The Natural History of Loss in Battle-Pieces

Abstract:This essay examines Melville’s Civil War poetry in Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, a collection that I read as formally enacting its ethical commitment to fostering relationality across divisions, even species divisions, through its adoption of natural history as a methodology for poetic construction. As its individual poems gain in meaning when read in relation to one another, so Melville’s poetic recuperation of the war’s many losses in Battle-Pieces produces an analytic for reckoning with multiple concurrent experiences of loss, bringing the ecological interests of Battle-Pieces to the fore. Attending to these interests, I situate Melville’s poetry in the environmental history of the Civil War, demonstrating how nineteenth-century Americans recognized the war as a crisis of human-nonhuman relations, both during and after the conflict. Ultimately, I argue that trees in Battle-Pieces index not only the disasters brought upon nonhuman lives during the war, but also the hopeful possibility for renewed life after great loss, reminding readers of the responsibility of remembering ongoing life and historical redress.