Selections from Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

Selections from Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, credited to Herman Melville, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War by Herman Melville. Read in English by Clark University Published in 1866, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War is a collection of poems about the Civil War by Herman Melville. Many of the poems are inspired by second- and third-hand accounts from print news sources (especially the Rebellion Record) and from family and friends. 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. In an opening note, Melville describes his project not so much as a systematic chronicle (though many of the individual poems refer to specific events) but as a kind of memory piece of national experience. The “aspects” to which he refers in the title are as diverse as “the moods of involuntary meditation—moods variable, and at times widely at variance.” Much of the verse is stylistically conventional (more so than modern readers perhaps expect from the author of Moby-Dick), but the shifting subjectivities and unresolved traumas that unfold in the collection merit repeated contemplation. Melville’s Battle-Pieces do not offer a neatly versified narrative of the Civil War but rather kaleidescopic glimpses of shifting emotions and ambivalent reflections of post-war America.(Professor Meredith Neuman)

Recording facts

• Recording title: Selections from Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War
• Author credits: Herman Melville
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 56
• Listed recording duration: 2:24:22

Opening tracks: first 24 of 56

1. 01 - The Portent (1859) — 0:58
2. 02 - Misgivings — 1:14
3. 03 - The Conflict of Convictions — 4:40
4. 04 - Apathy and Enthusiasm — 2:27
5. 05 - The March into Virginia — 1:59
6. 06 - Lyon — 2:56
7. 07 - Ball's Bluff — 1:21
8. 08 - Dupont's Round Fight — 0:53
9. 09 - The Stone Fleet — 2:16
10. 10 - Donelson — 19:01
11. 11 - The Cumberland — 2:20
12. 12 - In the Turret — 2:34
13. 13 - The Temeraire — 2:45
14. 14 - The Utilitarian View of the Monitor's Fight — 2:04
15. 15 - Shiloh — 1:32
16. 16 - The Battle for the Mississippi — 2:42
17. 17 - Malvern Hill — 1:53
18. 18 - The Victor of Antietam — 2:55
19. 19 - Battle of Stone River — 2:43
20. 20 - Running the Batteries — 4:20
21. 21 - Stonewall Jackson — 1:11
22. 22 - Stonewall Jackson (ascribed to a Virginian) — 2:51
23. 23 - Gettysburg — 1:54
24. 24 - The House-top — 2:42

Listen to this recording

Open the complete recording and player on Internet Archive. The player includes the full track list and available download formats.

Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.