Drum-Taps, 1866, gives us the first glimpse of this new Whitman. The tremendous poem, "Rise, O Days, from Your Fathomless Deeps," marks the transition. In it he declares that he had, with hunger of soul, devoured only what earth had given him, that he had sought to content himself simply with nature and the material world.
Yet there with my soul I fed, I fed content, supercilious.
He does not condemn this earlier phase of his development:
'Twas well, O soul—'twas a good preparation you gave me,
Now we advance our latest and ampler hunger to fill.
Now we go forth to receive what the earth and the sea never gave us.
Now for the first time he realizes the meaning of Democracy, the deep inner meaning of Man and America.
Long had I walk'd my cities, my country roads through farms, only half satisfied,
One doubt nauseous undulating like a snake, crawl'd on the ground before me,
Continually preceding my steps, turning upon me oft, ironically hissing low;
The cities I loved so well I abandon'd and left, I sped to the certainties suitable to me,
Hungering, hungering, hungering, for primal energies and Nature's dauntlessness,
I refresh'd myself with it only, I could relish it only,
I waited the bursting forth of the pent fire—on the water and air I waited long;
But now I no longer wait, I am fully satisfied, I am glutted,
I have witness'd the true lightning, I have witness'd my cities electric,
I have lived to behold man burst forth.
It is the same thrill that had aroused Stedman, and made him proud for the first time of his country. Henceforth the poet will sing of Men—men not as magnificent bodies, but as triumphant souls. Drum-Taps fairly quivers and sobs and shouts with a new life. America has risen at last—one feels it in every line. The book gives more of the actual soul of the great conflict and of the new spirit that arose from it than any other book ever written. "Come up from the Fields, Father," tells with simple pathos that chief tragedy of the war, the death message brought to parents; "The Wound-Dresser" pictures with a realism almost terrifying the horrors of the hospitals after a battle; "Beat! Beat! Drums!" arouses like a bugle call; such sketches as "Cavalry Crossing a Ford," "Bivouac on a Mountain Side," and "A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown," are full of the thrill and the excitement of war; and finally the poems in "Memories of President Lincoln": among them "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," "O Captain! My Captain!" and "Hush'd Be the Camps To-day," come near to the highest places yet won by elegaic verse in English.
IV
In June, 1865, after he had served for a short time as a clerk in the Interior Department at Washington, Whitman had been discharged on the ground that he kept in his desk an indecent book of which he was the author. As a result of the episode, W. D. O'Connor, an impetuous young journalist, published in September the same year a pamphlet entitled The Good Gray Poet, defending Whitman as a man incapable of grossness and hailing him as a new force in American literature. Despite its extravagance and its manifest special pleading, the little book is a notable one, a document indeed in the history of the new literary period. It recognized that a new era was opening, one that was to be original and intensely American.