With the war-time period came the turning point in the popular estimate of Walt Whitman. No doubt, too, his experiences during this time of stress and storm influenced the rest of his career as a man and as a writer. His service as a volunteer nurse in camp and in hospital gave him a sympathetic insight and a patriotic outlook tempered with gentleness which are reflected in his poetry of this period, published under the title Drum-Taps. His well-known song of sorrow, O Captain, My Captain, is a threnody poignant with genuine feeling. It has, more than any others of his verses, lyric rather than plangent quality. When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed, and The Sobbing of the Bells are other poems belonging to this distinctive group. It is notable that in his lament over the death of Lincoln, Whitman gives rhyme as well as rhythm to the verses.
This was a time of triumph for Whitman in a literary sense. In Germany, the poet Ferdinand Freiligrath contributed to the Allgemeine Zeitung, Augsburg, May 10, 1868, a long article in praise of his work. In England, his poetry attracted the attention of the Rossettis, Tennyson, John Addington Symonds. Mrs. Anne Gilchrist defended him from the aspersions cast upon his references to womanhood. A sympathetic and friendly tone began to displace the collection of distasteful adjectives which had been his meed heretofore.
Then, in the latter part of 1865, occurred an episode which drew around Whitman a circle of friends keen to resent, and active to condemn, an act of injustice from one high in authority. Among the influential friends who rushed to his defense were John Burroughs and William Douglas O’Connor, and the events which drew their fire were these:
Whitman, whose health was shattered by his untiring devotion and ministrations to ill and wounded soldiers, had been given a minor clerkship in the Department of the Interior. James Harlan was Secretary of the Department. He had been a Methodist clergyman and president of a western college. When his attention was called to Whitman’s authorship of Leaves of Grass, the Secretary characterized the book as “full of indecent passages,” the author was termed “a very bad man,” and was abruptly dismissed from the position he had held for six months.
Whitman meekly accepted the curt dismissal, but William Douglas O’Connor in a white heat of indignation issued a pamphlet which flayed the astonished Secretary of the Interior as a narrow-minded calumniator. The pamphlet, now a very rare document, was headed:
THE GOOD GRAY POET
A VINDICATION
With Celtic fervor and eloquence, William Douglas O’Connor made his plea an intercession in the cause of free letters. He examined the entire range of literature, ancient and modern, in quest of parallels that would prove Whitman’s book by comparison to be a masterpiece of literature, and would demonstrate Mr. Secretary Harlan to be merely a literary headsman. Out of many pages of allusion to the literary productions of the great writers of all time and for all time, some characteristic passages may be chosen:
“Here is Dante. Open the tremendous pages of the Inferno. What is this line at the end of the twenty-first canto, which even John Carlyle flinches from translating, but which Dante did not flinch from writing? Out with Dante!
“Here is the book of Job: the vast Arabian landscape, the picturesque pastoral details of Arabian life, the last tragic immensity of Oriental sorrow, the whole over-arching sky of Oriental piety, are here. But here also the inevitable ‘indecency.’ Out with Job!
“Here is Plutarch, prince of biographers, and Herodotus, flower of historians. What have we now? Traits of character not to be mentioned, incidents of conduct, accounts of manners, minute details of customs, which our modern historical dandies would never venture upon recording. Out with Plutarch and Herodotus!