Comments on: Sam P. for Oct. 6

By: Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Foundation for Defense of Democracies — Sun, 21 Dec 2014 05:15:06 +0000

Foundation for Defense of Democracies…

The Rosy Armpit of the Internet » Sam P. for Oct. 6…

By: caretaker landscape

caretaker landscape — Sat, 13 Sep 2014 22:19:54 +0000

Very good info. Lucky me I ran across your website by
accident (stumbleupon). I’ve book marked it for later!

By: Hydrolyze Dude

Hydrolyze Dude — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 17:10:29 +0000

Whats up! Wonderful concept, but can this actually do the job?

By: s-words

s-words — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 16:42:58 +0000

Yeah, I agree that the “Drum-Taps” poems suggest most nearly the feeling that “war itself excludes the domestic.” By affecting the “war cry” that would hurtle the country into the realities of death and misery, I think, Whitman attempts to “embody the war (spirit),” and thus, in the context of his open-hearted earlier poetry, show how war closes men off from the American “whole” he otherwise promotes.

By: mscanlon

mscanlon — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 16:26:36 +0000

But a poem like “The Artilleryman’s Vision”, which is basically about PTSD, no?, shows that war itself excludes the domestic, shuts out the infant’s breath and the wife and the pillow, even if the soldier wants to live again in that feminized world. I’m not sure this book really does show any soliders making it successfully back to a pre-war life; we see them parading in martial form after the war, and see news of their deaths reaching those fields and farms and doorframes, but not the men themselves at home except in this very haunting poem.

OtherSam, part of what interests me about D-T (drum-taps rather than delirium tremens, but who can really differentiate?) is the irregular but unnerving return of the repressed– like the soldier who can still feel that leg even when it’s been cut off, the grieving domestic world refuses to be utterly shut out.

By: tallersam

tallersam — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 04:55:18 +0000

Perhaps the Whitman of the Civil War cast aside the sweeping, albeit abstract and general, inclusiveness of his earlier poems in favor of the immediate, pressing ‘calamus’ love that he found among the soldiers of the Civil War.
The soldiers of the war are perfect examples of the “weed[ing] out irrelevancies” that you see Whitman as doing. Yes, it is unhealthy for them to have such a one-sided view of things, as most (if not all) of them recognize, but it is necessary in their immediate circumstances. Perhaps what ultimately separates Whitman from the soldiers is his inability to shift back into that ‘inclusive’ mindset; while most soldiers eagerly ran back home and (re)started their lives, Whitman was still trying to maintain the emotional magic that he discovered in the military hospitals.

By: brady

brady — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 21:05:38 +0000

Fascinating idea that in his war poems Whitman becomes for the first time “exclusive.”