Daneen Wardrop’s article, “Civil War Nursing Narratives: Whitman’s Memoranda During the War, and Eroticism,” provides a lense focused on the style and tone of Whitman’s Civil war narratives, and pays close attention to the ways he consistently conveys themes of “democracy, the typical American, motherhood, and the eroticism that forms between nurse and patient,”(Wardrop, 1). […]
Archive | Whitman and the Civil War
Post-War: Elegy and Memorialization
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 […]
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 […]