New UB English Chair Brings Civil War to 21st Century

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- When Cristanne Miller and Jerold Frakes joined the UB Department of English last fall, they took their leave, not only of excellent positions at prestigious institutions, but of Southern California's laid-back way of life and Mediterranean climate.

The UB English department was the main draw, says Miller, its new chair, but it wasn't the only one.

"Southern California is lovely in many ways, but it just isn't us," she says.

"We were looking for change," she says, "a change of climate, a change of place, something different. I'm from Iowa and did my graduate work in Chicago, and Jerold, who's from Tennessee, did graduate work in Minnesota, so the climate here is familiar and comfortable.

"Buffalo is the kind of medium-sized city we were interested in," Miller says, "and we like living here very much. There is such variety and so much going on. We have already found many extraordinary colleagues in the English department alone."

She came here from Pomona College, one of the top liberal arts colleges in the United States, where she was W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor of English and chair of the English department.

Mark Shechner, UB professor of English and immediate past chair of the department, calls Miller "a major scholar who has an impressive and fully rounded career in the academy." Her high professional visibility, he adds, will increase the national reputation of the English department and the entire university.

Frakes, a prodigious and distinguished scholar in his own right, was a professor of German and comparative literature and an associate member of the faculty of the Department of Classics at the University of Southern California. He now is a professor of English at UB.

Shechner calls Frakes "a multilingual scholar who can teach many medieval literatures in their original languages, among them English, Norse, Latin, Greek and Yiddish. His more recent work has led him to learn medieval Hebrew, Turkish and Arabic."

Miller says she did not come to UB to make drastic changes in the English department. She says she does not see herself as an "agenda setter," but that her role as chair "is to make this excellent department as strong as it can possibly be."

"We can do that through faculty hires and finding new grant opportunities and release-time for the faculty already here so they have more time for their research," she says.

"I also want to develop better research and travel funds for English department graduate students," she says, "and I am encouraging department committees to recommend ways to strengthen the graduate and undergraduate programs so that they serve students better."

Miller, a prolific and respected author of 19th- and 20th-century poetry by women, recently edited a fascinating book that she calls "an interpretational, literary and documentary monument to the cultural centrality of poetry in mid-19th-century America."

The book, "Words for the Hour: A New Anthology of American Civil War Poetry" (Amherst University Press, 2005), was compiled with Faith Barrett, assistant professor of English at Lawrence University.

It differs from the many other anthologies of Civil War poetry in that it awakens in the reader a profound sense of "being there."

It does so by presenting a wide range of works by published, unpublished, anonymous and posthumously published writers, professional and amateur, much of it presented in chronological order. The inclusion of a war time line permits readers to "follow the war in poetry" and, in so doing, to summon up an often startling affiliation with a period that many do not understand.

Miller says she thinks it is impossible for those of us living today to fully apprehend the horror of the Civil-War years.

"For us, 9/11, in which 3,000 Americans died at the same time, was horrifying and traumatic," she says, "but during the Civil War, more than 600,000 soldiers, sailors and marines died -- as many as 21,000 in a single battle." Nearly 400,000 more were maimed or wounded.

More than 10,000 military actions took place across 16 states and two territories -- 2,100 in Virginia alone. Hundreds of cities and towns were badly damaged and cities like Columbia, S.C., and Atlanta were virtually destroyed. In addition, many forms of the resulting social and economic change provoked by the war were abrupt and even violent. The country was torn in half and newspapers, which regularly published poetry as well as battlefield photographs, brought the carnage home.

Miller says poetry gives access to the day-to-day lives, as well as the thoughts and feelings that average Americans, both civilian and military, expressed in the face of the maelstrom.

"This is possible," she says, "because in the 19th century, poetry performed a social and personal function much different than it performs today.

"People wrote letters and kept journals and regularly included poetry in both," Miller says. "Families and friends 'performed' their poetry to one another, poems were commissioned for public occasions, newspapers featured poetry alongside news, and popular songwriters very often set political poems, as well as sentimental ones, to music."

These common practices left thousands of works, from the worst to the best, from which she and Barrett were able to select for their purposes.

The book opens with a preface by Miller and introduction by Barrett that describe the literary and historical contexts in which the work was written and discusses their sources. A few pages beyond that, the poetry quickly evokes the patriotic fervor and anger of those who penned it -- emotions that, whether articulated melodramatically or with logical precision, did much to provoke the war.

Quickly, too, it awakens readers to the abiding brotherhood and affection that held the war in abeyance for so long, then brought travail and torment to both sides.

"Words for the Hour" includes the poetry of Whitman, Melville, Longfellow, Hart Crane and Julia Warden Howe, who wrote a book of the same name in 1857, but it also features work by well-known southern poets, unpublished soldier poets and women responding to the war.

African Americans' poetry is found here as well, largely in the form of spirituals or sorrow songs that became well-known across the country because they spoke as well to the despair and hope of the soldiers who learned and sang them.

Miller points out that whether the author is male or female, southerner or northerner, the body of work "moves from the optimism and jingoism of the early years to bewilderment to deep grief and terrible mourning."

"The exception," she says, "is that the work of African-American poets, male and female, celebrated the end of slavery, while lamenting Lincoln's assassination."

The book also includes antebellum poetry and work written in the war's aftermath. Special sections are devoted to specific writers like Dickinson and Whittier, who wrote during and after the war. Period photographs and lithographs bring the reader into closer identification with the subject and authors.

In addition to "Words for the Hour," Miller's books include "Emily Dickinson: A Poet's Grammar" (Harvard University Press, 1987), her best-known, which has been used widely as a graduate and undergraduate text for more than 20 years.

She also is the author of "Marianne Moore: Questions of Authority" (Harvard University Press, 1995), "Cultures of Modernism: Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Else Lasker-Schüler" (University of Michigan Press, 2005) and "Comic Power in Emily Dickinson," co-authored with Susanne Juhasz and

Martha Nell Smith (University of Texas Press, 1993). Miller presently is at work on a monograph, "Poetry after Gettysburg," which traces the effects of the Civil War on American poetry.

Miller is the editor of The Emily Dickinson Journal (Johns Hopkins University Press), the major source for current scholarship on Dickinson, which she brought to UB with her; a member of the publications board of the Modern Language Association; and president of the Modernist Studies Association.

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