Melville saw an opportunity to establish himself as the prophet--poet of a rededicated America. The vehicle for this ambitious, and ultimately unfulfilled, enterprise was to be Battle-Pieces, an epically conceived book of poems that chronicles the war from John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry through Lincoln's assassination..Drawing upon previously unknown or neglected archival sources, Garner places Melville's experience within the larger contexts...He establishes Melville's position in the rift among major Northern writers in which Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, and Whittier were on one side and Melville, Hawthorne, and--to some extent--Whitman were on the other.

"This is the most important study of a period of Melville's life since Leon Howard's biography in 1951 and Eleanor Melville Metcalf's book in 1953. It contains a tremendous amount of previously unpublished information, mustered so that the reader can grasp it swiftly. Garner is both brilliant and daring in his decision to treat the poems in the chronology of the events with which they deal. A genuinely heroic achievement."--Hershel Parker, Associate General Editor of The Writings of Herman Melville