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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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While Niedecker's “life by water” is the subject of many of her poems, reflecting the experience of living on the flood-prone island of Black Hawk, Wisconsin, the water imagery that saturates many of her poems also becomes a way of reflecting upon time as it is experienced, of consciousness as process, of subjectivity as something pulled along by a temporal stream. The poetics of temporal flow suggests Niedecker's interest in exploring forms of experience that fall outside conscious attention and that point to her affinity with the modernist philosopher of time, Henri Bergson, whose Creative Evolution she read in 1955. This paper examines some of the short, concise poems Niedecker wrote in the 1950s, together with the later, looser-limbed poems such as “Paean to Place” where she turns away from the objectivist principles of com pression in order to produce fluid, malleable poems commensurate with the flow of experience. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]