Leif Eckstrom, English

A Civil Matter

Leif Eckstrom

When most people hear the names Herman Melville and Walt Whitman they think of Moby Dick and Leaves of Grass. But something else comes to mind when Leif Eckstrom hears these names—namely, the Civil War.

“I’m concerned with the historical development of Western lyrical poetry,” says Eckstrom, a new English graduate student and Provost Fellow. “More particularly, my research aims to document how Melville and Whitman contributed to and challenged what was then a still-developing Romantic understanding of the lyric. From this study, I eventually hope to sketch Melville’s and Whitman’s working theories of the lyric as it plays out in their Civil War poetry.”

The Civil War poetry of each author can be found in Melville’s “Battle Pieces and Aspects of War” his collection of over seventy poems on the conflict, and in Whitman’s “Drum Taps.” It should be noted, though, that Whitman’s Civil War poetry also appears in Leaves of Grass, under the same title of “Drum Taps.”

Eckstrom has studied the poems of each author closely, and has come up with some interesting conclusions.

“Though both Melville and Whitman were pro-Union, neither poet gave the Northern victory a wholly ringing endorsement,” he says. “Instead, their poems express a muted and reticent reaction to the war. With this said, Melville’s poems are more aggressively reticent and difficult than Whitman’s poems, which remain immediate and accessible despite their muted qualities. Finally, both poets seem suspicious of what their poems can represent, let alone accomplish. Whitman wrote famously that the war’s ‘interior history will not only never be written, its practicality, minutia of deeds and passions, will never even be suggested.’”

But, as Eckstrom shares, his interest in the Civil War poetry of each author goes beyond their impressions of the conflict, which spanned from 1861 to 1865. As a graduate student at Tufts, he hopes to explore the state of poetry in the 19^th century and the role that Melville and Whitman played in its development.

“In terms of readership, publication, performance, and available forms, the state of lyrical poetry was widely different in the nineteenth century than in our own,” says Eckstrom, who decided to pursue graduate studies at Tufts after observing the close knit environment of the Department of English during a visit last year. “Thus, my research will involve culling the many great archives in Boston for the uncollected and prolific public poetry of the period. From these readings, I hope to establish a working ‘horizon of expectation’ for the many genres once considered lyrical, and this frame of reference will enable me to read the formal innovations and departures Melville and Whitman made as they distinguished their [Civil War] poetry from their contemporaries.”

To learn more about the Provost Fellows program, click here.

Profile written by Robert Bochnak, G07, Tufts University Office of Graduate Studies.

Photo by Melody Ko