Whitman\'s Drum-Taps: Poignantly Realistic, Verifiably

Whitman's Drum-taps: Poignantly Realistic, Verifiably Patriotic

Walt Whitman's Civil War-related poetry was powerful yet paradoxical. On the one hand, early in his war-related poetry, he appeared to view the war as a wondrous event for democracy. On the other hand -- almost as though he was schizophrenic -- he saw the Civil War as an abhorrent desecration of humans. It is painfully clear that he was conflicted morally and creatively. His work in hospitals -- let along his sobering and fascinating poetry -- clearly shows his humanitarianism. The scholarship based in response to Whitman's Civil War poetry -- in particular, his noted work in Drum-taps -- is substantial. The viewpoints in the academic literature vary dramatically as to what Whitman's real attitude was about the war, about the soldiers, and his thinking about the moral and social value of the United States during its most bloody hours.

Notwithstanding come critics' negative views, confliction and passion led him to a harsh and sobering realism -- not romanticism -- as he wrote Drum-taps and his other Civil War-themed verse. He was a poet, after all, not a philosopher, or a politician, or a preacher. Some of the viewpoints reflected in this research are not specifically pointed to Whitman's alleged romanticizing of the war, but actually questioned Whitman's patriotism and his justification for spending so much time in the Civil War hospitals -- and connected to that criticism, were the attacks (unjustified and slanderous) on Whitman because he wrote so poignantly and graphically about the obscene conditions in hospitals.

Thesis

Those who attacked Whitman unfairly -- out of ignorance, bias against his lifestyle or for other unknown reasons -- need to be called out and that is what this research has done; those passages by critics that assert falsely that he was too romantic or not patriotic are juxtaposed with critics' views that are supportive of Whitman and hence of great value in the available literature.

Whitman, Slavery and the Civil War -- an Introduction

The Civil War was anything but civil. It was barbaric and brutal. An estimated 620,000 soldiers died. In the North, 250,152 soldiers died of disease and in the South, 164,000 died of disease (Faust, 2008, p. xi). Slavery was certainly not the only reason that the South and the North squared off against each other. The technical reason for the Civil War, and history reveals this truth when the truth is sought, was the conflict of state's rights. Do states within the United States have the power to make laws that depart from the Constitutional laws of the United States? The answer from the North was no. The response from the South was, well then, we'll form our own country and you can go your way while we go ours. Meantime, the war was on.

What was Whitman's view of slavery and of Black folks? In David Reynolds' book (Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman 150th Anniversary Edition) the author points out that Whitman's well-known poem (the 1855 edition) "I Sing the Body Electric" was originally titled "Slaves" (Reynolds, 2005, p. 88). The "political force of the lines describing the humanity and nobility of the auctioned slave: 'There swells and jets in his heart…there all passions and desires…all reachings and aspirations…" (Reynolds, p. 89). This passage and others sited by Reynolds "proclaimed" to the author that "African-Americans were fully human, just like whites -- a radical message for Whitman's day" (p. 89). By offering this passage Reynolds asserts that Whitman was "…escaping the racism that pervaded white society"; Reynolds believed that Whitman's themes in Leaves of Grass "emphasized the humanity of African-Americans" (p. 89).

"I am the poet of slaves," Whitman wrote in 1855. "I go with slaves of the earth equally with the masters / and I will stand between the masters and the slaves / Entering into both / So that both shall understand me alike" (quoted by Reynolds, p. 89). Meanwhile in 1858 Whitman wrote, "who believes that the Whites and Blacks can ever amalgamate in America? Or who wishes it to happen? Nature has set an impassable seal against it. Besides, is not America for the Whites? And is it not better so?" (Brooklyn Daily Times, May 6, 1858, quoted by Klammer, 1995, p. 161).

Whitman seems to go back and forth about Blacks and slavery, and hence it is difficult to pin him down on racial issues. "The institution of slavery is not at all without its redeeming points," he wrote in a May 1857 editorial; two months later he explained that for southern states "…the infusion of slaves and the prevalent use of their labor are not objectionable on politico-economic grounds" (Klammer, p. 161). But wait, at the conclusion of that editorial he adds, "America is not the land for slaves, on any grounds" (Klammer, p. 161).

The Literature -- Literary Criticism on Drum-Taps

William Moss: Walt Whitman in Dixie the Southern Literary Journal

This critique by Moss is vicious albeit it does not specifically take the position that Whitman's Drum-Taps -- or his other Civil War-related verse -- is too romantic or too realistic or any blend of both or either style. These passages in this journal article are presented in the context of how seriously and brutally the Northern creative artists were despised in the South. As a contribution to this research the scholarly piece by Moss sets the tone for one of the sidebar battles in the middle of the 19th Century -- the loathing and fear that the South had for the North.

Certainly the Southern writers and intellectuals were not fans of Whitman. Quite the contrary. William Moss writes in the Southern Literary Journal (Moss, 1990, p. 98) that a parody of a Whitman poem was published in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1862. The editor, George William Bagby, said it was "not only the best imitation, by long odds, of Walt Whitman, the b'hoy-poet and representative man of Yankeedon…but an excellent bit of sarcasm besides" (Moss, p. 98). This cryptic essay did not reference Drum Taps per se but Moss quoted from Southern critics as to Whitman's Civil War poetry. Frank Whittington said that Whitman's "genius comprehends (or includes) humanity, but is not to be comprehended by it!" (Moss, p. 102).

These are Southern writers and intellectuals and it is obvious they are very biased of course against the North and against poets, writers, politicians and other leaders from the north. Whittington said that when he reads respected critics who "gravely" commend Whitman's war poetry "…I begin to fear that the literary character of this country is becoming hopelessly perverted and rotten as the political" (Moss p. 103). Whittington goes on:

If Mr. Walt Whitman is a poet, he challenged, "…let us at once reverse all our former critical and aesthetic judgments…clearness of imagination and conception, purity of diction, loftiness of tone, and grandeur of moral insight" (Moss, p. 103). However, Whittington continued, what Whitman has produced embraces "…the most hideous manifestations of morbid egotism, and introspective vanity, united to an unmorality so complete, that all distinctions between vice and virtue, purity and filthiness, fail to be understood…" (Moss, p. 103).

As if that assessment is not blatantly bitter and ruthlessly inaccurate enough, John Reuben Thompson is quoted by Moss on page 100 of Moss's essay: "The extravagance of the style, the beastliness of the sentiments, the blatant blasphemy of the whole performance, its profanation of every tender and holy impulse…its frequent indecency of language" and even "the bizarre appearance of the book" made Thompson wonder if Whitman's Civil War work was the production "of a lunatic" or "a solemn hoax upon the public" (Moss, p. 100).

Again, these are angry Southerners, but they are objecting to Whitman's poetry on the basis of their terse ideology, and simply making up abusive passages because they hat the North so vehemently. Thompson went on to say that Whitman's poetry amounted to "profane, bestial rigmarole" and that Whitman "glories in materialism of the most degraded kind…" (Moss, p. 100). This is a wholly disagreeable and ignorant approach to the brilliance and realism of Whitman.

Richard Maurice Bucke, et al., Walt Whitman

Bucke is a supportive author with valuable contributions to Whitman's poetry. On page 170 of Walt Whitman, the authors note that Drum-Taps "has a special celebrity" however these poems "[are] not by any means equal to those which, in date of composition, preceded them" (Bucke, et al., 1884, p. 170). Among the poems that surpass Drum-Taps in Bucke's view are "Song of Myself," "Song of the Open Road," "Faces" and "Songs before Parting" (p. 170). Bucke references Th. Bentzon (a "clever critic") who admired Drum-Taps and said that Whitman's genius has "…not yet lost all its original brightness, nor appears less than Archangel ruined" (Bucke, p. 170). Okay, Bucke writes in 1884, so Drum-Taps is "immeasurably above (not by degree merely, but by kind) that of every other poet of the present time." That said, Bucke goes on (p. 171) to express that Whitman's Drum Taps work is "not the genius that poured out the fiery torrent of the earlier poems."

And had Bucke never read any of Whitman's earlier poetry (Leaves of Grass, for example) "we might think that words could not convey greater passion" than they did in Drum-Taps (p. 171). "But now we know better," he went on. The "splendid faith" of Whitman's earlier poems is "greatly dimmed" in Drum-Taps, he insists. Bucke writes that he was told by a person "who knew the poet well, and who was living in Washington when 'Drum-Taps' were being composed, that he has seen Walt Whitman…turn aside into a doorway or other out-of-the-way place on the street…" (p. 171).

Once out of the bustle of the busy street, Whitman would take out his notebook, Bucke continues, write some lines to Drum-Taps "…and while he was so doing he has seen the tears run down [Whitman's] cheeks. I can well believe this, for there are poems in Drum Taps that can scarcely be read aloud after their full meaning has once been felt" (Bucke, p. 171). But those tears that Bucke's friend related to him -- while certainly showing passion -- "show also a loss of personal force (i.e. faith) in the man who some years before wrote 'Children of Adam' and 'Calamus' without flinching" (p. 171).

John P. McWilliams Jr. -- Drum Taps and Battle Pieces: The Blossom of War

McWilliams consistently insists that Whitman did not really believe in or worry about the "sectional strife" in the Civil War. The war "raises no doubts about national unity or national strength" (McWilliams, 1971, p. 193) in Whitman's work. In his American Quarterly piece McWilliams explains that Whitman goes about examining various scenes of war, but he never writes about a "specific battle" and never pits the South against the North or the North against the South in Drum Taps.

The Drum-taps' themes are not about "Freedom combating slavery, Right combating Wrong," and the themes are not about the presence of Satan or the "corruption of Eden," McWilliams asserts (p. 194). Whitman's purposes are not along the lines of "eulogy, elegy, or hymn of victory" McWilliams continues. What Whitman is very deeply concerned with in Drum-Taps is for the individual, McWilliams writes. Whitman conveys that theme by bringing to the reader's mind the "changing relationship between Walt Whitman the poetic 'I' who is all men, and the Spirit of War" (p. 194).

The emotional changes that Whitman went through as the war dragged on, and as he saw different aspects of the war, are reflected in Drum-taps, McWilliams writes, with a hint of sarcasm. Embracing the spirit at the beginning of the war, the first nine poems in Drum-taps "celebrate war" but a bit later after glorifying the beginnings of this great war Whitman -- and after proclaiming himself the poet who glorifies war -- is "compelled to examine the realities of war," McWilliams goes on (p. 196).

Whitman creeps ever closer to the battleground in his poems; in "Cavalry Crossing a Ford" Whitman is watching the Union Army crossing a river then camping on a mountain then in "By the Bivouac's Fitful Flame" the poet is now actually in the army camp. And in that campsite the poet's physical presence brings a reality to Drum-taps that was absent in the beginning, according to McWilliams.

McWilliams says that when Whitman's tone transcends the glorification of the war at the outset, into another reality, the "sorrowing acceptance of its miseries" shows the critic that the poet "only becomes real when he learns to grieve" (McWilliams, p. 196). Here is an example of why the thesis of this paper: Whitman is not being overly romantic about war. He is just painting the picture that the nation was feeling at the beginning of the war. But in witnessing the slaughter and carnage of war -- or reading in gruesome detail -- a person soon becomes weary of war.

Because Whitman places himself in the shoes of the soldier -- becomes "a participating soldier and not a detached observer" in McWilliams' view -- the poet can "reconcile himself to a single enemy, and then declare that his action is symbolic of national reconciliation" (McWilliams, p. 197). In the following passage from "A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim" Whitman is brilliant in his ability to squeeze the whole world down to "the sorrowing mother or to the three dead youths on field stretchers" (McWilliams, p. 197). Whitman shows an "almost mystical love for the individual torn apart by war" (McWilliams, p. 197):

"Young man I think I know you / I think this face is the face of the Christ himself / Dead and diving and brother of all, and here again he lies" (Whitman quoted by McWilliams, p. 197). And again in "The Wound-Dresser" Whitman shows that he is not merely romanticizing the war or the injuries; he has an "overflowing love of mankind," McWilliams insists; and hence, by "extension" Whitman shows love for every man as he becomes the dresser of wounds, which indeed he was in many hospitals during the Civil War.

"Arous'd and angry, I'd thought to beat the alarum, and urge relentless war / but soon my fingers fail'd me, my face droop'd and I resigned myself / to sit by the wounded and soothe them, or silently watch the dead" (Whitman quoted by McWilliams, p. 197). In this passage Whitman clearly is enraged against the enemy; he sees the horrific, unbelievably savage results of men firing guns into one another's flesh in pitched battles where hundreds, thousands will lay bleeding and dying after the battle is done. It is important to realize that Whitman, the humanist, the poet who cares about families and young men, "is given equally to Northerner and Southerner," McWilliams reminds on page 198. This is a sign of the poet's love for "national reconciliation" (McWilliams, p. 198).

Thomas Wentworth Higginson -- an Attack on Whitman's Patriotism

Higginson has recklessly attacked Whitman for not enlisting in the war with the Union Army. According to Harry R. Warfel (Drum-Taps / Walt Whitman) Higginson "…elaborated the reasons why a man who bragged of consummate health and called on all others to fight should not have remained at the comparatively remote distance of the hospital" (Warfel, 1959, p. xii). This is not a critic who made some passing negative criticisms of Whitman; rather, Higginson "continued attacking Whitman…" in a way that suggests fanaticism (Warfel, p. xii). Indeed, Higginson (according to Warfel) prepared an obituary for the New York Post well prior to Whitman's death. "Of the many hundreds of obituaries this was the most widely distributed, the most elaborate, the most damaging," Warfel writes (p. xiii). Basically Higginson was calling America's greatest poet a coward.

Warfel considers Higginson among "the best of men"; and so Higginson's brutal attack on Whitman's patriotism makes Warfel "quaver at the inhumanity" given that apparently Higginson wrote the scathing obituary "during Whitman's critical illness three years before" (Warfel, p. xiii).

John Burroughs -- in Defense of Whitman's Patriotism

In Warfel's book he cites a response by a respected scholar and intellectual as to Whitman's patriotism. The scholar is John Burroughs, a noted author, conservationist and moral leader during the time of Whitman's productive and published life. In his book, Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person Burroughs recounts the times he went into the Civil War hospitals and witnessed Whitman as a "…man moving among the maimed, the pale, the low-spirited, the near-to-death" (Burroughs' book was digitized in 2009, p. 13).

The "lusterless eye" of every wounded soldier "brightened up at [Whitman's] approach," Burroughs wrote. As to Drum-taps, Burroughs noted that is was not "the purpose of the poet to portray battles and campaigns, or to celebrate special leaders or military prowess…" (Burroughs, p. 97). Instead, Burroughs continues, it was Whitman's desire -- through his poetry and his work in hospitals -- to show that "…the permanent condition of modern society is that of peace; that war, as a business, as a means of growth, has served its time" (Burroughs, p. 97). Burroughs believed that Drum-taps "will gradually and in due time come to be accepted as the vital and distinguishing memento through literature of the late war, and its strongest ties with the ages to come" (Burroughs, p. 106).

Harry R. Warfel, Editor -- Whitman's Patriotism is Questioned

In his book Drum-Taps / Walt Whitman editor Harry R. Warfel admits that there are reasons to question -- or "rationalize" -- Whitman's conduct while he wrote Drum-taps; those who question his patriotism "must [have] worked more on faith than on facts" (Warfel, p. xi). For Warfel, he believes that Whitman did indeed dip into patriotism perhaps a bit too fervently at the beginning of Drum-taps. Warfel calls it "the first flush of patriotism felt by so many at the time"; but Warfel believes that Whitman may well have been suffering from "a period of bewilderment" which Whitman never admitted to. Warfel suggests that Whitman's bewilderment is clear in the opening lines of the earliest known draft of a poem he wrote during that initial period of the Civil War:

"Quicksand years that whirl I know not whither / 1861-2 / Years that Whirl I know not whither / nothing is sure" (Whitman quoted by Warfel, p. xi). The reason Whitman seemed bewildered was because he was suffering…[even] fundamentally disturbed" (Warfel, p. xi). With all the crises in his family (a brother who was insane; other siblings who were sick or who died) it is no wonder he felt the "quicksand years, slipping from under" his feet (Warfel, p. xii).

William Dean Howells -- He Fails to Appreciate Drum-taps

Howells does not question Whitman's patriotism nor does he whine about Whitman's supposed over-use of romanticism. Howells starts his attacking essay by asking if indeed Whitman is a "true poet" -- suggesting that by "talking to himself in rhythmic and ecstatic prose" the poet ("talker") can "only have the devil for a listener" (Howells, 1983, p. 56). As to Drum-taps specifically, the poems give Howells "the same inarticulate feeling as that which dwells in music" and the lines in Drum-taps offer a "strange, shadowy sort of pleasure" which induces a kind of fascination, Howells continues, blasting Whitman's reputation and acumen. "We must not mistaken this fascination for a higher quality," he continues (p. 58), equating Whitman's poems with the "tender eyes of an ox" wherein "lurks a melancholy" (p. 58). So long as Whitman "chooses to stop at mere consciousness, he cannot be called a true poet," Howells asserts; "A man's greatness is good for nothing folded up in him, and if emitted in barbaric yawps, it is not more filling than Ossian or the east wind" (Howells, p. 58).

Donald D. Kummings -- Whitman has an "Uncanny Memory"

While William Dean Howells rants about the alleged "shadowy pleasure" in Whitman's Drum-taps, Donald D. Kummings asserts that Drum-taps has "multiple voices, values, and boundaries of memory" that are good enough to be in competition with other writings of historical significance (Kummings, 2006, p. 299). Kummings references Robert Leigh Davis who "…convincingly argued that Whitman's response to the war" is best represented in the first poem of the Drum-taps book. "First, O songs, for a prelude, / Lightly strike on the stretch'd tympanum, pride and joy in my city" (Whitman [1865], Kummings, p. 299).

Kummings believes that the image of the tympanum is "at once private and public, intimate and anonymous, hidden and displayed, a sign of the body (the inner ear) and a sign of the state" (the military drum) (Kummings, p. 299). This is typical of Whitman's poetic vision, to provide metaphors and symbols that stir the senses of the reader. The poetry that Whitman offers in Drum-taps uses many images, including natural landscapes. Images of soldiers, flags, and "political abstractions (like liberty and democracy)," Kummings continues. And he uses those images to help the reader stretch his or her identification with the meaning behind the images.

In "1861," for example, it is written in the cause of the Union, albeit as has earlier been mentioned in this research, Whitman's passion was for the nation to patch up the wounds and reunite. "I saw your gait and saw I your sinewy limbs, clothed in blue, bearing / Weapons, robust year; / Heard your determin'd voice, launch'd forth again and again" (Whitman [1865], Kummings, p. 300-301). "Clothed in blue" certainly gives the nod to the Union; earlier in the poem, Whitman speaks of a "strong man, erect, clothed in blue clothes" -- and this pro-Union tack on Whitman's part is certainly not to be considered romanticizing the war, but rather he clearly is sharing the reality of the soldiers of the war with readers now and in generations to come.

Robert Leigh Davis -- He Claims that Whitman is a Romantic

On page 7 of his book (Whitman and the Romance of Medicine), Robert Leigh Davis writes, "As poet and nurse," Whitman placed himself (in Drum-taps) "in a convalescent space between the living and the dead." In doing so, Davis claims, Whitman exploited the "copresence of opposites in his writing as a therapeutic alternative to the oppositional politics of his culture and its war" (Davis, 1997, p. 7). Davis insists that Whitman put himself in a kind of neutral place so he did not really have to take a position on the war. "Evoking a romance world between fact and dream," Whitman claims that "middle ground" Davis asserts, rather than a position on secession and civil war, "a combination of intermingled states" (Davis, p. 7). This is an interesting observation, but hardly worthy of being considered serious scholarship. Once again, an attack based on convoluted emotion rather on academic reasoning.

Mocking Whitman's decision to spend a great deal of time in hospitals, and putting it into the category of "middle ground" as though the poet isn't taking powerful positions, Davis says "This is the space of Whitman's romance, the moonlit space of blurred and intermingled boundaries" (p. 2). Davis goes to the trouble of quoting Nathanial Hawthorn in a further attempt to pin Whitman as a nebulous poet unable to take a stand; Hawthorn called the middle ground "…somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other" (Davis quoting Hawthorn, p. 2).

Gay Wilson Allen -- Giving Credit Where Credit is Due

Robert Leigh Davis of course has the literary license to posit that Whitman was a hopeless romantic caught in the middle of nowhere. But Gay Wilson Allen's critique is much closer to the positive thesis of this paper. Who could pass off the hundreds of times that Whitman visited the thousands of wounded and dying troops as somehow being "somewhere between the real world and fairy-land"? Only a shallow, bigoted critic could make such absurd pronouncements. Meanwhile Allen writes that from the time Whitman first went to a war-related hospital (to visit his wounded brother George in the spring of 1862), "except for intervals of his own illness," Whitman had visited "thousands of soldiers in army hospitals, dispensing little gifts but most of all dispensing his sympathy and understanding" (Allen, 1970, p. 83).