drumtaps

“For want of anything better, let me lightly twine a spring of the sweet ground-ivy trailing so plentifully through the dead leaves at my feet…and lay it as my contribution on the dead bard’s grave” (941).

Although they were contemporaries, the writing of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Walt Whitman could not be more different.  Longfellow was by far the era’s most popular poet, a “fireside poet” whose poems for adults and children were popular with the masses.  Whitman, the rabble rouser, wrote poetry for the masses, but was not quite as popular as Longfellow with the common man.  Perhaps Longfellow’s charming rhymes, gentle cadence and mild, uncontroversial subject matter was better suited as recreation for the layman’s lifestyle.  Whitman was beloved by his fans, attracting notice by British readers for his revolutionary work.

In Specimen Days on April 3rd, 1882, Whitman learns about the death of Longfellow through the newspaper and reminisces on the accomplishments of the fellow poet.  His comments seem to weigh disapproval with plentiful praise, beginning with, “Longfellow in his voluminous works seems to me not only to be eminent in the style and forms of poetical expression that mark the present age, (an idiosyncrasy, almost a sickness, of verbal melody,) but to bring what is always dearest as poetry to the general human heart and taste” (941.)  Whitman is not a fan of Longfellow’s insistent use of rhyme, the usage of which is not mere style, but a sickness, a dependance on formal verse.  Poetry that reads like a song is suited to the common man’s taste, but this appears to be a degradation rather than an enhancement of the form.  Longfellow adapts poetry to be readable by a large audience, simplifying it and its art for the general populace.

Yet Whitman goes on to claim that Longfellow represents “the sort of bard and counteractant most needed for our materialistic, self-assertive, money-worshipping Ango-Saxon races, and especially for the present age in America–an age tyrannically regulated with reference to the manufacturer, the merchant, the financier, the politician and the day workman–for whom and among whom he comes as the poet of melody, courtesy, deference” (942).  Longfellow is the one poet to take the gift of poetry beyond the literary minded and share its music and its power with the everyday workman.  In this way, Longfellow democracizes poetry, making it accessible to all those who are able to read.  Poetry now has its place beside storytelling and biblical texts as one of America’s most popular literary pastimes.

Longfellow is the “universal poet of women and young people”–a poet of sentimentality (942).  Whitman defends Longfellow from his critics who claim that the poet’s lack of originality.  Originality is dependent on the exploration and study of the literary figures and works of the past.  Before America, the New World, “can be worthily original, and announce herself and her own heroes, she must be well saturated with the originality of others, and respectfully consider the heroes that lived before Agamemnon” (943).

Everyone has heard of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in the Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.  Just as the monument honors the nameless and unrecovered soldiers of our country’s wars, Whitman also sets his pen to do justice to the unburied and forgotten brave heroes of the civil war:

No formal general’s report, nor book in the library, nor column in the paper, embalms the bravest, north or south, east or west.  Unnamed, unknown, remain, and still remain, the bravest soldiers. (Whitman, p. 748.)

Unnamed Remains the Bravest Soldier is one passage of many that celebrate the strength of America’s fighting youth, both on the field and in the hospitals.  Whitman gives name to these men, abbreviating some to protect their privacy, but details their bravery in the face of pain and death, their strong silence and humbleness and their struggle and will to survive.  Each case or “specimen” in Whitman’s work gives a unique and individual clause to the greater work, bringing the account of the war down to a personal, humanitarian level.

Whitman spoke in the preface to Leaves of Grass that America was itself one great poem, and that a poet of the people must write from the level of the common man.  Therefore, Whitman does not wax patriotic with stories of the heroism of the generals of the war, but details the ins and outs of the cavalry and infantry.  Even his passages about Lincoln describe the president as humble, courteous and yet deep and distinguished in the sadness in his face.  Lincoln and his wife go about attired in black in a simple carriage, and while the president is alone he goes with a small ensemble of cavalry at the insistence of this men.

The hot-blooded patriotism of Whitman’s early poems is absent here, replaced with gruesome scenes of the hospital and the field.  Whitman describes a battlefield in a fiery wood in A Night Battle, Over a Week Since. Both the wounded and the dead are consumed in the fire, flames that echo the burns that soldiers sustain if they survive the enemy cannon fire.  Other scenes describing amputation, gangrene and violent hemorrhages range from stirring to deeply disturbing.  Most of the soldiers are young, often between ages sixteen and twenty-one, and often described as farm boys–those who have little stake in the struggle between plantation owners and northern factory workers.

In Europe’s many military conflicts it came as no surprise that wars were waged by the rich with the ranks of the poor.  America may claim to be different, but the reality of the Civil War proves that even democracy does not prevent this bitter, cruel reality from occurring.