Whitman and the War: Responses and Interpretations:

Critics have offered different interpretations of Whitman's relationship to the Civil War. Most agree that the relationship is complex and changed over time, and yet critics draw diverse conclusions about the role of the war in Whitman's poetic career and about his attitudes towards the war. Here are a few excerpts. Read them, agree, disagree, form your own opinions.

Daniel Aaron, in a book devoted to literary responses to the Civil War, suggests that the war "quieted" the poet's bluster:

"He saw no battles of any kind, and he had only the briefest first-hand acquaintance with army camps. All the same . . . he 'partook' of it, was glutted by it, and although the ardors of hospital work may have wrecked him, the insights gained from tending the wounded confirmed his mystic Unionism. The first two editions of Leaves of Grass subordinated politics to personality. . . [but] [h]is psychic safety depended upon the Union's preservation . . . [and] he had to insist on the providentiality of the War and to wring optimistic conclusions from its horrors (57-59).

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In a recent study of Whitman's war writings, Robert Leigh Davis writes:

As poet and nurse, Whitman places himself in a convalescent space between the living and the dead, and he exploits the copresence of opposites in his writing as a therapeutic alternative to the oppositional politics of his culture and its war. Evoking a romance world between fact and dream, Whitman reclaims a middle ground in the sectional crisis, and offers, against the binary deadlock of secession and civil war, a combination of intermingled states. (7-8)

He goes on to write in a chapter focusing on Memoranda during the War :

Whitman deflects and complicates the arts of war and writing. He does not see war directly . . . but mediately, obliquely, in glimpses . . . Seeing "askant," Whitman demonstrates an alternative to the fronting of political, medical, and literary centrism dominating American culture during the war. Turning aside the assurance of authoritative control--exposing what is left out by that control--Whitman challenges the epistemological assumptions of imperial history as well as the social consolidations that history supports. Against such consolidation, Whitman will emphasize the elusiveness of the "real war" and he will insist on his inability to contain or stabilize its meanings. (98-99)

Davis then comments further on Whitman's inclination to look askant and to provide only glimses as an oppositional move to biomedical sciences that claim to have a complete view of the body:

By restoring an awareness of restraint in vision--"you must be on your guard where you look"--Whitman resists the despotism of unobstructed authority and explores a different mode of medical attention and care. The presence of textual obstructions . . . limit how the body can be looked at, how it can be approached, and what can be done to it. By writing these restraints into his representations of the body, Whitman seeks to to recover the sense of limit erased by the wholesale death and violation of the war. (107)

 

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In an essay devoted to thinking about new ways to grieve the loss of loved ones, Michael Moon turns to Whitman's war writings and to the "bodily abundance" in the Drum Taps poems. Moon believes these poems are "one of the great collections of male-homoerotic memorial writing."

. . . because of our particular histories as gay men and lesbians, we bring to the practice of mourning complex relations to body images . . . that may well make us want to challenge ideas of significant relationships . . . that are based on notions of bodily deficiency and abnormality. Such pathologizing ideas--for example, that being gay is a consequence of physiological deficiency or abnormality--have been central to homophobic constructions of homosexuality over the past century. What if, instead of focusing on bodily deficiency in thinking about our own mourning practices, we focus instead on bodily abundance and supplementarity? . . .

. . . what becomes vivid in reading these poems [Drum Taps] . . . is how the poems represent care-giving as erotically charged. . . . One need not ignore the shattered state of the flesh that is lovingly specularized, tended, dressed, undressed, and memorialized in this writing to perceive that "The Wound-Dresser" is a poem not only about literally shattered flesh but also about the shatterings--not least of all erotic shatterings--one can experience in response to flashes of flesh, the unexpected uncoverings and re-coverings of desired or beloved flesh . . . (236, 238-239)

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In an essay that draws upon Moon's work as well as Timothy Sweet's, Katherine Kinney focuses on Whitman's prose war writings that he revised and collected in Memoranda during the War.

I begin with the question many, perhaps all, critics have asked when considering Whitman relation to the Civil War: "What is to be done with the bodies?" Whitman's literal handling of soldiers' bodies, his rendering of them in poetry and prose, and the reader's response to the textual specificity of wounds, dismemberment, disease, and death have posed a critical crux for understanding the poet of the body and the Union. . . .

Whitman's memoranda were composed, collected, and prepared for their various printings within a culture actively seeking literal and figurative ways to contain the sheer physical presence of the war's wounded and dead. . . . These memoranda are not formal systems, he insists, but haphazard, random jottings, without any of the mediating gesture of poetry or narrative. With this language of informality, Whitman blunts the taxonomic associations of his own scientifically borrowed language of catalog, type, case, specimen, and collection. Whitman is not finally resisting art, but seeking to counter the techniques of categorizing and abstracting the bodies produced by the war. . . .

The uniform marks the state's power to expropriate individual will and desire and commandeer the body for the collective corps. But Whitman describes again and again the ways in which soldiers in Washington literally occupy a space greater than that contained by ranks, barracks, battles, or orders. (174, 185, 186)