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Grace Paley: Illuminating the Dark Lives by Jacqueline Taylor (review)

(1988), which gives a reading ofDrum-Taps significantly different from Sweet's. Although Sweet convincingly shows that much of Drum-Taps reveals Whitman's hope that a national consensus could be restored, Larson's analysis also convinces in showing that "Whitman hints not so much at a final defeat of his vision of consensus as its grim perversion, one that builds altars to the unreal majesty of a phantom republic which commands all and is commanded by no one" (213). However one reads Whitman and Melville, one wonders why Sweet decided to prove his thesis about ideology and the state by analyzing poetry read by relatively few Americans and probably none of their leaders. Until the recent PBS special on the Civil War, even Brady's photographs were seen by comparatively few. Surely, newspaper reports and illustrations reflected and shaped the popular mind more powerfully and directly than did Whitman's poetry. Sweet's choice of subject matter may stem from his confusion over the causal connection between the war and the crisis in representation. By quoting Emerson, he implies that the crisis caused the war. Yet his focus on the poetry and photography of the war suggests that understanding representation of the war is necessary to an understanding of the crisis in representation. The flaws in Traces ofWar are balanced by its considerable merits. Sweet's interdisciplinary approach yields valuable insights about representations of the Civil War. He demonstrates that photography, even in its infancy, was an art form shaped by aesthetic and ideological forces pervasive in all the arts. Along with the work of Shurr, Larson, and other critics, Sweet's book also makes compelling the case for the central importance of Whitman's and Melville's Civil War poetry. Most importantly, Traces ofWar forces us to think critically about a crisis of representation that has repeatedly permitted the American state to send thousands of our young off to slaughter. As Melville