Ugh. Day of Finish paper, Take nap, Sleep through Whitman party, Wake up, Post paper late, Go back to bed.

I hate exam week.

Before this project, I taught Whitman a lot, in three or four different courses, but had come to focus almost solely on “Song of Myself”– sometimes 1855, sometimes Deathbed, sometimes with humor, sometimes with aggravation, always with an appreciation for poetic genius, and always with a pretty clear picture in my head of the kind of guy I was dealing with: macho, swaggering, egotistical.  You know, this guy:

The Enhanced Manly Whitman

Even his radical inclusion had begun to feel at best appropriative, at worst cannibalistic, consuming the American people to feed his vast, virile self.  “Song of Myself” was like a poetic codpiece.  I couldn’t see the forest for the fibres of manly wheat.  You understand me.

I exaggerate, of course, but don’t entirely lie.  During the re-immersion in Whitman that I undertook about a year ago, something happened.  In between blaming Whitman for Charles Olson and rolling my eyes at his father-stuff, I began to see someone unexpected emerging–someone with soft hips and warm eyes, someone surprisingly quiet, a good listener, a bringer of lemons and ice cream, a moon-watcher.  This person:

The Marriage Photo, with pleased smiles and fleshy hips

And this one:

Whitman, about 1869, sad

This Whitman appeared in the memoirs of his friends, in letters to his mother, and, powerfully, in the Civil War writings to which I was turning fresh and focused attention.   (To my surprise, when I went back to “Song of Myself,” of course this Whitman was all over it.)  Right now my favorite work of this Whitman may be “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night,” which is here.

“Vigil Strange” imagines a private wake for a young dead soldier, kept through the night by an older, grieving comrade.  It is not a perfect poem, being marred by weird syntactic inversions and being, arguably, maudlin.  But it is intensely moving in the quietness of its grief:

Till late in the night reliev’d to the place at last again I made my way,

Found you in death so cold dear comrade, found your body son of responding kisses, (never again on earth responding,)

and its acceptance of the unacceptable:

Passing sweet hours, immortal and mystic hours with you dearest comrade—not a tear, not a word,

Vigil of silence, love and death, vigil for you my son and my soldier,

As onward silently stars aloft, eastward new ones upward stole . . .

and in its exquisite, unbearable gentleness:

My comrade I wrapt in his blanket, envelop’d well his form,

Folded the blanket well, tucking it carefully over head and carefully under feet,

And there and then and bathed by the rising sun, my son in his grave, in his rude-dug grave I deposited. . .

“Vigil Strange” has a rhythm that approaches incantation or lullaby–long, frequently repetitive lines that are calming (cut short abrasively by the reality of war in the aborted rhythm of the final line/action: “And buried him where he fell”).  The swaddling of the “son,” “my soldier,” in his blanket is, I’m going to suggest, not masculine, not even paternal.  It is maternal, tender, womanly.

What problems arise from my assertion?  A lot, and two of them have to be addressed.  First, unquestionably my desire to call this voice the Womanly Whitman is rooted heavily in a construction of the womanly and the maternal that is traditional, nurturing, compassionate, the angel in the hospital ward.  It is the construction I invoked in the domestic scene that began this post.  It is a construction with which I am utterly at odds ideologically and which I have doggedly and sometimes fiercely interrogated in my teaching, my politics, and many of my life choices.  Second, there is a complication in casting the speaker of “Vigil Strange” as maternal, a Freudian complication best indicated by the title from Lawrence (curse, growl): “Sons and Lovers.”  My casting of this soldier as maternal effectively recontains the homoeroticism of the poem:

One look I but gave which your dear eyes return’d with a look I shall never forget,

One touch of your hand to mine O boy, reach’d up as you lay on the ground,

Then onward I sped in the battle, the even-contested battle,

Till late in the night reliev’d to the place at last again I made my way,

Found you in death so cold dear comrade, found your body son of responding kisses, (never again on earth responding,)

The language of “my son,” “dear eyes,” and “boy” can mask the power of that body, those kisses, the assertion of love that will transcend death (less so, perhaps, if you’ve read the repeated use of the word “son” in Whitman’s letters to his partner Peter Doyle).  OR, and this is equally problematic, I am mapping “gay” over “tender, feminine, womanly” as though they are fundamentally interchangeable.

Oy vey.  Now I’m really in the total animal soup of essentialism.

But I want that term.  Maybe because in some ways it is MY “womanly”– that is to say, “womanly” is a tag not unlike the “myWW” tag I append to certain posts to indicate a connection to Whitman that goes beyond admiration of the poetic line, the image, the nest of guarded duplicate eggs you have to have to throw over the literary establishment.  It is, I will say on safer ground, a non-patriarchal Whitman: tender, generous, nurturing, doubting, equalizing.  It’s the Whitman this semester has given me, and I’m grateful.

The “Bloody Angle” is the name given to a piece of ground at the Spotsylvania Courthouse Battlefield on which, in May 1864, some of the war’s most traumatizing hand-to-hand and muzzle-to-muzzle fighting took place.  Whitman would certainly have encountered a number of the men damaged at this site.

Ford's Theater where Lincoln was shot (in rare non-rainy moment)

When we went into the actual theater (or, in some of my students’ cases, the napping room–shame on you!), I was disappointed at first that the guard ushered me upstairs since the downstairs was full.  But in the balcony I realized I was actually at eye level with Lincoln’s box, shown below.  Both Lincoln and Booth made their way through the crowded balcony that night; the door Booth entered and jammed shut is just to the right of what I captured on this photo.  The theater is very intimate, and the box is really hanging over stage left.  I had real chills when the ranger was narrating the events of April 1865.

Presidental box, Ford's Theater (image of Washington in center frame)

Afterward we toured the Peterson House where Lincoln actually died– such a small, nondescript room with a sloped ceiling and bed so short (the real one is in Chicago, but the replica) that Lincoln had to lie diagonally while they waited for his heart to stop; he was brain dead pretty much instantly after being shot.

At the Library of Congress, Barbara Bair had set out three different tickets to Whitman’s Lincoln lecture, an advertising poster for it, and the text Whitman used for the lecture, which was a novel into which he had glued written bits, parts of his published works, annotations, etc.

Tickets to W's Lincoln lectures

Advertisement with our heroes side by side

The pasted-up text of W's Lincoln lecture (wish that was my hand!)

Digital Whitman can attest that I am probably a little–well, over-invested in Lincoln.  But these artifacts, though not as personal as some others we saw, were indeed very moving to me.

]]> http://marywash.lookingforwhitman.org/2009/11/01/o-lincoln-my-lincoln/feed/ 0 http://mscanlon.lookingforwhitman.org/2009/10/28/favorite-manuscript-moment/ http://mscanlon.lookingforwhitman.org/2009/10/28/favorite-manuscript-moment/#respond Thu, 29 Oct 2009 03:46:21 +0000 http://mscanlon.lookingforwhitman.org/?p=288 I am indebted to Other Sam for drawing my attention to this very moving detail.  One of the best things I saw at the Library of Congress was Whitman’s letter of December 29, 1862 (that is, exactly 106 years before the day I was born), to his mother about finding George in Fredericksburg.  We were able to read aloud his words about the suffering of the soldiers putting other suffering into perspective.  We have read this letter in a collected of selected letters: “Dear, dear Mother, . . . I succeeded in reaching the 51st New York, and found George alive and well–in order to make sure that you would get the good news, I sent back by messenger to Washington (I dare say you did not get it for some time), a telegraphic dispatch . . .”  What is not visible in that version of the letter is the revision Whitman made, no doubt anticipating the anxiety with which his mother would scan the letter if she had not received the “telegraphic dispatch” or was desperate for information about her wounded son.  Lovely:

revision ("alive and well"), photo by MNS 10/24/09, LOC

Edwin Booth BOOST

Here Edwin is looking pensive (or moping about his footwear):

Edwin Booth, thespian

And here is a famous photo we saw at Ford’s, with John Wilkes lurking around at Lincoln’s second inaugural (Lincoln center, JWB top row).  Read more at this blog post on The Blind Flaneur.

JWB stalking MLL

This nauseating bit about JWB is something I learned this summer at Harper’s Ferry.  Here, from Wikipedia:

Strongly opposed to the abolitionists who sought to end slavery in the U.S., Booth attended the hanging on December 2, 1859, of abolitionist leader John Brown, who was executed for leading a raid on the Federal armory at Harpers Ferry (in present-day West Virginia).^[60] Booth had been rehearsing at the Richmond Theatre when he abruptly decided to join the Richmond Grays, a volunteer militia of 1,500 men travelling to Charles Town for Brown’s hanging, to guard against any attempt by abolitionists to rescue Brown from the gallows by force.^[60][61] When Brown was hanged without incident, Booth stood in uniform near the scaffold and afterwards expressed great satisfaction with Brown’s fate, although he admired the condemned man’s bravery in facing death stoically.^[40][62]

I’m having trouble reconciling Whitman’s desire to portray the war honestly and his poems that are set in the midst of battle. I suppose it is a naïve assumption, but, before Drum-Taps, I felt that the voice in Whitman’s poetry was his own. In Drum-Taps, however, this is obviously not the case, as Whitman never truly experienced some of the situations in his poems, all the various battlefield scenes. Why did he place his experiences and insights that he acquired in the hospital on a battlefield that he was never on?

Drum-Taps is notable for the shift in Whitman’s attention span, for lack of a better word. In his earlier poems, especially the 1855 “Song of Myself”, he is in a hurry to encompass everything in his poems and because of this, some detail must be lost. So he lists everywhere and everyone, but he does not make each one notable. These Civil War poems are more contemplative in that they focus on one item at a time, devoting the poet and the reader to the observation of a single incident. This would seem to be a talent that Whitman would have developed sitting long hours at a hospital.

I think that Whitman came to respect the strength of the individual soldiers that he came across in the hospital. By placing his poems in the mouths of soldiers much like the ones he met, he is showing them his respect and love. His purpose in the hospital was similarly self-sacrificing. He could not demand anything of the wounded, but gave what he could to them instead. In this way, he could not continue in the same style as he had before. While the war strengthened his resolve in some areas, as in the area of brotherly love, his confidence in one work’s ability to contain everything and treat all the material within it respectfully was waning. This is evident in his slapdash 1867 Leaves of Grass, where the bizarre binding expresses his own anxiety over his encyclopedic work in which he had placed such faith before the war. The construction of Drum-Taps may seem to contradict this with its careful evolution from naïve patriot through the battles and hospitals to the wise and still energetic leader that we find at the end of the book. However, Whitman is not changed completely by the war; he just finds it more important to devote himself to these voices that would otherwise be lost. The idea that poetry can be a higher means of communicating and creating community is just as important to Whitman during the war, and after it, as it was to him before the war.

I suppose Whitman felt his hospital work was important for himself and for the soldiers, but for America, the soldiers were the first heroes and even they are not properly understood by Americans at large. Therefore, Whitman must subsume his own desire to be recognized for his hospital work to show America the soldiers that would otherwise be unnamed and unknown.

In spite of all this, I found myself feeling a lot of admiration for what Whitman did for those soldiers. Referring to the prompt for this week, he really did treat those soldiers the way that Whitman as speaker tells his audience how he wishes to treat them. He is tender, and while outwardly trying to be non-sexual, it’s evident in his writings and Morris’ description that he struggled with his feelings while with the soldier, and formed more than casual relationships with some. He holds them, caresses them, tries to make them feel better, much like Whitman the speaker does for his readers through his poetry. According to Whitman, the soldiers responded positively to him, in the same way I’m sure Whitman wanted his readers to react. While Morris notes that “you are always the hero of your own biography” it seems very plausible to me that Whitman would be well accepted among the soldiers. I mean, who wouldn’t want someone to visit them and bring them gifts when they were trapped somewhere as foul as those hospitals, being taken care of by soldiers who weren’t good enough to go off to battle?

So often I feel that I am looking at a juxtaposition of two very different sides of Whitman, and the two opposing sides are making my decision on how I view him incredibly difficult. Part of me wants to, and does, accept him as the great American poet, someone who’s poetry is beautiful and inspiring, and yet I can’t reconcile that to my frustration at his all-knowing stance in his poetry, in which his personal view points are not always what I want them to be.

This flag was flown during the battle of Fredericksburg, as well as some other big name battles. The lighting isn't great, but you should be able to make out "Fredericksburg" embroidered on the bottom.

This is a list of places where the flag was flown.

This flag was flown at the Spotsylvania Court House battle.

And also just for fun:

This is made entirely out of locks of human hair from a bunch of different people, including...

See where the 1 is? That would mark off Jefferson Davis' hair. Awesome.

Apparently this was an art form back in the day…strange.

My pictures/blog  from our field trip should be up soon, Flickr wasn’t letting me upload anything for a while.

In “Bivouac on a Mountain Side”, Whitman turns his attention to the night: “And over all the sky—the sky! far, far out of reach, studded, breaking out, the eternal stars” (435). This, however, seems to be part of a mini-poetic-cycle about the soldiers’ days and nights, alternating for four short poems: “Calvalry Crossing a Ford”, “Bivouac on a Mountain Side”, “An Army Corps on the March”, and “By the Bivouac’s Fitful Flame”. The last poem brings in the notion that nighttime is when one reflects on death and memories, a notion with which Whitman ends the next poem “Come Up From The Fields Father”: “In the midnight waking, weeping, longing with one deep longing,/O that she might withdraw unnoticed, silent from life escape and withdraw,/ To follow, to seek, to be with her dear dead son” (438). He then immerses a poem entirely in night, “Vigil Strange I Kept On the Field One Night”, a soldier keeping wake for a younger soldier (with Whitman, I am loathe to take the mention of “father” and “son” too literally), not grieving necessarily but tenderly remembering, until a dawn burial. “A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown” depicts a nighttime hospital set up in a church with little light.

The moon makes its first appearence in “Dirge for Two Veterans”. The speaker calls it “silvery” “beautiful” “ghastly” “immense”, a “sorrowful vast phantom”, “some mother’s large transparent face”. Now the full moon is linked with the tenderness of nighttime grief and burial. “Look Down Fair Moon” adds a sense that the moon’s light hallows the dead bodies on the fields. This is echoed in “Reconciliation” in which the moon is seen as the sister of Death, and together they wash “this soil’d world” (453). “Lo Victress on the Peaks” has Whitman distancing himself from the glory-mongering attitude of his earlier poems, offering up his poems of “night’s darkness and blood-dripping wounds,/And psalms of the dead” (455)

The final poem of Drum-Taps, fittingly enough, brings the cycle back into daylight with the return of “forenoon air” and the final line “But the hot sun of the South is to fully ripen my songs” (458).

While this progression from daybreak to hot sun to cool night to day again may be an expression of the Civil War as a descent into blackness, a nightmare, etc., I feel that nighttime and the Civil War do not correspond exactly. I think rather that the connection is between night and death/memory. Whitman seemed a daytime poet before these writings, all his poems taking place in full day and bright sun. With his hospital visits and understanding of war and death which that gave him, Whitman develops a new appreciation for the solitude of nighttime and the power of the emotions he saw felt by dying soldiers in the night and felt himself for dead comrades. Nighttime makes it easy for Whitman’s tender and compassionate  poet to emerge.

Meg and I have noticed that most people writing civil war poetry were not writing from a position of experience, but most likely from their lazy boys by the fire. A lot of their poetry had to do with glorifying the war cause and trying to inspire people to go to battle. The most prominent writers were never involved in the war.

When I was reading “Song of the Banner at Daybreak” it seemed like a pretty direct criticism of those people. The pennant, calling the child to war and yet having nothing to do with the war in and of itself is saddening in a way. Especially with the father, trying desperately to make the child understand that the war isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, is a sad contrast.  Hardly any writers at the time seemed to be pointing out the utter pointlessness and brutality of the fighting going on, but Whitman went ahead and put it out there. “The Wound Dresser” is also a very direct attempt to portray the violence of the war. It’s almost like he’s using shock value to get his point across.

I also thought it was interesting how in several poems Whitman inserts direct speakers, something I hadn’t seen before. Perhaps this is an attempt to legitimize the points he’s attempting to make?

I definitely have a new respect for what Whitman was doing during this time period. Also, I would like to say that his poetry is LOADS better than a lot of other civil war writings we’ve come across. The awful rhyming…just awful. Also sometimes sickeningly patriotic, especially when considering how all these young boys were dying and people thought it was all for the glory of the union…just…ugh. So kudos to Whitman for stepping away from his grand vision of America to point out that this killing is senseless, yo.

The poems change as they progress, eventually bringing us to the quote in his poem “Year That Trembled and Reel’d Beneath Me” – “Must I change my triumphant songs?…/ Must I indeed learn to chant the cold dirges of the baffled?/ And sullen hymns of defeat?” (442). This is the darkest moment for Whitman, poetically speaking. He wonders whether his poetic vision can apply to the War and the world that will come after the war ends. He also has doubts as to the importance of poetry when more physical work is needed, as in the poem “The Wound-Dresser”.

He quickly rallies himself though, and reconstructs his vision to include the Southerners, the War, and his hospital work. A view in miniature of the arc of Drum-Taps can be seen in “Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun” in which he moves from desiring the peace and simplicity of the country to embracing the living, changing, and dangerous life he finds in Manhattan and south during the war. Whitman begins to equate his poetic quest with the war, claiming that when the war ends, his battles, which promise to be just as challenging and dangerous as the more physical battles of the war.

Although the series of poems in Drum-Taps suggest a resolution and a resolve following the horrors of war, Whitman’s treatment of the book suggests that he was not quite as certain as I would have thought he was from reading the poems alone. He could not decide initially whether the poems, and thus the Civil War itself, belonged to his life-work of Leaves of Grass. Arguably, he spends the rest of his life wrestling with this question, making his few weeks spent in Fredericksburg and the longer time spent in DC helping the wounded a formative part of his poetic life.

It would be fantastic if  those two selves would merge. While I don’t want him to change, necessarily, it would be great if we could get the best of both Whitmans.  The hopeful voice of the poet-prophet tends to get lost in the pain of the war, and the inexperience of the 1855 poet-prophet needs to be tempered by the experience of man. “Over the Carnage Rose a Prophetic Voice” captures such a sense of the two selves merging, at least in the later version. The initial version, published in the 1860 edition, is radically different (here, if you like).

Whitman’s ideas remain the same throughout both pieces. There’s a sense of unification here, for Whitman, for the nation, and for the people. 1855 Whitman lists his nations, and War Whitman connects each nation with its geographical counterpart. Missouri finds its mate in Massachusetts, and Michigan, Florida. The Calamus Whitman is also found in both versions of the text; Whitman challenges the reader:

(Were you looking to be held together by lawyers?

Or by an agreement on a paper? or by arms?

Nay, nor the world, nor any living thing, will so cohere.)

Our nation is not one to be unified by proclamations, laws, or by armistices; not even our president can hold us together. It’s not even Whitman, really. The preceding wars have taught everyone that no one person or institution can hold such a diverse nation. Instead, it is the people that 1855 Whitman has mentioned, the prostitute and the sailor and the slave. It is the “comrades,” “lovers,” and “manly affection” (449) that is so prevalent in Calamus.

1855 Whitman is so evident in the 1860 version. His ego-centrism spills off the page. It is he who will “make the continent indissoluble,” and “plant companionship.” Whitman, the divine poet-prophet, takes everything upon himself. He is the action that we will follow, and he can’t resist reminding us that it is his words that give the nation hope. Whitman is the devoted “femme” of democracy, and will do everything to help its progeny. It’s easy to find the man who empathizes with everyone but has experienced very little here.

When we get to 1867, Whitman has seen the work of man. He’s seen his beloved nation fracture, and the people themselves break apart and be destroyed much in the same way. His words haven’t led the nation in the sense of manly love—at least, not yet. In 1867, most evidence of Whitman’s actions is taken out. Whitman’s words are there; his voice rises, and he checks the reader, reminding them that neither laws nor papers will hold a people together. But that’s all the poet-prophet is, a prophet. The result is much quieter; 1860 has a flurry of exclamation points. Whitman can barely contain his exhilaration and hope on the page. In 1867, it’s up to the people themselves for the “manly affection” (449) that Whitman puts such hope in. His faith in it is more hopeful; he doesn’t proclamate (there are a ton of “there shall be…!”s in the other version), but he looks toward the future. It’s easier to trust this reflective speaker, rather than the agitated and overly excited 1860 one.

So, yes. I think that as a man changes, his poetry needs to change. Whitman saw himself in his poetry. It was a reflection of his inner-self, and as he changed and his ideas changed, so did Leaves. But maybe it doesn’t so much have to be a change as it is a tempering and merging, especially in Whitman’s case.

You move between the soldiers’ cots

the way I move among my dead,

their white bodies laid out in lines.

____

You bathe the forehead, you bathe the lip, the cock,

as I touch my father, as if the language

were a form of life.

_____

You write their letters home, I take the dictation

of his firm dream lips, this boy

I love as you love your boys.

____

They die and you still feel them.  Time

becomes unpertinent to love,

to the male bodies in beds.

____

We bend over them, Walt, taking their breath

soft on our faces, wiping their domed brows,

stroking back the coal-black Union hair.

____

We lean down, our pointed breasts

heavy as plummets with fresh spermy milk–

we conceive, Walt, with the men we love, thus, now,

we bring to fruit.

Looking back on my previous post I feel ashamed that I accused Whitman of abandoning his personal style of poetry for one of a more universal style, after reading his diaries I can see he did nothing of the sort. Every time a soldier died Whitman felt it, every time a cannonball tore through a line of troops and left craters in the blood-soaked battle field Whitman died a little inside. To him the Civil War was personal, that his fellow country men could inflict such pain and horror upon each other appears to have hurt Whitman in ways I can hardly grasp.

I’ve been struggling with the dichotomy between Whitman-the-Poet and Whitman-the-Man, hence the poem I posted earlier this week, but I feel like now that I’ve had  a glimpse of Whitman-the-Man I understand his poetry all the better for it.

In 1855 Whitman wrote poetry with the optimistic, carefree wonder of a child. He saw good and beauty in everything: the body, the soul, nature, speech, song, even death. His entire being was founded on his faith that if everyone could learn to experience the world with the same love and admiration that he did then the world would truly be perfect. He believed that if any group of people were capable of such a transformative world view it was the American people. To have these same people that he glorified in his poetry be the cause of something so horrendous as the Civil War must have been like being shot by a beloved friend. The fact that Whitman was able to maintain any sort of adherence to his prior optimism is amazing, to face the bowels of Hell and still maintain belief in Heaven is a skill reserved for only the strongest of people (I’m wandering into the field of flowery prose here, I apologize).

This post has become rather emotional and presumptuous, in that I seem to be claiming that I know Whitman in an emotionally intimate way, but I think that this may be the response Whitman was seeking all along. To stir the emotions of his reader, to have their hearts break every time one of the soldiers he loved was found laying on a stretcher covered by a gray cloth, to have them sing for joy when the soldiers returned from battle celebrating the chance to live another day.

I still need to sort out my feelings on the changes he made from 1855 to 1867, and I think reading the deathbed edition will help with that, but for right now I am content to sit by the bedside of Whitman and listen to his tales.

Both versions of the poem echo themes of solidarity and the endless possibilities set out before “a simple, separate person.”  In the first version, Whitman hints that it may be necessary for people to come together.  However, in the later version he proposes that the “modern” man must learn to come together “EN MASSE.”  Times had changed, and Whitman advises his readers to change with them.  He directly addresses the “hapless war” that had been tearing the country apart.  Stylistically, this marked another change in Whitman’s work.  Instead of masking everything in ambiguity and mentions the war directly, right in the first poem of the book.

As interesting, perhaps, as the things that Whitman changed in the revised version, are the things that he left the same.  Although the American landscape had changed drastically, Whitman’s message of camaraderie and relationships (whether you believe Reynolds that they are all quite fraternal or have more raunchy ideas) still remains the same.  As the nation crumbled around its citizens, Whitman insisted that they continue to come together in intimate ways for the good of everyone.

It also seems that, in the wake of the Civil War, Whitman’s priorities have changed.  We all know now that, if Whitman believes something then we will be asked to believe it as well.  In “Leaves of Grass, part 4,” which originally appeared as “To You,” Whitman’s scope has changed ever so slightly.  In the original version he said, “They stand forth out of affairs, out of commerce, shops, work, farms, clothes, the house, buying, selling, eating, drinking, suffering, dying.”  However, in the later version he adds to the list, “law, science, medicine, and print.”  In the changing American landscape, Whitman felt the need to broaden his audience.  His message had to be heard by everyone now, not just the outdoorsy hermits looking for a prophet.

Whitman had always shown a strong sense of nationalistic pride, and throughout the early editions of Leaves of Grass he inspired his readers to improve upon the face of America through personal growth.  However, after the devastation of the Civil War, Whitman realized that maybe that was not enough to keep the country standing.

All the sudden the poem was completely different than how I had first read it. This was due mostly to his breaking up of the poem. For instance, in the 1855 version Whitman writes “I am mad for it to be in contact with me/The smoke of my own breath” (27). When I first read this passage I could imagine Whitman roaming though the woods, drunk on the sight of nature, his breath fogging against the leaves and vines. In the 1867 version however, Whitman puts a section break between these two lines. Now when I read it, I see the ecstatic Whitman in section one, followed by a much calmer, categorizing Whitman in section two.

I’m not saying that he didn’t intend for this to be the case, or that he even had an intention one way or the other, all I’m saying is, by putting the section breaks in it Whitman manages to lead the reader in a way that he didn’t accomplish in the 1855 version. I still haven’t decided whether I really do prefer the 1855 version, or if it’s just a matter of me not liking a change in Whitman’s style when I feel like I’ve just gotten the hang of it.

Whether I like it or not though, I have some speculation as to why this kind of change takes place. Mancuso talks about the fact that Whitman changed many of his poems to move from the personal to the national and that the 1867 Leaves of Grass was intended to show the way in which a unified nation was the only hope of rebuilding the America that Whitman had praised so often before. Mancuso gives a sense that Whitman was trying to reach out more than ever. I think that after the civil war Whitman developed a sense of urgency and desperation to make people see what he had been trying to argue since 1855. He did not feel that he could wait for everyone to discover the truth for themselves, he felt a stronger hand was needed.

This could explain why Whitman’s 1867 version was so much more structured than his 1855 version. He was worried he was losing the America he loved and felt the need to lead readers more strongly towards the ideals which he had been presenting. I say that I prefer the 1855 version, but I also don’t have a civil war to contend with, which probably makes me a little more relaxed than Whitman was at the time. I think it will be interesting to see how Whitman continues to change as the America he knows recovers from the turmoil of the Civil War.

The 1860 text is here, if you wish to compare it to the 1867 and 1881 editions that we read. I sat up all night going back and forth between the three. Stanzas like this were particularly interesting:

Two together!

Winds blow south, or winds blow north,

Day come white, or night come black,

Home, or rivers, and mountains from home,

Singing all time, minding no time,

while we two keep together.

This stanza is taken from the 1860 and 1881 versions. In the 1867 version, however, the last line goes like this: “If we two keep together.” The certainty that “while” possesses is taken from the text. “While” implies that the singing and playing is already going on. However, the instance of “if” makes the stanza a plea instead of a  statement. Whitman, having worked in the hospitals, has seen the chaos and pain of a fractured America, and the dream of his joined country shattered. It’s as if he presenting his earlier promise again, showing the grandeur that America could be. He speaks of uniting both the  black and the white, the north and the south. It’s interesting that he speaks in these strictly binary terms here as well. I’m normally used to his meandering lists, naming North and South and Southeast and Midwest, not just the opposition. Here, Whitman displays our lost mates, mirroring the binary oppositions in the war.

There is also a section in the 1860 and 1867 editions of this poem (Whitman 8:32) that is completely taken out of the 1872 edition. This stanza also shows me a Whitman touched by a fractured nation. There are lines such as “O what is my destination! (I fear it is chaos..” Whitman can’t see whether fortune “smiles” or “frowns” on America. I wonder if he was watching with a sort of baited breath. The prophet doesn’t seem so clairvoyant anymore. By 1881, Whitman is triumphant; he jumps straight to the line about conquering death. This is more like my 1855 Whitman, devil may care and ready to take on America’s metaphysical salvation. There is no doubt about the nation anymore. America has healed, has been reborn, and has begun greatness again.

Finally, there’s a line I can’t really account for. In the 1881 edition, Whitman compares the whisper of the sea to “some old crone rocking the cradle” (394). The other two simply…end.  Perhaps Whitman felt that the others were incomplete, or perhaps it better accounts for some sort of God, rocking the cradle of life. But I’m not really so sure Whitman needed that explanation. I’ll keep thinking about it, and let you know later, perhaps. Until next week, Whitmaniacs.

Our town around the time Whitman came here to look for his brother George, in late 1862.

“The Civil War” (8:20)

 http://media.pbs.org/asxgen/general/wind…

“Drum-Taps” (8:40)

Two episodes from a pretty cool series (online and free–the whole thing is at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/whitman/pro…) featuring our own Karen Karbiener as well as other scholars and writers including Ed Folsom, Ken Price, Alan Garganus, and Yusef Komunyakaa.