Lighting it up

Ben Jonson's joke about burning a ballad to light a pipe:

"One who fired a Tobacco pipe with a ballet [ballad] the next day having a sore-head, swoare he had a great singing in his head, and he thought it was the ballet: A Poet should detest a Ballet maker."
--Notes of Ben Jonson's Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden

made me think of Melville's bit in Pierre about lighting cigars with sonnets:

Now, the dollars derived from his ditties, these Pierre had always invested in cigars; so that the puffs which indirectly brought him his dollars were again returned, but as perfumed puffs; perfumed with the sweet leaf of Havanna. So that this highly-celebrated and world-renowned Pierre—the great author—whose likeness the world had never seen (for had he not repeatedly refused the world his likeness?), this famous poet, and philosopher, author of "The Tropical Summer: a Sonnet;" against whose very life several desperadoes were darkly plotting (for had not the biographers sworn they would have it?); this towering celebrity—there he would sit smoking, and smoking, mild and self-festooned as a vapory mountain. It was very involuntarily and satisfactorily reciprocal. His cigars were lighted in two ways: lighted by the sale of his sonnets, and lighted by the printed sonnets themselves.  --Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities

William Drummond of Hawthornden does not appear in Melville's Reading or Melville's Sources or the Online Catalog of Melville's known reading. Only stray references to William Drummond in Melville scholarship, it seems. I would be glad to know of anything at all in print, especially on Melville and those notes of Ben Jonson's talking.

We do know Melville owned the 1692 folio edition of The Works of Ben Jonson which he bought in London, November 1849. Formerly in the collection of Albert Boni, this volume now is held by the New-York Historical Society, as indicated in Online Catalog at Melville's Marginalia Online.

Stanton Garner charts the influence of Jonson on the last of Melville's poems in the John Marr volume, in "Rosemarine: Melville's 'Pebbles' and Ben Jonson's Masque of Blackness," Melville Society Extracts 41 (February 1980): 13-14. Before Garner, Newton Arvin in the October 1949 Partisan Review had noted the same borrowing but thought it more of a happy accident, "an unconscious but felicitous echo" of Jonson.

Source-study 101

The Storming of Fort Donelson:
Terrific bayonet charge and Capture of the outer intrenchments, by the Gallant Soldiers of the West--
Saturday Feby. 15th. 1862 / Currier & Ives via Library of Congress

In Frontier in American Literature, Edwin S. Fussell brilliantly catalogs and describes Melville's obsession with the American West. Nevertheless, he makes a bad mistake about "Donelson" in the Civil War volume Battle-Pieces which might have been forestalled by proper attention to the basics of source study. Also evident, alas: ignorance of Melville's rejected 1860 volume for which the intended title "Poems by Herman Melville" was known, and pretty widely available in for example Leyda's 1951 Melville Log.

Fussell on "Donelson":

"Storms at the West derange the wires," is an unconsciously ironic line in Battle-Pieces (1866). In this first volume of verses, Melville more than once descended to doggerel, perhaps in part because at first he found it so difficult to think in the medium of poetry, except off and on:

But, full of vim from Western prairies won,
They'll make, ere long, a dash at Donelson.

In view of the fact that the prairies traditionally belonged to the whole nation, Melville's identification of them as a training-ground for Union troops (even with respect to an obviously Western victory) rings hollow; apparently he was half-automatically trying to invoke the old magic of the West for the new cause (Civil War, poetry), but the two worlds simply declined to lie down together.  --Fussell, Frontier p377

In denigrating Battle-Pieces as so much "doggerel," Fussell is following the lead of biographer Leon Howard (who applied the term "hack work," twice) and before Howard, William Dean Howells. But Fussell could not have been more wrong. Factually wrong, on two counts. One, like I said poetry was not a new cause for Melville; and two, Melville had a very good, very concrete reason for introducing his prairie image. To understand that reason you have first to give Melville credit for meaning something intelligible. Then it helps to look at Melville's reliance on the Rebellion Record. This source was known even before Frank Day's 1959 M.A. thesis on "Melville's use of the Rebellion Record in his poetry," published in 1960 by the University of Kentucky Press and now available online through the Clemson University Digital Press. In 1938 Willard Thorp pointed directly to the Rebellion Record in his Introduction to Herman Melville: Representative Selections, Thorp specifically called attention to Melville's heavy dependence on the Rebellion Record in "Donelson":

A glance through some of the documents and journalistic reports in the volumes of this work which relate to episodes turned into poetry by Melville, shows at once that the Rebellion Record was exploited extensively by him. Either he turned at once to its pages when the impulse to write verse again was imparted to him or he happened to be going through them when Richmond fell. His use of this monumental record of the war varies from the close paralleling and mere "versified journalism" derived from the New York Times account of the capture of Fort Donelson in his "Donelson" to the remarkable reconstruction of the character of the brave General Lyon from the matter-of-fact report of the battle of Springfield as he found it in two newspaper accounts in the Record.   

--Thorp's Introduction to Representative Selections

Thorp helpfully gave the right volume number IV and page numbers 170-176. After Thorp's 1938 notice, Howard Vincent in the Explanatory Notes to the 1947 Collected Poems again cited the Rebellion Record as the main source for "Donelson":

Melville's bulletins throughout the poem are a recasting of selected details from The New York Times account of the battle as printed in the Rebellion Record, IV, 170-176.
--Melville's Collected Poems p449

Fussell does footnote the Hendricks House edition of Melville's Collected Poems which makes me wonder if he only had the version lacking Vincent's Explanatory Notes at the end. (The first copy of Collected Poems I bought online was one of those, without the notes.) Vincent's sentence quoted above is all you need to figure out what Melville means by "vim from Western prairies." Plus vol. 4 of the Rebellion Record that is.

As Frank Day found when he went to the Rebellion Record:

Melville's use of "vim," which he italicizes, in his description of the troops' morale, probably was inspired by its use by the Times correspondent, who describes an old man who is stirred by the strains of "Yankee Doodle" as the fleet passes Eddyville: "Off went his hat, and with a vim that sent his hat flying…" (Documents, p. 171). --Frank Day

How the figure of the rejuvenated old patriot might have appealed to Melville and drawn his attention to the word vim may be easier to see in the context of the whole passage from the New York Times account:

An old man, whose head was white as a snow-drift, stood on the shore leaning heavily on his cane and watching with seeming apathy the passage of the boats, whose full appearance his faded eyes probably failed to catch. Just as the Minnehaha passed opposite him the magnificent band of the Fifty-seventh struck up “Yankee Doodle.” Its strains seemed to awaken stirring memories in the old man's mind—off went his hat, and with a vim that sent his hair flying around his head like a snow-bank lifted by the wind, he gave three hearty cheers for the Union—the Union in which himself, his children, and his grandchildren had been born, reared, and protected.   --Rebellion Record vol. 4 

References to the steamer Minnehaha and Fifty-seventh show why Melville conceives of "vim" as a product of "Western Prairies." Earlier in Union preparations for the assault on Fort Donelson, the Minnehaha brought the Fifty-seventh Illinois from Cairo, Illinois to Fort Henry. This regiment was the one formally known as the Fifty-Seventh Regiment Illinois Volunteer Infantry, under command of Colonel S. D. Baldwin:

It was determined by Gen. Grant to make the attack upon Fort Donelson from two directions— by land from the direction of Fort Henry, and by water up the Cumberland, assisted by an adequate column of troops on the banks. Tuesday night, the Fifty-seventh Illinois, Col. Baldwin, arrived at Fort Henry, on the steamer Minnehaha.

As noted by Henry Howe, the seige of Donelson was conducted by troops from western states, chiefly Illinois.

At the first great battle in the west—the taking Of Fort Donelson— an unusual proportion of the soldiers of Illinois took part; and so conspicuously that an eastern poet made it a subject of some congratulatory verses, under the caption of New England's Greeting To Illinois.  --Henry Howe, Times of the Rebellion in the West

Howe's anonymous New England poet associated Western prairies with Illinois:

New England's glad hurrahs—
Bear to the prairies of the West
The echoes of our joy,
The prayer that springs in every breast,—
"God bless thee, Illinois!

No wonder the victory when finally achieved would be commemorated in the North as a victory of the "Loyal West" or "Gallant Soldiers of the West."

Finding enthusiastic "vim" inspired by Illinois troops in the Times report, Melville then must have mentally associated Illinois with prairies as everyone did, and as he did elsewhere, for example in the poem Trophies of Peace. The old patriot's "vim" stirred up by the Illinois regiment gets translated creatively into something else: high spirits among troops in the cheerful early stages of a key battle.  As Frank Day noticed, Melville assigns that vim to the fresh and still upbeat troops, the Illinois soldiers who brought it with them from "Western prairies."

So Melville's image of "Western prairies" does not as Fussell thought refer to military drills and marches over the prairies before the Civil War--though such operations certainly were extensive and significant. As a look at the source for "Donelson" in the Rebellion Record makes clear, by "Western prairies" Melville means Illinois.

Prairie "vim" has to be something like the energetic, wild-and-free feeling communicated in a letter to the Illinois Journal and reprinted in the New York Mirror, December 4, 1841, under the heading THE WESTERN PRAIRIES:

In short, I love the feeling of freshness, and freedom, and wildness which a man on the prairie alone can so well feel.

Further along in Melville's poem the depiction of Fort Donelson corresponds in essential details to the same Times article wherein Melville found vim associated with the Illinois Fifty-seventh:

The ground around the Fort is a rolling upland, covered with heavy timber and dense undergrowth, and broken for miles around into ravines, bordered by precipitous bluffs, whose sides, steep and rocky, almost forbid the passage of even a goat. The Fort itself is situated upon a high bluff, which slants with an easy descent to a point at the water's edge on the north, and is probably not less than one hundred feet above the level of the water. To the rear the bluff has been to some extent levelled for the distance of a mile. On this artificial table-land stands the Fort, whose lines of fortifications and rifle-pits cover the entire levelled space.  --Rebellion Record vol. 4 p171

Here's what Melville made of it:

This stronghold crowns a river-bluff,

   A good broad mile of leveled top,

Inland the ground rolls off

   Deep-gorged, and rocky, and broken up—

A wilderness of trees and brush.

   The spaded summit shows the roods

Of fixed intrenchments in their hush;

   Breast-works and rifle-pits in woods

Perplex the base.—

More of the extensive borrowings that Day inventoried:

the phrasing of the lines "Grant's investment is complete—/A semicircular one" follows remarks in the Times that "the Fort is completely invested" (Documents, p. 173) and that forces were extended "both up and down a line parallel with the river…thus enclosing the Fort in a semicircular line" (Documents, p. 171).
--Frank Day on Donelson

Not only that, but Day shows also how Melville occasionally blended choice bits from two articles reprinted in the Rebellion Record, the NY Times article and another one from the Missouri Democrat. In a single stanza, illustrating the carefulness of his method, and at the same time destroying Fussell's idea of Melville's writing anything "half-automatically" in "Donelson."

Bottom line, the probability that Melville mined this long, literate, dramatic, and richly detailed Times account for "Donelson" is right around 100%. Strange then that so thorough and wise a scholar as Stanton Garner would feel bound to doubt or rather downplay Melville's borrowing habits:

The influence of the Record has been detected in at least twenty of the poems, but the importance of the borrowings has been overstated, tempting readers to believe that Battle-Pieces is "versified journalism," and, therefore, that both the author and his poems were distant "from the actual events of the war." That idea is rooted in Raymond M. Weaver's conception of Herman as a "mariner and mystic" who stood aloof from earthly concerns, for a mystic looks only above and a mariner looks only beyond, at the inscrutable sea. That leaves unexplained the lively interest in the social and political issues of the time demonstrated in many of Herman's other works....

... 

Herman had no need to embellish what he already knew, nor did he. In fact, he may have used the Record somewhat less than has been supposed. It has been noted that in both "Donelson" and in a column reprinted from the New York Times the word "vim" appears; but at the time that word was in common use, as is demonstrated by General Sheridan's philippic against Jeff Hobart. Again, although a piece from the Missouri Democrat and "Donelson" both use the word "sortie," that is the kind of military term that war introduces to the civilian vocabulary.  --Stanton Garner, Civil War World pp389-90

Garner is wrong when he doubts Melville's borrowing of "vim" and "sortie" as well but absolutely right I think about his more important claims for Melville's artistry as a poet. For the legacy of stone-cold imperviousness to the high quality of Battle-Pieces, blame not only or mainly Weaver but also William Dean Howells and Edmund Wilson, and distinguished followers of theirs like Andrew Delbanco. 

Hats off then to Garner for battling Wilson's verdict of "versified journalism." Garner's own great line

"Herman's mind contained a rebellion record of its own."  --Civil War World

 reminds me of Dylan on Dylan: "All my songs are protest songs."

For further study...

Donelson in Melville's Battle-Pieces

Donelson, online text

Frank Day on Melville's Use of the Rebellion Record

Hennig Cohen, Introduction to 1963 ed. Battle-Pieces

Rebellion Record vol. 4 at Google Books

Rebellion Record vol 4 at Hathi Trust Digital Library

Corps Commander Winfield Scott Hancock

Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock
Library of Congress

On the Photograph of a Corps Commander.

Ay, man is manly. Here you see
The warrior-carriage of the head,

And brave dilation of the frame;
And lighting all, the soul that led

In Spottsylvania's charge to victory,
Which justifies his fame.

A cheering picture. It is good
To look upon a Chief like this,

In whom the spirit moulds the form.
Here favoring Nature, oft remiss,

With eagle mien expressive has endued
A man to kindle strains that warm.

Trace back his lineage, and his sires,
Yeoman or noble, you shall find
Enrolled with men of Agincourt,
Heroes who shared great Harry's mind.

Down to us come the knightly Norman fires,
And front the Templars bore.

Nothing can lift the heart of man
Like manhood in a fellow-man.

The thought of heaven's great King afar
But humbles us—too weak to scan;

But manly greatness men can span,
And feel the bonds that draw.

--Herman Melville, from Battle-Pieces and Aspects of War

In this month of May 150 years ago, Hancock as commander of the Union's Second Army Corps or II Corps led the attack on U-shaped rebel works called The Mule Shoe at Spotsylvania, Virginia:

"At the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House the II Corps again attained a glorious place in history by Hancock's brilliant and successful assault on the morning of May 12." --Wikipedia

Horrible hand-to-hand fighting, the longest of the war, took place in a stretch of the Mule Shoe known as "Bloody Angle." Today at the Bloody Angle Trail, Tour Stop 3 specifically commemorates Hancock's charge:

Tour Stop 3: Second Corps Attacks

General Winfield Scott Hancock's Second Corps attacked across the open ground, past where you are standing, and against the works at Stop #2.

"I remember the thin picket line of the enemy, with their bewildered look. There was a little patter of bullets, and I saw a few of our men on the ground; one discharge of artillery. . . and we were up on the works with our hands full of guns, prisoners and colors."

--General Francis Barlow, USA

Brilliant success? or bloody miscue? 

https://www.historynet.com/the-unions-bloody-miscue-at-spotsylvanias-muleshoe/

However costly and temporary,

"Spotsylvania confirmed the position of Winfield Hancock as the premier corps commander in the Army of the Potomac." 

--David M. Jordan, Winfield Scott Hancock: A Soldier’s Life (1995) 

Recent critical studies duly credit Stanton Garner with identifying Melville's Corps Commander as Winfield Scott Hancock. That he did, but before Garner there was Robert Penn Warren, editor of the daring 1971 volume, Selected Poems of Herman Melville. In the textual notes Warren plainly states what to him must have seemed obvious:

The poem is linked with "The Armies of the Wilderness." The hero of the poem is General Winfield Scott Hancock (1824-1886), commander of the II Corps, who at dawn on the last day of the Battle of Spotsylvania, May 12, led a massive attack on a narrow front (a favorite tactic of Grant's), at the Mule Shoe Salient in the center of Lee's line. Hancock broke through, captured two general officers and several thousand men and would, no doubt, have converted Spotsylvania into a decisive battle, had not General John B. Gordon's savage counterattack flung him back to the first line of trenches, where he was contained at the famous Bloody Angle until past midnight, by which time Lee had consolidated a new line. In 1880, Hancock was candidate for President on the Democratic ticket. The poem, in celebrating the manliness of the Federal officer, hints at the theme of manliness which creates a brotherhood beyond particular side or commitment."  (Robert Penn Warren, Selected Poems of Herman Melville 369-70)

Warren then refers back to pages 19-20 in his introduction, which emphasized the point that one's "fellow-man may be a fellow, not by ideology, but only in his manhood."

And before Warren there was Hennig Cohen making the connection to Hancock in the important 1963 edition of Battle-Pieces, "one of the landmark studies of Melville's engagement with the visual arts" (Christopher Sten, Savage Eye page 286, note 24). Megan Williams only goes back as far as Garner, whom she tasks with backing up the Hancock claim:

Without providing supporting evidence, Garner argues that Melville honors General Winfield Hancock in this poem (Garner 325).

But Garner had no idea of needing to support such a plain fact. (Garner was cautiously arguing something more debatable and more interesting, that Melville actually met Hancock in person).

Williams wants an opening for Grant, which is perfectly fine and allowable to the extent that, as she observes:

"By refusing to give this commander a name, Melville makes this poem a deliberately generic treatment of heroism that could be applied to any Civil War general."

Source: Megan Williams, "Sounding the Wilderness": Representations of the Heroic in Herman Melville's Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, Texas Studies in Language and Literature (Summer 2003: 152 of 141-17) at JSTOR; also in Through the Negative (Routledge, 2003) page 112.

Grant might be man enough to embody the heroism of generic "manly greatness." However, Grant is just nobody's Corps Commander. The title Corps Commander denotes a particular level of military authority and responsibility in the command structure from Regiment to President, as the National Park Service helpfully explains. 

https://www.nps.gov/articles/from-regiment-to-president-the-structure-and-command-of-civil-war-armies.htm

Yes the promotion of Grant in March 1864 created an "awkward command situation" while Meade still formally led the Army of the Potomac. Even so,

 "As lieutenant general of the U.S. Army, Grant was answerable only to Lincoln."  

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/lincoln-signs-ulysses-s-grants-commission-to-command-the-u-s-army

Andrew Miller accepts Hancock as the right fellow-man (again after Garner, ignoring Warren and Cohen), but gets bogged down in Neo-Platonism and phrenology (Journal of American Studies). Really, the physiology does not seem all that complicated. It does enrich one's reading experience I think to have one or another photograph handy, of many such available. Miller provides one yet fails I fear to see what Melville is talking about. Good, that's why Melvilliana is here. Look! Will you look at that fine figure of a man:

Head up! (warrior-carriage)
Chest out! (brave dilation)
Looking sharp! (eagle mien--oh! how focused and determined are those eyes!)

 Oops, what just happened? Was that my narcissism showing? So Timothy Sweet would allege:

"Melville describes a bond between man and an image in a political vacuum. He hints that narcissism is the real ground of the wartime camaraderie Whitman valorized. The viewer of the photograph is supposed to identify himself, ‘a fellow man,’ with the idealized subject of the photograph; but he remains locked in his own narcissistic gaze." -- Traces of War (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); quoted by Hsuan Hsu in War, Ekphrasis, and Elliptical Form)

Quoting and approving Sweet, Hsuan L. Hsu extends the idea, and the irony. For Hsu, Melville's poem On the Photograph of a Corps Commander

"does not so much indulge in narcissism as parody the narcissistic circularity of a gaze that would aestheticize the war by viewing it in a political vacuum.”

Source: Hsuan Hsu, “War, Ekphrasis, and Elliptical Form in Melville's Battle-Pieces,” Nineteenth-Century Studies 16 (2002): 51–71 at page 58.

Irony on top of irony. Exquisite, except now I'm drowning.

Help! Help!

Oh thank heaven there's Geoffrey D. Sanborn with a life saver:

... —it may seem nearly impossible to read this poem “straight.” And yet there are no signs of irony in it. From its opening affirmation that “man is manly” to its closing contrast between the overbearingness of God’s grandeur and the attractiveness of “manly greatness,” it is a pure song of praise, one that bears strong resemblance to Ishmael’s similarly unironic paeans to Queequeg.⁴⁷ Like Queequeg, the corps commander has a lofty bearing, a dauntlessly daring spirit, and “excellent blood in his veins” (55); like Queequeg, he is “good/To look upon,” a “cheering picture” that “lift[s] the heart.” However bizarre it may seem, in light of Melville’s reputation as a thorough-going skeptic, he asks us, here and elsewhere, to lift our gates, to affirm with him the belief that “there is a something about every man elevated above mediocrity, which is, for the most part, instinctively perceptible” (Corr 121).

Bravo! Now that's one great paragraph, from pages 117-18 of Sanborn's latest book Whipscars and Tattoos. Footnote 47 acknowledges the aforementioned article by Hsuan Hsu. Sanborn's concluding quotation is taken from Melville's 3 March 1849 letter to Evert Duyckinck, as printed in Herman Melville's Correspondence, edited by Lynn Horth (Northwestern University Press, 1993) at page 121.

The real General Hancock inspired noble feelings and language. You have to know that I think to get, or say begin to get Melville's poem.

Winfield Hancock certainly looked the part of a high-ranking officer. The observant staffer Frank Haskell saved his highest superlatives for the 6' 2" Second Corps chief. Of all the army's officers, Haskell believed "Hancock was . . . in many respects the best-looking, dignified, gentlemanly and commanding. He was tall and well proportioned, had a ruddy complexion, brown hair, and he wore a mustache and a tuft of hair upon his chin . . . . Had General Hancock worn citizen's clothes, and given commands in the army to those who did not know him, he would be likely to be obeyed at once, for he had the appearance of a man born to command." Another officer wrote that "one felt safe to be near him." Others were impressed with his sartorial splendor: a Maine artilleryman wrote that "his very atmosphere was strong and invigorating . . . . I remember (how refreshing to note!) even his linen clean and white, his collar wide and free, and his broad wrist bands showing large and rolling back from his firm, finely molded hands." Grant himself recalled him as having been "tall, well-formed and . . . young and fresh-looking, he presented an appearance that would attract the attention of an army as he passed. His genial disposition made him friends, and his personal courage and his presence with his command in the thickest of the fight won for him the confidence of troops serving under him. No matter how hard the fight, the Second Corps always felt that their commander was looking after them." --Larry Tagg, The Generals of Gettysburg (Da Capo Press, 1998) page 33.

In remembrance this Memorial Day of the fallen at the Battle of Spotsylvania, May 1864.

Later (5/11/2015): A Currier & Ives print shows the "Glorious Charge of Hancock's Division," further confirming Hanock's popular association with Spottsylvania--you can see it online at the Library of Congress and the Melvilliana post on Hancock's Charge.

Related posts:

• Battle-Pieces in De Peyster's Biography of Philip Kearny

• Hancock and Grant in Harper's Weekly

• Hancock's Charge