridicule among reviewers. While the American Literary Gazzette and Publishers Circular of Philadelphia “decried the rhymes as ‘fearful’”, the Independent “enumerated the various words Melville had rhymed with ‘Shenandoah,’ ‘regardless of incompatibility,’ then added that ‘Shenandoah’ made ‘another Mormon marriage with half-a dozen unfit terminations …’” (in Parker 2002: 618).
54 It is interesting that, in the same way that Howells criticized Melville’s Battle-Pieces for failing to capture the emotional dimension of the war, he also criticized Whitman’s Drum-Taps despite capturing it (see Howells 1865).
arguing that the volume failed to move readers because it remained too vague and distant:
Is it possible—you ask yourself, after running over all these celebrative, inscriptive, and memorial verses—that there has really been a great war, with battles fought by men and bewailed by women? Or is it only that Mr. Melville’s inner consciousness has been perturbed, and filled with the phantasms of enlistments, marches, fights in the air, parenthetic bulletin-boards, and tortured humanity shedding, not words and blood, but words alone?
(in Parker 2002: 623)
Nevertheless, there were also –though not many– positive reviews of Battle- Pieces in general and of some of its poems in particular. The Boston Traveller, for example, stated that “little poetry that is worth preserving” had been produced by the war, “but Mr. Melville’s poems are an exception to the rule, for they have both vigor and sweetness, and often rise to the element of grandeur” (in Parker 2002: 619). “Donelson” and “Sheridan at Cedar Creek” received the praise (though also the condemnation) of reviewers, some of whom qualified them as the best poems in the volume and which, therefore, allowed the reader to forgive Melville’s “multitude of … poetic sins” (The Albion in Parker 2002: 620).
On the other hand, the “Supplement” was met mostly with opposition, though there were some who shared Melville’s thoughts over the need to carry out a non- punitive Reconstruction. This was the case of Henry Raymond, editor of the New York Times, who praised the “Supplement” and the volume in general for “mak[ing] the more pleasant a contribution to the literature of the war” (in Parker 2002: 616). Similarly, the New York Herald argued that “far from spoiling the symmetry of his book, this supplement completes it, and converses [sic] it into what is better than a good book—
into a good and patriotic action” (in Parker 2002: 617). Nonetheless, the “Supplement” outraged the very same group of readers it tried to persuade, that is Radical Republicans, as they fervently opposed Melville’s views about prudence and magnanimity toward the defeated South and dismissed him as “mischievous” (New York Independent in Parker 2002: 617-618).
Battle-Pieces, then, added to the list of Melville’s disappointments, and his intention to intervene in the instruction of his fellow citizens could not be satisfied because of the poor sales of the volume. Instead, Melville had to “acknowledge the almost universal opinion that he was no poet, and as the months passed he had to face the book’s failure to sell more than a few hundred copies” (Parker 2002: 624). Like Whitman, Melville received –again– America’s dismissal of the work he had probably considered would definitely gain him the respect of his countrymen and a place in American letters.
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