“We ought to know these poems, which are so different from the run-of-the-mill effusions that have flooded the market since 1861.”
—Shelby Foote, Civil War historian & author
- On American Boys Dying in 1863, in Virginia and Later Elsewhere
- What Now Coheres—Of 1861-1865?
- The Waiting Maine Man, Dead at Little Round Top, Near Gettysburg, July 1863
- Thoughts in 1960 on the Civil War, 1861-1865
About the last two poems, Ellen Reiss writes in issue Number 803 of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known:
[These] poems are about the Civil War; which, Eli Siegel showed, contrary to some historians, was fought over one thing: slavery. Slavery was behind the so-called economic causes of the war and the insistence on “states’ rights.” Mr. Siegel was passionate in saying that what the South nostalgically called “the lost cause” was the horrible ability to own black human beings. And when one sees how much America tried not to make the decision that slavery had to end, and how the years of compromising on the subject—the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act—culminated with the Civil War, one sees that ethics cannot be compromised with or put aside. The ethics “waiting and charging” in 1863 was about—in Eli Siegel’s kind words—“what does a person deserve by being alive?” The same ethics is insisting now.
Eli Siegel tells of this, first in free verse lines about a soldier, whose depths he is so fair to; then in eight rhymed lines about four battles of the Civil War. In both poems, so different, the music is beautiful: a oneness of the definite, the insisting, and the delicate, lingering, deep—both of which are justice.