It is a collection of poems about the Civil War. A handful of trips Melville took before, during, and after the war provide additional angles of vision into the battles, the personalities, and the moods of war thus indicating criticism.
Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Bram Stoker, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, William Shakespeare, Aldous Huxley, Victor Hugo, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Mark Twain, L.M. Montgomery, A. A. Milne, Alexandre Dumas, Leo Tolstoy, Kurt Vonnegut, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anna Sewell, Miguel de Cervantes, Herman Melville, L. Frank Baum, Jack London, Dante Alighieri, Joseph Conrad, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, H.G. Wells, Franz Kafka, Irmãos Grimm, Lewis Carroll, Louisa May Alcott, John Steinbeck, Emily Bronte, Oscar Wilde, Hermann Hesse & Niccolò Machiavelli