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.