Library of Congress Poetry Resources

Civil War Poetry: Online Books

Anthologies

Personal and Political Ballads, 1864.

A collection of eighty-five poems edited by Frank Moore. Page v notes:

"this volume contains a selection from the best Political and Personal Ballads that have appeared since the commencement of the present Rebellion. They have been gathered from various sources, Rebel as well as National, and are presented to the reader without note or comment."

War Poetry of the South, 1867.

More than 200 Southern war poems edited by William Gilmore Simms. In the preface, Simms writes of his hope that

"these poems will be recognized, not only as highly creditable to the Southern mind, but as truly illustrative, if not justificatory of, that sentiment and opinion with which they have been written; which sentiment and opinion have sustained their people through a war unexampled in its horrors in modern times, and which has fully tested their powers of endurance, as well as their ability in creating their own resources, under all reverses, and amidst every form of privation."

War Songs of the South, 1862.

Collections of Civil War Poetry

Brownell, Henry Howard. War-Lyrics and Other Poems. Boston, Ticknor and Fields, 1866.

Confederate Broadside Poetry Collection. Z. Smith Reynolds Library, Wake Forest University.

Melville, Herman. Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1866.

Whitman, Walt. Drum-Taps, 1865.

---. "Sequel to Drum-Taps." Leaves of Grass. New York, 1867.

This first issue of the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass, available through the Walt Whitman Archive, includes the 18 poems of Sequel to Drum-Taps, which were oginally published as part of the second edition of Drum-Taps (1865-1866).

Collections of Poetry that Include Civil War Poems

Timrod, Henry. The Poems of Henry Timrod. Ed. Paul Hamilton Hayne. New York, E. J. Hale & Son, 1873.