Wartime Myths: Poetry and the American Civil War

This thesis explores the political evolution and ideological impact of nineteenth-century American poetry during and in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War.

The American Civil War (1861–1865) was a conflict of unprecedented scale and cultural influence. It was also the first war in which poetry played a major part. Fundamentally transformed by its place within the emergent mass media of the nineteenth century, poetry gained both a broad new readership and a new level of political influence. When war broke out, this influence meant that poetry became an intrinsic part of constructing America’s wartime myths. Such myths performed the vital political functions that the nation required to go to war; they issued the call to arms, unified the Union and Confederate armies, drummed up hatred for the enemy and offered consolation to those who had lost loved ones in battle. In the aftermath of the conflict, these myths dissolved and were reformed into the necessary postbellum narratives through which Americans of the North and South attempted to rebuild a shattered country whilst retaining some sense of former identity.

This project analyses the myth-building role of poetry in several areas including but not limited to the myths surrounding soldiery, abolition and slavery and the postwar romances of the postbellum era. It considers the  differences in poetic representations of these ideologies depending on their publication position in newspapers, whether they were written in the North or South, whether they were written by men or women and whether they were written by white or African American authors.