We often mourn the loss of an other, but how does one mourn the losses on such a scale as we see in war? Whitman is perhaps the quintessential poet of crisis and recovery: his catalogues hold the world in all of its diversity together; his acts of poetic and personal sacrifice suggest that union […]
Author Archive | Prof VZ
The War Itself: Drum-Taps
In “Year that Trembled Beneath Me,” Whitman asks, as the war begins to scar both the land and Whitman’s own psyche: “Must I change my triumphant songs? / Must I indeed learn to change the cold dirges of the baffled? / And sullen hymns of defeat”? The poems we read from Drum-Taps offer a range […]
Pre War: Resting By the Roadside
Critics have long puzzled over the cluster of poems–“By the Roadside”–that Whitman tucks just ahead of his Drum-Taps. This cluster comes directly after after the “Sea-Drift” cluster, which includes some of the most famous poems of crisis and recovery that Whitman would ever write, include “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” and “Out of […]