In response to the prompt and quote for this week, what did Whitman consider the “real” war to be? My interpretation, which could be wrong, is that Whitman saw the real war as the devastation that was felt by the families of soldiers and civilians, and the stories of the soldiers themselves. The history that is in the books is impersonal. I think Whitman tried to personalize the war and bring it down to less grandiose level by relating the stories of the soldiers he met. Unfortunately he only captured most at the ends of their lives, after they were physically and mentally destroyed by the war.
I think some of the problems with Whitman’s description of his war experiences are the same problems that we run into with his poetry. He tries to represent everything and everyone, and therefore somewhat loses something when he begins to generalize and list. I saw this in the way he kept his diary like a catalogue, a description we have used for his poetry, a catalogue of the various soldiers he met, their injuries, what he gave them, whether or not they died. On the one hand we are seeing the mass amount of destruction caused by this war- it seems like every soldier Whitman described had something amputated- but on the other hand we’re still not seeing any reflection on how this is going to affect the soldier’s life from then on, or his family.
I thought Whitman’s most interesting observations were not necessarily with the soldiers, but when he observed life outside of the hospitals. I loved the passage where he described the inauguration ball taking place in the patent office, where months before he had seen the cots of the soldiers.
So to answer the question for this week, I’m not really sure whether or not Whitman succeeded in getting the “real” war into his books. At his time, I feel like it’s very likely that all of the horrible injuries and mass casualties were not necessarily widely reported, so maybe for Whitman’s time he really was giving a more real account of the civil war than anyone else was at the time. The passage about the two brothers who were fighting on opposite sides and were injured in the same battle, the wounds from which both subsequently dies, strikes me that way. Perhaps no one in Whitman’s time would have made a statement like that. I feel like now though, especially the way the civil war is gone over and over again in history classes throughout grade school, most people are very aware that family members often fought against each other, that the battles were extremely bloody, and the politics involved in the fighting. I wonder if Whitman would say that the history books now are giving a more true account of things.
Ok this is a side note but, every time Whitman mentioned the “naked” bodies of the soldiers and then that part where he said he was sitting by the side of the soldier while he was sleeping, I just got this really weird image of him being a creeper and watching people while they slept…not to mention the part where he alludes to stalking Lincoln…
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