A History of American Literature

by Percy Holmes Boynton

In 1862, when his brother George was seriously wounded at Fredericksburg, Whitman became a hospital nurse in Washington. With his peculiar gifts of comradeship and his life-long acquaintance with the common man, he was able to give thousands of sufferers the kind of personal, affectionate attention that helped all, who were not doomed, to fight their way to recovery. From every side has come the testimony as to his unique relationship with them. One must be quoted:

Never shall I forget one night when I accompanied him on his rounds through a hospital, filled with those wounded young Americans whose heroism he has sung in deathless numbers. There were three rows of cots, and each cot bore its man. When he appeared, in passing along, there was a smile of affection and welcome on every face, however wan, and his presence seemed to light up the place as it might be lit by the presence of the Son of Love. From cot to cot they called him, often in tremulous tones or in whispers; they embraced him, they touched his hand, they gazed at him.... He did the things for them which no nurse or doctor could do, and he seemed to leave a benediction at every cot as he passed along. The lights had gleamed for hours in the hospital that night before he left it, and as he took his way towards the door, you could hear the voice of many a stricken hero calling, “Walt, Walt, Walt, come again! come again!”

The fruits in poetry from these years of duress were in some ways the richest of his lifetime. They were included in the edition of 1865 under the title “Drum-Taps.” Here were new poems “of the body and of the soul,” telling of his vigils on the field and in the hospital, not shrinking from details of horror and death; and here also were poems that dealt with the implications of the war and of nationalism militant. “Drum-Taps”—the title poem—and “Beat! Beat! Drums!” sound the call to arms. “The Song of the Banner at Daybreak” contrasts the patriotism of the philistine with the patriotism of the idealist. “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” sings of America for the world, with its thrillingly prophetic fourth stanza,

Have the elder races halted?

Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied, over there beyond the seas?

We take up the task eternal, and the burden, and the lesson,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

And “President Lincoln’s Burial Hymn” (“When Lilacs last in the Door-yard Bloom’d”) with “O Captain! My Captain!” are preëminent among the multitude of songs in praise of Lincoln. Whitman wrote fairly in a letter: “The book is therefore unprecedently sad (as these days are, are they not?), but it also has the blast of the trumpet and the drum pounds and whirrs in it, and then an undertone of sweetest comradeship and human love threads its steady thread inside the chaos and is heard at every lull and interstice thereof. Truly also, it has clear notes of faith and triumph.”

There were other fateful fruits of his hospital service. It is the salvation of the surgeon and the nurse that they adopt a professional attitude toward their tasks; they save individual lives in their struggle to save human life. But it was the essence of Whitman’s work among the soldiers that he should pour out his compassion without stint. The drain of energy forced him more than once to leave Washington for rest at home, and assisting at operations resulted in poisonous contagions. He seemed to recover from these, only to give way in 1873 to a consequent attack of paralysis, and, though he had nineteen years to live, he was never quite free from the shadow of this menace.

During the latter years, however, public respect increased as his strength waned. Popularity this self-elected poet of the people never gained, but he became a poets’ poet. A Whitman vogue developed among the consciously literary, just as a Browning vogue did in the same decades. It is rather a misfortune than otherwise for any art or artist to be made the subject of a fad, but the growth of Whitman’s repute was slow and was rooted in the regard of other artists. In the years near 1870 essays and reviews in England and Germany showed how deeply “Leaves of Grass” impressed the small group of men who knew what the essentials of poetry were and were not afraid to acknowledge their great debt to this strange innovator. The timid culture of America at first shrank as usual from any native work which was un-European in aspect, and lagged behind foreign indorsement of something freshly American just as it did in the cases of Mark Twain and “Joaquin” Miller (see pp. 293 and 403). When it did begin to take Whitman seriously, the heartfelt admiration of Freiligrath in Germany and of William Michael Rossetti and John Addington Symonds in England, the published charge that America was neglecting a great poet, and the public offer of assistance from English friends combined to build up for “the good gray poet” a body of support to which the belated interest of the would-be intellectuals was a negligible addition. From 1881 to his death eleven years later the income from his writings was sufficient to maintain him in “decent poverty.”