“Youth is the time when hearts are large and stirring wars appeal to the spirit which appeals in turn to the blade it draws.
It’s called “On the Slain Collegians.” It’s timeless, it could be about any war, although collegians don’t go to war anymore very much in America. This was Melville’s meditation in poetry on the death of college students in the war. Our greatest death poet was, of course, Whitman more from him later.īut one little piece by Melville, because it’s about you. She became obsessed with the idea of the war, and if you read her closely enough it’s all over her wartime poetry. Don’t know if any of you are Emily Dickinson fans, but Emily, the Belle of Amherst, wrote between 9 poems in her life, and fully two-thirds of them in the four years of the war. Maybe our greatest writer of the nineteenth century also wrote a lot of poetry, and he wrote almost all of his poetry during the Civil War, as did, by the way, Emily Dickinson. He wasn’t very famous yet, as you know, for Moby Dick that was to come later. Herman Melville wrote a whole bunch of poems during the Civil War. and 89 to be exact is, I think, an unforgettable mediation by Sherman on the meaning of death and just what it means and why he in some ways enjoys it. Look especially for those journeys into Sherman’s own mind, Sherman’s psyche, those meditations of Sherman’s on death.
In some ways, possibly the most brilliant inventions in this book are the slave characters, or the freedman characters, and what Doctorow does with them through this sort of anguished crucible of all out war. Most of the people in this book were real people, but there are some invented. Much of his fiction is often very historical and you’ll find, if anyone takes the time some day, that large chunks of the monologue you hear from William Tecumseh Sherman in this novel is directly out of his famous memoirs, and then every now and then Doctorow will embellish or add a few lines. Doctorow, as some of you must know, is a famous American writer for his historical fiction. Doctorow, a poet in prose, a poet in fiction. This week you’re reading a great poet, E.L. Most great poets don’t go to war, they write. Don’t kill the poets, because the poets had to be left to tell the story. I don’t know if this is true, but I love the idea, that no matter how much they slaughter themselves with broadswords and knives and whatever else those maniacs used, that they should always spare the poets. Professor David Blight: It used to be said that in the old wars fought by the Irish clans that they had an agreement. Introduction: Melville’s “On the Slain Collegians” The lectures are in conjunction with an interdisciplinary undergraduate course on the Civil War co-taught by Richard Blackett, the Andrew Jackson Professor of History, and Michael Kreyling, the Gertrude Conway Vanderbilt Professor of English.The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877 HIST 119 - Lecture 19 - To Appomattox and Beyond: The End of the War and a Search for MeaningsĬhapter 1. The talks, sponsored by the university’s College of Arts and Science, take place during the 150 th anniversary of the start of the Civil War and the presidential inauguration of Abraham Lincoln.
#Professor david blight yale university contact info series#
Civil War scholars from across the nation are speaking at Vanderbilt University this spring on a variety of themes, including the war’s impact on Nashville, during a series of public lectures. This lecture is sponsored by the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities. Civil War sesquicentennial related to Robert Penn Warren’s The Legacy of the Civil War. Blight recently authored A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation. Watch video of the talk “Gods and Devils Aplenty: Robert Penn Warren’s Civil War,” by David Blight.īlight, professor of American history and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale University, delivered the Harry C.
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