Walt Whitman

by Reynolds, David S. ;

  In an essay called “The Origins of Attempted Secession” Whitman insisted “the Northern States … were really just as responsible for that war… as the South.” He explained that in the North, “especially in New York and Philadelphia cities,” the political system was becoming “composed of more and more putrid and dangerous materials,” of disunionists, infidels, “pimpled men,” “scarred men,” “skeletons,” and so on. “Is it strange, he asked, that thunderstorm followed such morbid and stifling cloud strata?”3

  He saw the war as a necessary cleansing agent. His new poems reflected his exultation:

  War! An arm’d race is advancing! the welcome for battle, no turning away;

  War! Be it weeks, months, or years, an arm’d race is advancing to welcome it.

  The hard certainty of war appealed to him. Sometimes he manifested an almost masochistic delight in the violence, as in the uncollected poem “Ship of Libertad”:

  Blow mad winds!

  Rage, boil, vex, yawn wide, yeasty waves

  Crash away […]

  Welcome the storm—welcome the trial—[…]

  I welcome the menace—I welcome thee with joy.4

  Since he thought the North needed purifying as much as the South, several of his poems pictured the war as cleansing the Augean stables of capitalism and urbanism. In “First O Songs for a Prelude” he describes the lawyer, the driver, the judge, and others of various economic backgrounds melding as armed regiments. “How good they look as they tramp down to the river, sweaty, with their guns on their shoulders!”5 In “Beat! Beat! Drums!” the war is a “ruthless force” that bursts through everything and wrenches people from their peacetime pursuits. The inspiriting music of war blows “through the windows—through doors,” scattering the congregation, the scholars, the merchants engaged in their capitalist double-dealing: “No bargainers’ bargains by day—no brokers or speculators—would they continue?”6

  So important was the war and its violence to his imagination that he would devote a disproportionate section of his autobiography Specimen Days to the war years. Part of the reason for this lies in what Whitman saw as the war’s purgative violence. “The real war will never get into the books,” he wrote, referring to “the seething hell and the black infernal background of countless minor scenes and interiors.”7 It was the sheer tumult and adventure of the war that he registered in Specimen Days.

  He captured the hell of war in some of the poems in Drum-Taps, such at “The Artilleryman’s Vision”:

  I hear the sounds of the different missiles, the short t-h-t! t-h-t! of the rifle-balls,

  I see the shells exploding leaving small white clouds, I hear the

  great shrieking shells as they pass, […]

  And even the sound of the cannon far or near, (rousing even in dreams a devilish exultation and all the old mad joy in the depths of my soul.)8

  It was during his long hours as a volunteer nurse in Washington’s hospitals that he saw the results of the war’s violence with special vividness. The suffering he witnessed in the hospitals was on a scale unmatched in American history. More Americans died and were wounded in the Civil War than in all other wars combined. Whitman filled his notebooks and letters with descriptions of soldiers afflicted with virtually every imaginable wound or with maladies like diarrhea and dysentery. He recorded his hospital visits in his poem “The Wound-Dresser”:

  To the long rows of cots up and down each side I return,

  To each and all one after another I draw near, not one do I miss,

  An attendant follows holding a tray, he carries a refuse pail,

  Soon to be fill’d with clotted rags and blood, emptied, and filled again.9

  Like other aspects of the war, his hospital visits accomplished key things he had hoped his poetry would do. They validated his vision of the common man; they answered his need for an ideal family and loving comrades; and they permitted full indulgence of his humanistic, magnetic medical ideas. He had filled the first three editions of Leaves of Grass with fresh, Adamic common people whose goodness or picturesqueness was intended to counteract the governmental corruption that had contributed to the political crisis of the fifties. When he settled in Washington, he found that something wonderful was happening: the capital city was being flooded by young men—the wounded in the hospitals—who were accomplishing the very social cleansing he had designed his poetry to do. To Emerson he wrote of his plan to write a “little book” about “this phase of America: her masculine young manhood,… her fair youth—brought and deposited here in this great, whited sepulchre of Washington (this union Capital without the first bit of cohesion—this collect of proofs how low and swift a good stock can deteriorate—).” He exulted that Providence had brought to this sink of political corruption a “freight of helpless worn and wounded youth, genuine of the soil,… of the first unquestioned and convincing western crop, prophetic of the future, proofs undeniable to all men’s ken of perfect beauty, tenderness and pluck that never race rivall’d.”10

  The soldiers he saw in the hospitals, he would say later, saved him and saved America by displaying all the qualities he associated with ideal humanity. Before the war, he had fallen into a deep cynicism about American society that his hospital experiences eradicated. As he told Traubel: “There were years in my life—years there in New York—when I wondered if all were not going bad with America—the tendency downwards—but the war saved me: what I saw in the war set me up for all time—the days in the hospitals.” He said he was thinking of “not chiefly the facts of battles, marches, what-not—but the social being-ness of the soldiers” in the hospitals.11 Generosity, tact, propriety, affection, and, always, toughness in the face of suffering and death: these were the qualities he saw among the wounded. “Not a bit of sentimentalism or whining have I seen about a single death-bed in hospital or on the field, but generally impassive indifference.”12

  Patients in Armory Square Hospital, one of the military hospitals in Washington, D.C. Whitman frequented during the Civil War.

  Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

  He took on the role as the comforting, pious wound dresser embracing the heroic, helpless soldiers. In “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night” he gave his version of the emotional battlefield death, a common theme of the day. The poem mixes wartime violence, comradely love, and patriotic piety, as a soldier sits up all night with a mortally wounded comrade, devoting “immortal and mystic hours” to his “son of responding kisses” whom he says he will meet in heaven.13 In “A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest” he gives the grisly details of the death of a young soldier to whom he affectionately tends until he is called to join his marching regiment.

  Although Whitman still saw corruption in the government, during the war he considered subordinate officials corrupt but the higher ones, especially President Lincoln, basically sound.

  Whitman admired Lincoln from the start of the war. Just as Lincoln said early on that he was pursuing the war to preserve the Union rather than extirpate slavery, so Whitman was fixated on the idea of Union. Having long hated both Abolitionists and fire-eaters because they threatened to destroy the Union, Whitman was delighted when the war brought things to a head. “By that war,” he said, “exit fire-eaters, exit Abolitionists.”14 The South’s greatest sin, he thought, was secession; the North’s greatest virtue was devotion to the Union. Lincoln, weaned in the Henry Clay school of nationality, epitomized this virtue above all. Whitman declared of Lincoln that “UNIONISM, in its truest and amplest sense, form’d the hard-pan of his character.”15

  Whitman saw Lincoln some twenty to thirty times in Washington. He didn’t meet the president, but saw him riding through the city for business or pleasure. “I see the President almost every day,” he wrote in the summer of 1863. “We have got so that we exchange bows, and very cordial ones.” Once Lincoln gave Whitman a long stare. “He has a face like a Hoosier Michel Angelo,” Whitman wrote, “so awful ugly it becomes beaut
iful, with its strange mouth, its deep cut, criss-cross lines, and its doughnut complexion.”16

  Abraham Lincoln. Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library

  No other human being seemed as multifaceted to Whitman as Lincoln. The president, he said, had “canny shrewdness” and “horse-sense.” He seemed the down-home, average American, with his drab looks and his humor, redolent of barnyards and barrooms. Whitman commented on the “somewhat rusty and dusty appearance” of Lincoln, who “looks about as ordinary in attire, &c., as the commonest man.” Whitman was excited that “the commonest average of life—a railsplitter and a flat-boatsman!”—now occupied the presidency.17

  Funny and unaffected, Lincoln nonetheless had, Whitman wrote, “a deep latent sadness in the expression.” He was “every easy, flexible, tolerant, almost slouch, respecting the minor matters” but capable of “indomitable firmness (even obstinacy) on rare occasions, involving great points.” He was a family man but was had an air of complete independence: “He went his own lonely road,” Whitman said, “disregarding all the usual ways—refusing the guides, accepting no warnings—just keeping his appointment with himself every time.” His “composure was marvellous” in the face of unpopularity and great difficulties during the war. He had what Whitman saw as a profoundly religious quality. His “mystical foundations” were “mystical, abstract, moral and spiritual,” and his “religious nature” was “of the amplest, deepest-rooted, loftiest kind.” Summing Lincoln up, Whitman called him “the greatest, best, most characteristic, artistic, moral personality” in American life.18

  In short, Lincoln, as Whitman saw him, was virtually the living embodiment of the “I” of Leaves of Grass. He was “one of the roughs” but also, for Whitman, “a kosmos,” with the whole range of qualities that term implied. If, as Whitman said, Leaves of Grass and the war were one, they particularly came together in Lincoln.

  As impressive as Lincoln was in life, it was his death that for Whitman was the crucial, transcendent moment in American history. John Wilkes Booth’s murder of Lincoln in Washington’s Ford Theatre on April 14, 1865 was, in Whitman’s view, a culminating moment for America. There was good reason Whitman would give his “Death of Abraham Lincoln” speech over and over again in the last dozen years of his life. He became fixated on what he called “the tragic splendor of [Lincoln’s] death, purging, illuminating all.”19 The assassination, he declared, had unequalled influence on the shaping of the Republic.

  Many violent, contradictory cultural elements Whitman had tried to harness and redirect in Leaves of Grass found their outlet in the tragic event that he would always believe offered a model for social unification. In Lincoln’s death, he declared, “there is a cement to the whole people, subtler, more underlying, than any thing written in constitution, or courts or armies.” The reminiscence of Lincoln’s death, he noted, “belongs to these States in their entirety—not the North only, but the South—perhaps belongs most tenderly and devotedly to the South,” the president’s birthplace.20 In death, Lincoln became the Martyr Chief, admired by many of his former foes.

  Lincoln had, in Whitman’s view, accomplished the cleansing and unifying mission he had designed for Leaves of Grass. It is not surprising that Whitman’s writing changed dramatically after the Civil War. Never again would he write all-encompassing poems like “Song of Myself” or “The Sleepers,” for he believed that Lincoln and the war had encompassed all cultural materials.

  In Whitman’s best-known poems about Lincoln, “O Captain! My Captain!” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” the silencing of his former poetic self is noticeable. Both poems marginalize Whitman and concentrate on Lincoln, presaging the poet’s obsession with Lincoln in late years. In “O Captain!” the fixation is visible in the image of the “I” staring relentlessly at Lincoln’s bloody, pale corpse on the ship of state’s deck amid celebrations heralding the ship’s return to port. In “Lilacs” Lincoln is the majestic western star, while the poet is the wood thrush, the “shy and hidden bird” singing of death with a “bleeding throat.”21 No longer does Whitman’s brash “I” present himself as the Answerer or arouse readers with a “barbaric yawp.” In the war and Lincoln, many of the nation’s most pressing problems had reached painful resolution, changing the poet’s role from that of America’s imaginary leader to that of eulogist of its actual leader.

  Whitman’s handwritten revision to “O Captain! My Captain!”

  Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

  Although Lincoln and the war would always be transcendent ideals for Whitman, he had to face the fact that the ideals were not matched by the realities of postbellum America. Industrialization and the growth of new power structures brought new challenges for the poet intent on social salvation.

  The war remained a retrospective touchstone for Whitman. It was, he wrote, “the Verteber of Poetry and Art, (of personal character too,) for all future America.”22 But he found that the ideal nation made possible by the war was not mirrored by the reality of postbellum America. Neither the war nor his poetry had purified the political atmosphere. The Tweed Ring, the Credit Mobilier, and other sordid operations, leading to the notorious corruption of Grant’s administration, made Whitman believe, on some level, that America’s problems were more dire than ever.

  But he was more confident than before that these problems would disappear with time. He regained faith in the democratic political process, and he got philosophical consolation from an intensified belief in Hegelianism and progressive evolution. With his poetic “I” no longer able to absorb and recycle massive amounts of cultural material, his poems became, principally, brief vignettes or thoughts, as though his imagination had surrendered an all-encompassing posture on behalf of writing for the occasion. His change from rebellious individualist to Good Gray Poet was played out against the background of the rise of corporate capitalism and institutional organizations.

  Before the war, his temperament and poetry had reflected a free-flowing culture with few centralized institutions. After the war, with the rise of big business and a strong federal government, such institutions confronted him, and much of his later life was defined by them. He faced a new repressiveness in sexual matters, evidenced by his being fired by the Interior Department in 1865 and later by the government-authorized Comstockery that lay behind the banning of the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass. Although designed to suppress Whitman, these institutional actions actually aided his cause by arousing the loyalty of his followers and increasing his visibility. Ironically, the institutions aimed against him helped make him a cultural institution.

  Much of his fame late in life rested on his firing from the government by the Secretary of the Interior, James Harlan. When Whitman friend William Douglas O’Connor took revenge against Harlan by writing his pamphlet The Good Gray Poet, he gave rise to what might be called the Whitman Myth: the image of the poet as a neglected genius who was thoroughly patriotic, personally exemplary, and almost spotless in his writings. Versions of this sanitized image would be pounded home time and again for the rest of Whitman’s life, by the poet himself and by others.

  If Whitman’s public image became more conservative after the war, so, in some respects, did his private attitudes. He was a strong supporter of President Andrew johnson, a white-supremacist who was lenient toward the South. Whitman said Johnson had “an inherent integrity” and opposed the president’s foes in Congress, the Radical Republicans.23 Whitman’s job in the attorney general’s office between July 1865 and January 1872 initially involved enforcing Johnson’s most controversial policy: granting pardons to former rebels.

  How could Whitman possibly support the reactionary johnson while damning the Radical Republicans and other supporters of civil rights? Like Whitman, Johnson was devoted simultaneously to the Union and to states’ rights. As president, he was concerned mainly not with retribution but with restoring the Union by respecting th
e wishes of the individual Southern states.

  Whitman, more worried than ever about the balance between the individual and the mass, felt this balance was more closely approached by Johnson than by the Radical Republicans. In Notes Left Over Whitman reiterated a long-standing conviction about the essence of America: “There are two distinct principles—aye, paradoxes—at the life-fountain of the States: one, the sacred principle of Union, the right of ensemble, at whatever sacrifice—and yet another, an equally sacred principle, the right of each State, considered as a separate sovereign individual, in its own sphere.” Either “the centrifugal law” alone or “the centripetal law” alone, he stressed, would be fatal to the nation.24 Johnson combined an old-fashioned states’ rights view with a Lincolnish, pro-Union one.

  So important was this balancing of the individual and the mass that he introduced the 1867 Leaves of Grass and all later editions with a poem that in its final version began:

  One’s-Self I sing, a simple separate person,

  Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.25

  Seeking metaphors for the right balance became almost an obsession in his later years, but he could no longer rely on an all-powerful poetic “I” to achieve the balance. He seemed to find a “solution of the paradox” everywhere but in himself. He found it in a future race of “bards,” in New York City, in the railroad, in the Mississippi River basin, and in the geography and people of the American West, to name a few phenomena he discussed this way.

  Whitman’s racial views took a conservative turn after the war. During the 1850s, he had shared the fervent racial egalitarianism of Frederick Douglass, Samuel Ringgwold Ward, and others who called attention to the humanity and nobility of African Americans. Whitman has rightly been cherished as a great spokesperson for racial brotherhood and equality.