[4] Melville's major source for the poems were the early volumes of Frank Moore's (compiler) eleven-volume The Rebellion Record: A Diary of American Events, with Documents, Narratives, Illustrative Incidents, Poetry, Etc.

He does not favor enfranchising former slaves immediately, for they are "in their infant pupilage to freedom" and argues that sympathy for them "should not be allowed to exclude kindliness to communities who stand closer to us in nature".

Jamie Fenton sees John Brown, as depicted in "The Portent," as a Launcelot in the mode of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott."

Fenton also acknowledges the likely influences of Whitman, Shakespeare, Thoreau, and others upon Melville but emphasizes the Tennyson connection as imbuing "a productive irony."

Therefore, the poem uses the content and themes of a ballad in a distinctly non-romantic way in order to warn of the war related in the volume as well as the difficulties of peace.

Schulman also writes that "The poetic structure of Battle-Pieces presents a fractured and incomplete narrative that mirrored the sense of fragmentation many postwar Americans felt."

Tommy Jamison, in Technology and Culture, wrote that "Melville's poem had identified a raw nerve: materiality was ascendant in the industrial age, displacing... naval manhood."

Levy in American Literature read "A Utilitarian View," "Temeraire," "The Cumberland," and "In The Turret" as containing intentional intertextualities with an 1862 essay by Nathaniel Hawthorne reacting to the Battle of Hampton Roads and elegizing the utility of non-armored vessels.

[18] Essays in Arts and Sciences carried a piece by Edward Stessel that connected Melville's mourning of the age of wooden ships to his critical and commercial failures in the 1850's and 1860's.

Stessel wrote of Melville's Monitor poems that they reflect the poet's "mourning of his new obsolescence" and an identification of "the wooden ships" with "his time of promise."