Walt Whitman's Drum-Taps - The Personal Record of Whitman’s Wartime Experiences
Walt Whitman is one of America’s most popular and most influential poets. The first edition of Whitman’s well-known Leaves of Grass first appeared in July of the poet’s thirty-sixth year. A subsequent edition of Leaves of Grass (of which there were many) incorporated a collection of Whitman’s poems that had been offered readers in 1865. The sequence added for the 1867 edition was Drum-Taps, which poetically recounts the author’s experiences of the American Civil War.
Walt Whitman was born May 31, 1819, in West Hills, Long Island. His early years included much contact with words and writing; he worked as an office boy as a pre-teen, then later as a printer, journalist, and, briefly, a teacher, returning eventually to his first love and life’s work—writing. Despite the lack of extensive formal education, Whitman experienced literature, "reading voraciously from the literary classics and the Bible, and was deeply influenced by Goethe, Carlyle, Emerson, and Sir Walter Scott" (Introduction vii).
Whitman was drawn to the nations capital roughly a year after the Civil War began, at the age of forty-three. The wounding of his brother, George Washington Whitman, who served in the Union Army, precipitated his contact with the carnage of the war. Reading the notice of his brother’s injury in the New York Herald, Whitman went immediately to Falmouth, Virginia, where he found his brotherly only slightly wounded. Perpetually short-handed, Army officials asked the poet to help transport injured soldiers to field hospitals in Washington. Whitman agreed, and began a mission of mercy that would occupy him from 1862 until the war’s end in 1865 (Murray).
Drum-Taps is the personal-historical record of Whitman’s wartime occupation. Drum-Taps’ early poems were written prior to Whitman’s contact with wounded soldiers, and betray a starkly different attitude toward the war than one finds later in the sequence. The chronologically earlier poems celebrate the coming hostilities, expressing Whitman’s "early near-mindless jingoism" (Norton 2130). As one progresses through the work, he finds a less energetic, sorrowful, jaded narrator who seems little like the exuberant youth who began. Understandable so, "[Whitman] estimated that over the course of the war, he had made ‘over 600 visits or tours, and went … among from some 80,000 to 100,000 of the wounded and sick, as sustainer of spirit and body in some degree, in time of need’" (Murray).
What follows is a contemporaneous review of his work that speaks of the esteem that much of the world extended Whitman as patriot and poet of Drum-Taps:
Getlein, Mark. "Chapter 17-The 17th and 18th Centuries." Living with Art. 9th ed. Boston, MA: McGraw Hill, 2008. 384-406. Print.
In the essay “Naturalism and the Venetian ‘Poesia’: Grafting, Metaphor, and Embodiment in Giorgione, Titian, and the Campagnolas,” Campbell explains the role of poetic painting, poesia, in Venetian artwork during the 1500s. Titian personally used the term poesia when he “[referred] to paintings he was making for [King Philip II] with subject matter derived from the ancient poets.” Poesia now refers to a type of sixteenth century Venetian painting, which Giorgione and Titian initiated and used within their works. Campbell’s main argument is that poesia is not simply aesthetic or reflective of poetry, but rather “grounded in the process of making – and in making meaning – rather than in an aesthetics of self-sufficiency or self-referentiality.” Like poetry, it is not self-contained; meaning lies outside of the work, within the interpretations of the viewers. He discusses the idea of grafting in poetry and how the same grafting model is utilized in the visual arts. Different images, such as pagan figures and contemporary figures and settings, are juxtaposed to create visual discordance and give an intrinsic meaning to the viewer. Campbell then uses many examples of writing, poetry, engravings, and paintings to explore his argument and the connections between artists during the 1500s.
(1) See "Judgment, Aesthetic" in A Companion to Aesthetics edited by David Cooper (Basil Blackwell, Oxford: 1992).
Though most works of art have some underlying, deeper meaning attached to them, our first impression of their significance comes through our initial visual interpretation. When we first view a painting or a statue or other piece of art, we notice first the visual details – its size, its medium, its color, and its condition, for example – before we begin to ponder its greater significance. Indeed, these visual clues are just as important as any other interpretation or meaning of a work, for they allow us to understand just what that deeper meaning is. The expression on a statue’s face tells us the emotion and message that the artist is trying to convey. Its color, too, can provide clues: darker or lighter colors can play a role in how we judge a piece of art. The type of lines used in a piece can send different messages. A sculpture, for example, may have been carved with hard, rough lines or it may have been carved with smoother, more flowing lines that portray a kind of gentleness.
Quarles, Benjamin. The Negro in the American Revolution. The University of North Carolina Press; November 25, 1996
The American Revolution was a “light at the end of the tunnel” for slaves, or at least some. African Americans played a huge part in the war for both sides. Lord Dunmore, a governor of Virginia, promised freedom to any slave that enlisted into the British army. Colonists’ previously denied enlistment to African American’s because of the response of the South, but hesitantly changed their minds in fear of slaves rebelling against them. The north had become to despise slavery and wanted it gone. On the contrary, the booming cash crops of the south were making huge profits for landowners, making slavery widely popular. After the war, slaves began to petition the government for their freedom using the ideas of the Declaration of Independence,” including the idea of natural rights and the notion that government rested on the consent of the governed.” (Keene 122). The north began to fr...
Goldwater, Robert and Marco Treves (eds.). Artists on Art: from the XIV to the XX Century. New York: Pantheon Books, 1945.
This essay will compare and contrast two works of art from the Metropolitan Museum of Art that raise the question of the role in gender in art. The first is Edgar Degas’s, A Woman Seated Beside a Vase of Flowers painted in 1865, an oil on canvas. The second is Berthe Morisot’s, Young Woman Seated on a Sofa painted around 1879, also an oil on canvas. Both of these artworks have similarities in subject matter and composition; they both contain a seated woman and flowers. Their differences, however, make the two paintings seem like they are hardly about the same subject at all. The differences between Degas’s A Woman Seated Beside a Vase of Flowers and Morisot’s Young Woman Seated on a Sofa are indicative of not just how different Impressionists portrayed the same subject different ways, but more importantly, how the artist’s gender affects the portrayal of woman in their paintings, that male artists had a tendency to show woman in ways that suggested decoration, instead of actual entities in the world they occupied.
The quote above is from the British governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore who proclaimed freedom for African American slaves who fought for the British, after George Washington announced there would be no additional recruitment of Blacks in the Continental army in 1776. For numerous free blacks and enslaved blacks, the Revolutionary War was considered to be an essential period in black manifestation. Many public officials (like Dunmore), who initially had not expressed their views on slavery, saw the importance of African Americans and considered them an imperative tool in winning the war. Looking back, it almost seems like an inherent paradox in white America’s desire of emancipation from England while there still enslaving blacks. This concept has different grounds in white’s idea of liberation in comparison to that of the African-Americans. To white Americans, this war was for liberation in a political/economical tone rather than in the sense of the privatized oppression that blacks suffered from. But what started this war and what would this mean for blacks? How did these African Americans contribute to the war effort? What were there some of their duties? How did the white communities perceive them? How did it all end for these blacks? The main topic of this paper is to show how the use African Americans helped the control the outcome of the war while monitoring their contributions.
As time progresses, art progresses and as time goes on, the addition of years to the expansion of time introduces new experiences, new minds, new artistic venues and styles to the human populace. Likewise, no matter the decade or the era, there will always be someone willing to critique art comprehensibly and as a result, there will always be people in this world, such as Heinrich Wölfflin, who truly understand the arts and demonstrate this with their theories. Heinrich Wölfflin was an educated, Swiss art critic and historian who developed a set of criteria to distinguish between Renaissance and Baroque art through the use of five pairs of concepts: linear and painterly, planar and recessional, open and closed form, multiplicity and unity, and clearness and unclearness (Liukkonen).
The poems “Beat! Beat! Drums!” “A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown” and “Reconciliation”. The first poem “Beat! Beat! Drums” Whitman is saying that he thinks that war is necessary even though he really doesn’t like war. Whitman thinks that if in life and there is an emergency situation that war had to be an option than it should be taken into consideration. This first poem really shows that and his ideas and thoughts on war itself. The second one “A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown” Whitman is now reconsidering the thought of war. He is double taking the thought that war is a good thing because he is seeing all these deaths and they are not real pretty. The sight of everything dying isn’t
Philosophies of Art and Beauty Edited by Hofstadter and Kuhns, (Chicago: University of Chicago press, 1976) chapters one and two for an overview of the aesthetics of Plato and Aristotle.
While the poem can be termed to be democratic, both in subject matter and its language, Whitman is viewed to be cataloging the ‘new’ America that he is seeing around him. The poem includes subject matter such as relationships, patriotism, heroes, family and ancestors, and a view on social commentaries too.
“The great variety of Taste, as well as of opinion, which prevails in the world, is too obvious not to have fallen under every one’s observation”(text pg 255), Hume states in his opening. He then points out, “Every voice is united in applauding,”(text pg 255) all kinds of values like “elegance” and “simplicity” that are supposedly seen in an object. Hume is conveying the idea that every person has their own unique tastes in art and they all seem to agree on the aesthetic value of an object. He then brings in the critic who analyzes the pieces of the object and proposes that all previous judgments were not accurate. Hume says, “But when the critic comes to particulars, this seeming unanimity vanishes”(text pg 255). The job of t...
Goldblatt, and Brown. Aesthetics: A Reader in Philosophy of the Arts, Upper Saddle Ridge, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997.