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:
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.
Walt Whitman was born in 1819 to a family with seven siblings. He started work at a printing service when he was just a boy in order to help out his family financially. During his tenure in the printing industry, Whitman began to read and write. He fell in love with the art of writing and would eventually go into editing as a career. Whitman created a new style of poetry called free verse, and at the time American culture would reject this
Thesis: People who read about Walter Whitman tend to say that he had a good life until his mother passed and his book Leaves of Grass is a book about his life and what he went through. Introduction: Walt Whitman was an American poet from West Hills, Long Island, New York. He wrote plenty of poems for the New York Times Journal newspaper, also known for the famous book Leaves of Grass, which had nine editions and is more than one book. The book Leaves of Grass was published in 1888 when he was finally done with all nine editions and he had passed after publishing the ninth edition.
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.
Quarles, Benjamin. The Negro in the American Revolution. The University of North Carolina Press; November 25, 1996
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.
During this time of the war, enslaved African Americans saw an opportunity to gain their own independence, seeing that the American people were also trying to gain independence from their mother country, Britain. In the document, “Lord Dunmore, a British General, Entices Slaves of Colonial Rebels to Flee, 1775,” Lord Dunmore says, “And I do hereby declare all indented Servants, Negroes, or others, (appertaining to Rebels,) free that are able and willing to bear Arms, they joining His Majesty’s Troops as soon as may be…” (Dunmore, 97). Lord Dunmore promised to grant enslaved African Americans, freedom, if they fought with the British, but at the end of the war, many were disappointed with Dumore’s empty promise. According to the document, “Saul, a Slave Revolutionary veteran, Petitions for Freedom, 1792,” Saul, an African American that served as a veteran during the war, did not gain his freedom after the war.(Saul, 98). One would think that a veteran who served for his country should have liberation after years of being enslaved, but that was not the case during the aftermath of the revolution due to the color of a human being’s skin. This demonstrates that the African Americans did not get what they hoped for even though many of them served for their
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
The soldiers that fought during the civil war were fighting for their livelihood. The northern soldiers needed to bring the south back to the north, and the southerners were fighting to keep their way of life. Whitman was amazed at how far each side was willing to go and was amazed at the sacrifices that the men gave to their causes. The soldiers according to Whitman went through hell just to get to battle which if in the case of Gettysburg was even worse. Food was hard to come by, their clothes were tattered, they marched through heat, cold, rain, through mud, and anything that they needed to to get to where their next battle was, only to march on again once the battle has past (Whitman 333). While Whitman worked as a nurse, he was moved by how strong the soldiers were, and when he was going from Fredericksburg to Washington D.C., he wrote to the wounded soldiers families, as he felt that this was one of the best was he could comfort soldiers as they traveled to hospitals (Home). Whitman’s dedication to these wounded soldiers shows how even if he couldn’t fight in the war, he could help in the recovery of the injured. Walt Whitman thought that the way that the developing culture of the arts was beginning to take shape in what was going on around America. Claiming wilderness for fertile farmland, being able to ship goods anywhere along the coast and further, and expanding the railroad so it could touch the furthest reaches of the Louisiana Purchase allowed new ideas to flow and mingle in the new areas and then be condensed into literature and
Whitman was a self educated New Yorker who began his literary career by satiating himself with classical reading and appreciating nature. After leaving school, Whitman held a great variety of jobs including a printers apprentice and editing several periodicals. His first independent publication was Leaves of Grass; a compilation of various untitled poems. Initially, he was met with limited success or recognition (with the exception of a satisfied Ralph Waldo Emerson). His second edition was far more warmly welcomed. During the Civil War, Whitman offered his services to care for soldiers ...
Whitman opted to publish his own passionate evaluation of Leaves of Grass. Whitman’s style of writing was quite unnerving to readers and critics. His poems received minimal public acclaim owing to a number of reasons: this openness in regard to sex, his self-portrayal as a rough working man and his outstanding innovations. He appeared to be a poet who didn’t adhere to the normal meter and rhyme schemes as set by his contemporaries.
Walt Whitman was a man that served as a nurse helping wounded soldiers in the Civil War. While he was there, he took what he saw and wrote them in his poems. Every aspect of each poem related to the time that he was in and he wrote about every experience and feeling he had about what he saw. Whitman had three themes that he used to focus all of his poems on and these themes were individuality, democracy, and freedom. With writing with these themes, Whitman could make an impact on what the reader imagined in their head while reading and he was also able to convey a certain feeling through his poems that he wanted the reader to feel. Whitman had a unique style of writing, which was free verse. Through free verse, Whitman could direct and write a poem in a way that he liked and in a way where he was able to give more detail rather than writing in a rhythmic way. Through Walt Whitman’s themes of individuality, democracy, and freedom, Whitman was able to express his feelings about war and leaders in the poems that he wrote during the Civil War time.
In this paper, I investigate the overall Enlightenment role that Kant conceived for aesthetic experience, and especially, of the beautiful. (1) I argue for an interpretation of Kant's aesthetics whereby the experience of the beautiful may play the same functional role in the invisible church of natural religion as Scripture does for the visible churches of ecclesiastical religions. Although aesthetic experience, for Kant, is autonomous by virtue of its disinterestedness, seemingly paradoxically, this very autonomy enables the beautiful, potentially, to serve profound moral and Enlightenment aims within his system. For Kant, because we are both rational and animal, we require embodiments of moral ideas, and thus, the experience of the beautiful is necessary in order to f...
He crossed the boundaries of the poetry literature and gave a poetry worth of our democracy that contributed to an immense variety of people, nationalities, races. Whitman’s self-published Leaves of Grass was inspired in part by his travels through the American frontier and by his admiration for Ralph Waldo Emerson (Poetry Foundation). He always believed in everyone being treated equally and bringing an end to slavery and racism. Through his poetry, Whitman tried to bring every people in America together by showing them what happiness, love, unison, and real knowledge looked. His poetry and its revolution changed the world of American literature