Here are links to some of our favorite poetry from the Civil War era:

• Emily Dickinson
  • “The Battle-Field”
  • “Emily Dickinson and the Civil War” (Emily Dickinson Museum)
• Julia Ward Howe
  • “Battle-Hymn of the Republic” (1861)
• Herman Melville
  • “The Portent”
• Kate Putnam Osgood
  • “Driving Home the Cows”
• James Jeffrey Roche
  • “Gettysburg”
• John Reuben Thomas
  • “Music in Camp”
• Walt Whitman
  • Leaves of Grass: Index of titles
  • “First O Songs, for a Prelude”
  • “Eighteen Sixty-One”
  • “Come Up from the Fields, Father”
  • “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night”
  • “A Sight in Camp on the Day-break Grey and Dim”
  • “The Wound-Dresser”
  • “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”
  • “O Captain! My Captain!”
  • “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors”
  • “To the Leaven’d Soil They Trod”
• John Greenleaf Whitter
  • “Barbara Frietchie”
  • “Brown of Ossawatomie” (1859)
  • “We Wait Beneath the Furnace-blast” [about]
  • “A Word for the Hour”

“A Poetry-Fueled War” Ruth Graham (Poetry Foundation)

“Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and the War That Changed Poetry, Forever” David Ward (Smithsonian.com)