New Approaches to Civil War Poetry: Dickinson, Whitman, Melville

Abstract

O rganized and moderated by Joseph Fruscione (Melville Society), Tyler Hoffman (Rutgers University, Camden), and Elizabeth Petrino (Fairfield University), this collaborative panel brought together five scholar/teachers at various stages of their careers to discuss the Civil War– era poetry of Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson. Each panelist gave a short, focused talk that sparked a lively discussion. This was the Melville Society’s second collaborative panel for MLA, and it was successful and engaging (with 54 audience members). In part, this panel was designed as a preview for the June 2013 Melville International Conference, “Melville and Whitman in Washington: The Civil War Years and After.” Our goal for the roundtable was to examine these authors’ different types of poetry, as well as to investigate the growing interest in parsing the aesthetic, political, and formal responses of these three innovative responses to the Civil War. The panelists showed a strong awareness of recent scholarship and of useful new directions of scholarly work on these writers and their era. Each, in his or her own way, helped include Melville in current critical conversations about nineteenthcentury American poetry.