They open a window to see the relationship between war and culture in ways that other readings just cannot - through personal experience. Our Civil War poetry is located on the web Please read: Melville, "On the Slain at Chickamauga"; Roche, "Gettysburg"; Thompson, "The High Tide at Gettysburg"; Longfellow, "Killed at the Ford" and "The Cumberland"; Finch, "The Blue and the Gray"; Bierce, "The Hesitating Veteran"; Whitman, "Beat, Drums, Beat!," "O Captain, My Captain!," and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd."

a) Choose any poem from the ones listed above and explicate it in terms of the writer's views on the Civil War, with a minimum of 200 words.