Content area
Full text
To Fight Aloud Is Very Brave: American Poetry and the Civil War. By Faith Barrett. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012. vii + 336 pp. $80.00 cloth/$2795 paper.
Faith Barrett's To Fight Aloud Is Very Brave takes its title from the first Unes of a Civil War-era Dickinson poem: "To fight aloud, is very brave - / But gallanter, I know / Who charge within the bosom / The Cavalry of Wo -" (vi). While Barrett's ambitious and foundational work sheds Ught on a broad spectrum of Civil War poetry, extending weU beyond the usual suspects like Dickinson and Whitman into work by Confederate and Union soldiers, Southern poetry of varied persuasions, and Melville's still underexamined Battle-Pieces, Dickinson's argument for the value of introspection resonates powerfuüy through Barrett's writing. To Fight Aloud apphes the language of lyric theory to a canon that is often read largely for its historical value, and in so doing it models a means of discussing the diverse work of this era as an interrelated canon.
As Barrett demonstrates persuasively, conceptual and formal depth is as present in the songlike verse of newspaper and popular writing as in the more traditional Uterary canon. What Barrett caUs "voice-effects," or figures of address, work dramaticaUy to claim different types of audience, from the "writerly T" to the "coUective national 'we'" (10). Figures like apostrophe, exclamation, and "the songlike techniques of repetition and refrain"...