Battle-pieces And Aspects Of The War

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.

The aspects which the strife as a memory assumes are as manifold as are the moods of involuntary meditation-moods variable and at times widely at variance. Yielding instinctively one after another to feelings not inspired from any one source exclusively and unmindful without purposing to be of consistency