All right, so. The Civil War. It’s a subject we Southerners know like the back of our hands, and sometimes I think I learned what the Confederate flag was just as early as the American one (if only because I saw so many floating around the backs of every truck that passed me by. I  know Lee; I know Grant.

Whitman’s role in the war strikes me as an interesting one.   He’s a brother, a civilian, a nursemaid, and a writer. To me (sappily enough) he’s also become a sort of a friend. I think it’s interesting how quickly Whitman’s mood fades; there is a singular set of jubilant entries, with such quotes as “The volcanic upheaval of the nation, after that firing on the flag at Charleston…will remain as the grandest and most encouraging spectacle yet vouchsafed in any age..” (I wonder if he regretted these words later?). Only two entries later, Whitman’s mood is defeated with the soldiers at Bull Run.

Whitman’s prose strikes me exactly like his poetry does. There are times when Whitman can’t stop listing, especially when things are at their worst. Whitman’s summation of the dead  is a frenzy similar to that of “Song of Myself.” Here we have the graves of “Gettysburgh, the West, Southwest—Vicksburgh—Chattanooga—the trenches of Petersburgh” (800). It’s as if even with these (or rather, especially, since they have died for the cause), Whitman seeks to show these men united as a nation. Whitman’s language throughout “Speciman Days” is, as always, expansive, with most sentences lasting several lines and not fitting on the page. These are excepting the few worst days, such as “Down at the Front,” where Whitman’s length is cut short. He seems merely intent on focusing on the facts; he shows us “a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands” (736), and that’s it. They’re in front of a cart. There’s no poetry in that, no “good manure” (85) or fear of the compost, and I’m dying to know what Whitman was thinking, or why he didn’t record that there . Perhaps it was too much for him. Then again, when Whitman sees the released Union prisoners later, his diction can’t can’t help but demonstrate horror; he calls them “monkey-looking corpses” (789). What was it about that day or that mood that silenced him? Surely the living dead would be more horrifying than the actual?

But I’m rambling at little, I think. Throughout this section of “Specimen Days,” we again get asides, but not in such an inclusive way as “Song of Myself.” Again, I see Whitman rushing to include important facts, especially in sections such as “The Million Dead, Too, Summ’d Up.” So many of his asides here have to do with numbers, whether it be the breakdown of all the soldiers killed, or the number of soldier cemeteries now existing in the nation. It’s interesting that Whitman, normally so expansive and word-loving, uses numbers to literally “sum”  the men up; eventually, it becomes all that they are (for evidence, all you have to do is go look at the graves in the Confederate Cemetary just a couple minutes from here). But perhaps that’s the point that he’s getting at later, in “The Real War will Never get into the Books.” We forget the loving husband, and instead remember that he was one of “25,000 national solders kill’d in battle and never buried at all” (800). Perhaps Whitman was balancing the reality of his words, with the sterile factoids that he knew the war would become today.

There are so many things that I want to say, or ask, or do in response to Whitman. I guess the best place to start tonight is that I’m still trying to place Whitman in the scheme of religion–in his own personal, in the Christian, and in others. I  know we’ve gone over it extensively, but especially in poems like “Whoever You are Holding Me Now in Hand,” where I find places so identical to scripture, I find myself marveling at how closely Walt must have looked at others’ spirituality. Okay. Good night, all. I have a lot to think about.

Okay, so this is going to sound kind of weird, but hear me out. When I was reading Calamus, I couldn’t help but start comparing many of the concepts in here to those of ancient Greece. Even the name, Calamus, is associated with Greek mythology; it was the name of a man who was turned into a reed upon his male lover’s death. I was also reminded of  pederasty. For the most part, and in most cases, the affair was meant to be a sort of mentorship, with the older man leading the boy and teaching him. Whitman often took this role with the men he loved, acting as sort of an uncle or father. This is a role he often takes in his literature as the poet-prophet, but I think that in his reality, this concept of mentorship was brought to a whole other level, especially since he could name the face that he was teaching, and not just embrace an entire nation.

In “I Dream’d in a Dream,” Whitman remarks, “I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth/I dream’d that was the new city of Friends” (284). This puts me in mind of the Sacred Band of Thebes, a Greek army consisting only of lovers, who, up until their massacre, had never seen anything remotely like defeat. This kind of army is Whitman’s ideal (although I don’t think he had any resolve for them to pillage and fight and whatnot). Whitman wants a band of men who are joined—mind, body, and soul—without negative feelings between them. What would destroy and separate them, pettiness and anger, is in turn destroyed because of the immense love among them. This lack of negativity is reflective in anything they do (hence, it is “seen every hour” (284)), and spreads to others, who are in turn inspired.  This sentiment is even argued by a character in Plato’s “Symposium:”

And if there were only some way of contriving that a state or an army should be made up of lovers and their… it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that when fighting at each other’s side, although a mere handful, they would overcome the world.

Furthermore, ancient Greece reminds me of Whitman’s America. Greece was a nation of city-states, prone to fighting and going to war amongst each other. However, when they fought together for a common goal, they were frequently invincible. For the most part, America’s states ruled in a similar fashion, and had been brutally defeated by the fracture of the Civil War. There is so much more that I could talk about in relation to this—for example Plato’s idea of the concept of love, and how all souls are only half of a soul that was split in two.

Interestingly enough, in “The Base of all Metaphysics,” Whitman outright claims that he has studied this model of companionship. More still, he says that it’s the same as other models that he identifies with, such as Christ. At the end the poem, he amends again that all these philosophies of joining are within man and woman themselves. Again, we have this concept of divinity that we merely need to unlock. And here is Whitman, Adam, lover of man, the first, to lead us past our sins and bond with one another. Like us, he’s searching for that other half of a soul to be joined and be complete in our divinity.