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Selections from Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War

Selections from Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War

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Genre(s): ,

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Number of Chapters: 56

Length: 02 hours and 24 minutes

Language: English

Published in 1866, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War is a collection of poems about the Civil War by Herman Melville. Many of the poems are inspired by second- and third-hand accounts from print news sources (especially the Rebellion Record) and from family and friends. A handful of trips Melville took before, during, and after the war provide additional angles of vision into the battles, the personalities, and the moods of war. In an opening note, Melville describes his project not so much as a systematic chronicle (though many of the individual poems refer to specific events) but as a kind of memory piece of national experience. The “aspects” to which he refers in the title are as diverse as “the moods of involuntary meditation—moods variable, and at times widely at variance.” Much of the verse is stylistically conventional (more so than modern readers perhaps expect from the author of Moby-Dick), but the shifting subjectivities and unresolved traumas that unfold in the collection merit repeated contemplation. Melville’s Battle-Pieces do not offer a neatly versified narrative of the Civil War but rather kaleidoscopic glimpses of shifting emotions and ambivalent reflections of post-war America.(Professor Meredith Neuman)

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01 - The Portent (1859) (Clark University)
02 - Misgivings (Clark University)
03 - The Conflict of Convictions (Clark University)
04 - Apathy and Enthusiasm (Clark University)
05 - The March into Virginia (Clark University)
06 - Lyon (Clark University)
07 - Ball's Bluff (Clark University)
08 - Dupont's Round Fight (Clark University)
09 - The Stone Fleet (Clark University)
10 - Donelson (Clark University)
11 - The Cumberland (Clark University)
12 - In the Turret (Clark University)
13 - The Temeraire (Clark University)
14 - The Utilitarian View of the Monitor's Fight (Clark University)
15 - Shiloh (Clark University)
16 - The Battle for the Mississippi (Clark University)
17 - Malvern Hill (Clark University)
18 - The Victor of Antietam (Clark University)
19 - Battle of Stone River (Clark University)
20 - Running the Batteries (Clark University)
21 - Stonewall Jackson (Clark University)
22 - Stonewall Jackson (ascribed to a Virginian) (Clark University)
23 - Gettysburg (Clark University)
24 - The House-top (Clark University)
25 - Look-out Mountain (Clark University)
26 - Chattanooga (Clark University)
27 - The Armies of the Wilderness (Clark University)
28 - On the Photograph of a Corps Commander (Clark University)
29 - The Swamp Angel (Clark University)
30 - The Battle for the Bay (Clark University)
31 - Sheridan at Cedar Creek (Clark University)
32 - In the Prison Pen (Clark University)
33 - The College Colonel (Clark University)
34 - The Eagle of the Blue (Clark University)
35 - A Dirge for McPherson (Clark University)
36 - At the Cannon's Mouth (Clark University)
37 - The March to the Sea (Clark University)
38 - The Frenzy in the Wake (Clark University)
39 - The Fall of Richmond (Clark University)
40 - The Surrender at Appomattox (Clark University)
41 - A Canticle (Clark University)
42 - The Martyr (Clark University)
43 - 'The Coming Storm' (Clark University)
44 - Rebel Color-bearers at Shiloh (Clark University)
45 - The Muster (Clark University)
46 - Aurora Borealis (Clark University)
47 - The released Rebel Prisoner (Clark University)
48 - A Grave near Petersburg, Virginia (Clark University)
49 - 'Formerly a Slave' (Clark University)
50 - The Apparition (Clark University)
51 - Magnanimity Baffled (Clark University)
52 - On the Slain Collegians (Clark University)
53 - America (Clark University)
54 - An Epitaph (Clark University)
55 - The Mound by the Lake (Clark University)
56 - Commemorative of a Naval Victory (Clark University)
The audiobook Selections from Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War falls under the genres of , . It is written by .