By Tom Ganser
Correspondent
Beth Lueck’s lecture, “Bearing Witness: American Poets on Suffering and Death in the Civil War,” focused on poems by the well-known American poets Walt Whitman and Emily Dickenson, along with a poem by Obadiah Ethelbert Baker, a school teacher and Union soldier who enlisted in the 2nd Iowa Cavalry Volunteers and fought in Mississippi, Missouri, Louisiana and Tennessee.
Lueck is a professor of English in the Department of Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Monday’s lecture was the eighth in the Fairhaven Spring 2014 Lecture Series, “The Legacy and Lessons of the Age of Lincoln.”
She provided a context for her lecture in two ways.
First, Lueck said that the 620,000 casualties between 1861 and 1865 were about the same as the number of casualties in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II and the Korean War combined.
The Civil War “was the bloodiest in American history, one that touched nearly every American living at that time,” Lueck said, adding, “While death was intimately familiar to 19th century Americans, carnage on this scale was heretofore unknown.”
Second, Lueck said that the 19th century expectations for a “good death” included a dying man’s “awareness of his fate, his willingness to accept it, his showing signs of belief in God and in his own salvation, and messages and instructive exhortations for those at his side.” But these expectations were disrupted by thousands of combat fatalities during the Civil War.
“The condolence letters and elegized poems tried to replace the idealized deathbed experience,” Lueck said, “with reports on the conditions of soldiers who knew that death was approaching.”
Rather than talking about “nationalistic poems the celebrated the glories of the Civil War, such as Julia Ward Howe’s ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic,’” Lueck chose to turn her attention to “poems that were written to help people understand the meaning of death in the war.”
Lueck began and ended her lecture with two poems from Walt Whitman’s 1865 “Drum-Taps” collection, “Virgil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night” and “A Sight in Camp.”
Ruth Bertolaet, a Fairhaven resident, volunteered to read each of the Whitman poems, and did so with a powerful and moving interpretation that was indeed memorable for those in attendance.
Whitman’s involvement in the Civil War began in December 1862 when he traveled from Brooklyn, New York, to Washington, DC in search of his brother who had been wounded in the Battle of Fredericksburg. During his stay at camps near Washington, Whitman determined “to provide a link between the war and the home front, between soldiers and their families, with letters and poems.”
According to Lueck, “When he could, Whitman tried to set the suffering and death of a soldier in a larger, redeeming context which emphasized the transfiguring courage of the sufferer, along with the love and care that attended him.” He also “stressed the love and care that surrounded the wounded and dying soldiers, consoling those at home with the belief that their own soldier might have been similarly cared for and comforted.”
Lueck described “Vigil Strange I kept on the Field One Night,” as “a poem about mourning as well as a poem of mourning” written by a “poet who never saw a battle in the war … but because he nursed so many soldiers during the war … he was able to understand what it was like to be on a battlefield and what it might have been like to bury a comrade” as depicted in the poem.
“Part of the poem,” Lueck said, “is a meditation on the comradeship of the battlefield, the comradeship that [soldiers] experience through fighting together in a battle.”
Obadiah Ethelbert Baker’s “The Unknown Grave,” written in 1891 long after the war, is in the form of an elegy to a soldier.
Lueck said that Baker’s poem “presents the problem of many families who lost sons or husbands or fathers in the Civil War” but without having a body to bury or even knowing a burial location.
“Their one consolation, other than their pride at his giving his life for the Union,” Lueck said, “is that his possessions, clothes, a watch and his bible, are returned to them.”
Correcting the misconception that Emily Dickinson was completely isolated from the events of her time, Lueck said she was well aware of current events during the Civil War as reported in the newspapers she read.
Dickenson’s poem #426 was about the battlefield death of her brother’s friend.
In the poem, Lueck explained, Dickinson “resists the impulse to view this soldier’s death as part of a larger narrative of collective sacrifice for the greater good of the nation. … Dickinson’s poem resists that simple acceptance of death in wartime as heroic” and in the last line of the poem, calls his death “murder.”
Whitman’s “A Sight in Camp” records viewing the bodies of three soldiers, one of an “elderly man so gaunt and grim,” a second of “a sweet boy with cheeks yet blooming,” and a third with “a fact nor child nor old” that Whitman describes as “the face of the Christ himself;/Dead and divine and brother of all, and here again he lies.”
Although Lueck said she believes that the Whitman, Baker and Dickinson’s poems each “responds in a different way to the loss of a soldier in wartime,” she also assets that they all share in common a higher aim.
“Each poem,” Lueck said, “bears witness to the death, whether the soldier agrees or disagrees with the meaning of the war, and to the tens of thousands of individual losses occasioned by the war. Like hundreds of other poets… these poets bear witness to their losses, both individual and collective. One hundred and fifty years later, we read these poems and remember the death.”
Amber Moulton, an assistant professor of history at UW-Whitewater, will present the next lecture in the series at 3 p.m., Monday, April 7 – “Lincoln’s Legacy and the Promise of Reconstruction.”
All lectures are free and open to the public and are held on Mondays at 3 p.m. in the Fellowship Hall of Fairhaven Retirement Community, 435 W. Starin Rd., Whitewater. Street parking is adjacent to the building.
Links to videos of lectures, including those from prior series, can be found at http://www.uww.edu/conteduc/fairhaven.
