These CDs will play in any CD player at home or in your car.

Selections from Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War

Herman Melville 
(1819 - 1891)

Read by Multiple Readers From Clark University

Running Time:02:24:22 in 2 Audio CDs

Published in 1866, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War is a collection of poems about the Civil War by Herman Melville. Many of the poems are inspired by second- and third-hand accounts from print news sources (especially the Rebellion Record) and from family and friends. A handful of trips Melville took before, during, and after the war provide additional angles of vision into the battles, the personalities, and the moods of war. In an opening note, Melville describes his project not so much as a systematic chronicle (though many of the individual poems refer to specific events) but as a kind of memory piece of national experience. The “aspects” to which he refers in the title are as diverse as “the moods of involuntary meditation—moods variable, and at times widely at variance.” Much of the verse is stylistically conventional (more so than modern readers perhaps expect from the author of Moby-Dick), but the shifting subjective and unresolved traumas that unfold in the collection merit repeated contemplation. Melville’s Battle-Pieces do not offer a neatly versified narrative of the Civil War but rather kaleidoscopic glimpses of shifting emotions and ambivalent reflections of post-war America.

Poetry Titles:
   The Portent
   Misgivings  
   The Conflict of Convictions  
   Apathy and Enthusiasm  
   The March into Virginia  
   Lyon  
   Ball's Bluff  
   Dupont's Round Fight  
   The Stone Fleet  
   Donelson  
   The Cumberland  
   In the Turret  
   The Temeraire  
   The Utilitarian View of the Monitor's Fight  
   Shiloh  
   The Battle for the Mississippi  
   Malvern Hill  
   The Victor of Antietam  
   Battle of Stone River  
   Running the Batteries  
   Stonewall Jackson  
   Stonewall Jackson (ascribed to a Virginian)  
   Gettysburg  
   The Housetop  
   Lookout Mountain  
   Chattanooga  
   The Armies of the Wilderness  
   On the Photograph of a Corps Commander  
   The Swamp Angel  
   The Battle for the Bay  
   Sheridan at Cedar Creek  
   In the Prison Pen  
   The College Colonel  
   The Eagle of the Blue  
   A Dirge for McPherson  
   At the Cannon's Mouth  
   The March to the Sea  
   The Frenzy in the Wake  
   The Fall of Richmond  
   The Surrender at Appomattox  
   A Canticle  
   The Martyr  
   'The Coming Storm'  
   Rebel Colorbearers at Shiloh  
   The Muster  
   Aurora Borealis  
   The released Rebel Prisoner  
   A Grave near Petersburg, Virginia  
   'Formerly a Slave'  
   The Apparition  
   Magnanimity Baffled  
   On the Slain Collegians  
   America  
   An Epitaph  
   The Mound by the Lake  
   Commemorative of a Naval Victory  



Public domain books

A public-domain book is a book with no copyright, a book that was created without a license, or a book where its copyrights expired or have been forfeited.

In most countries the of copyright expires on the first day of January, 70 years after the death of the latest living author. The longest copyright term is in Mexico, which has life plus 100 years for all deaths since July 1928.

A notable exception is the United States, where every book and tale published before 1926 is in the public domain; American copyrights last for 95 years for books originally published between 1925 and 1978 if the copyright was properly registered and maintained.