The representation of “real war” is more naturally expected in epics or novels than in a lyric poem or even a sequence of poems. But Walt Whitman is a rare hybrid, a lyric-narrative poet, and is necessarily aware that a war poem must visibly exhibit its primal archetype in realistic battle. His war poems can be read as a series urgently entering the war through different portals, each attempting to fill a different gap in the imagined panorama, each therefore reflecting the assumed partial inadequacy of the others, and the need for more. To read Drum-Taps, his collection of 1865, is to recognize how quickly Whitman realized the banality of his early jingoistic battle-cries and flag-wavings, not to speak of the suppression, in those early war poems, of what he called, with deadly accuracy, “the red business.” In 1861, when the Civil War began, Whitman was a man in his forties, a non-combatant who had never himself even been wounded. His most natural lyric genre was a poem spoken in the first person. Could he, should he, ethically assume the voice of an active soldier? Nor was he sure of the stance that he should take toward weapons and their wielders. Was he obliged to portray actual killing? He found comparably troubling questions everywhere in the composition of his war poetry. In addition to such moral questions, formal questions came thronging, arising inevitably in the perplexities of representing battle. At what point should the poem enter the battle, and how much had the poem to accomplish before it could find an ending? What kind of battle should it present, in what large or small setting? Should it be seen in close-up or from a distance? Who will populate the battle, with what weapons, and in what choreography? How specific must the poem be: should the armies be named, should the cause of the war be articulated? What decorum should a war poem observe: should dead bodies be exposed to view? In a personal lyric such perplexities are more easily solved by ear, eye, and instinct, but when the topic arises from a contemporary war, known in its historical circumstances (from newspapers and military bulletins), how shall the poet enter his nation’s current history? And how are his claims to be authenticated? Such questions would arise interiorly in anyone writing a group of war poems. Whitman made the most active claim to the authenticity of his reportage in the first poem of Leaves of Grass: “I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there.” Those words bring to a close an anecdote in which the poet learns of the actions of a heroic sea-captain: how he risked following a sinking ship through three stormy days, and how, when the storm abated, the brave captain rescued the traumatized passengers from what would have been their sure death: How he saved the drifting company at last, How the lank loose-gown’d women look’d when boated from the side of their prepared graves, How the silent old-faced infants and the lifted sick, and the sharp-lipp’d unshaved men; — but at that very moment, within the very same sentence, the narrated story of the captain’s acts begins to move, with almost biological caution, step by step, into first-person speech. The poet gradually feels himself mutating into one of the rescued passengers: All this I swallow, it tastes good, I like it well, it becomes mine, I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there. His new identity, which at first appears (quite peculiarly) as a present-tense testing of sense-experience — of ingestion, of swallowing, of tasting — comes to life as a complete present-tense being (“I am the man”). The poet then recapitulates the process in the past tense: the poet insists that he is the same man as he was before the assumption of his added identity — that of one saved from death: “I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there.” The three “I’s”, present and past, fuse into a new immaterial oneness. Are you the man? Did you suffer? Were you there? How can the reader be persuaded of this extraordinary declaration? And if this is the poet’s suffering during a purely “natural” catastrophe — a storm — can he expect the reader to believe him when he takes on the hideous suffering — caused by arbitrary human evil — of “the hounded slave”? I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs, Hell and despair are upon me, crack and again crack the marksmen, I clutch the rails of the fence, my gore dribs, thinn’d with the ooze of my skin, I fall on the weeds and stones. Whitman, often pondering the empathetic possibility of union, implicitly authenticated his claim by the accuracy of his vocabulary — his imagination alone was responsible for his convincing portrayal of the population awaiting rescue: the women of the shipwreck, their “lank” “loose-gown’d” selves, and the sad infants, surprisingly “silent” and “old-faced,” the sick needing to be “lifted,” the “unshaved” men with their three-days’ beards. We can even see what the drifting doomed are thinking as they fear “their prepared graves.” In a postwar poem, “Sparkles from a Wheel,” Whitman clarifies this imagined participatory process, naming it “effusion.” As the poet-speaker casually notices a knife-grinder in the street, his impersonal first glance narrows to a directed focus. The focusing awakens in the eager eye an arterial imagination, recreating the material presence of the poet’s physical body as an invisible immaterial one: Myself effusing and fluid, a phantom curiously floating, now here absorb’d and arrested. Absorbing, he is absorbed; arrested by the scene, he is arrested into it. Only after his casual physical eyesight fixes on the individual detail of the organ-grinder does his spirit effuse itself (Latin: “pour itself out into a receptacle”). In “I am the hounded slave,” the poet’s self-doubling flushes nouns and verbs alike into physicality: hounded, wince, despair, crack, clutch, gore, ooze, fall.
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