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Favoring Nature: Herman Melville's “On the Photograph of a Corps Commander”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2012

ANDREW MILLER
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Abstract

This paper involves a close reading of Herman Melville's poem “On the Photograph of a Corps Commander,” published in Melville's 1866 collection Battle-Pieces. Realizing that Melville's poem is one of the first descriptions (ekphrases) of a photograph in verse, the paper explores how Melville's poem uses physiognomy to describe the subject of the photograph: an American Civil War general, who is only identified as “the Corps Commander.” In this way, Melville's poem reflects the nineteenth-century philosophical and popular notions of photography. These notions came to regard photography as a Neoplatonic medium capable of recording and revealing the inner character of its subjects. Relying on these conceptions of photography, Melville's poem describes the photograph of the Corps Commander as having the power to reveal the Platonic absolute of American masculinity, and thus it comes to hail the photograph as a semi-sacred image that has the power to draw Anglo-Saxon American men into a common brotherhood.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 3 , August 2012 , pp. 663 - 679
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

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