WALT WHITMAN

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WALT WHITMANS CIVIL WAR POETRY An Online
Professional Development Seminar

Walt Whitman c. 1860
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Televisions most-watched history series,
AMERICAN EXPERIENCE brings to life, on air and
online, the incredible characters and epic
stories that have shaped Americas past and
present. AMERICAN EXPERIENCE Online premiered
in November 1995 and has won accolades from
viewers and critics alike. To date, AMERICAN
EXPERIENCE Online has produced over 130 feature
sites. These sites enable viewers to watch films
online and encourage in-depth exploration of each
film beyond the television screen.

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TEACH WITH AMERICAN EXPERIENCE ONLINE
Alexander Hamilton The story of a founding
father who laid the groundwork for the nation's
modern economy -- including the banking system
and Wall Street. He was also a primary author of
the Federalist Papers. The Assassination of
Abraham Lincoln Just days after the Civil War
ended, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated
at Ford's Theatre. As a fractured nation
mourned, a manhunt closed in on his assassin, the
twenty- six-year-old actor, John Wilkes
Booth. The Crash of 1929 The unbounded
optimism of the Jazz Age and the shocking
consequences when reality finally hit on
October 29th, ultimately leading to the Great
Depression. The Bombing of Germany
During the defining months of the offensive
against Germany, American forces faced a moral
and strategic dilemma. Buffalo Bill
William "Buffalo Bill" Cody's legendary
exploits helped create the myth of the
American West that still endures today.


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• GOALS OF THE SEMINAR
• To deepen your understanding of Whitmans Civil
  War poetry.
• To introduce new texts, including the American
  Experience documentary Walt Whitman.
• To illustrate how those texts can be used for
  instruction.

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Franny Nudelman Associate Professor of English
Carleton University Ottawa, Canada Nineteenth-
and twentieth-century American culture, war and
violence, African American literature,
documentary studies. John Browns
Body Slavery, Violence, and the Culture of
War 2004 Trip to Hanoi Anti-War Travel and
Transnational Consciousness, forthcoming in New
World Coming The Sixties and the Shaping of
Global Consciousness

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• FRAMING QUESTIONS
• How did the crisis of war transform Whitmans
  poetry? How would you characterize the poems he
  wrote before the war began? By contrast, how
  would you characterize the poems in Drum-Taps?
  Can Whitmans wartime experiences help us to
  account for these differences?
• 2. While volunteering in Washington hospitals,
  Whitman observed the suffering of
• wounded and dying soldiers firsthand. How do
  his wartime poems deal with
• wounded and dead bodies? Does Whitman
  believe poetry can convey, and
• perhaps alleviate, the physical suffering
  war entails?
• 3. How did Whitman want his future readers to
  understand the Civil War? What did he want us to
  know about the war? What aspects of the war did
  he want us to remember? And what did he hope we
  would forget?
• 4. By extension, how can we use Whitmans poems
  to encourage our students to reflect on the
  relationship between war and literature?

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Song of Myself (1855 edition) . . . There
was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now
And will never be any more perfection than
there is now, Nor any more heaven or hell than
there is now. . . .
Billy Collins, poet Here was the first truly
American poet who broke out of the form of formal
poetry. You know how in a sonnet you have these
boundaries. Leaves of Grass is a poem without
boundaries and so that everything can flood into
it People, professions, landscape, memories,
engineering, water, children, Native Americans.
There's no boundaries keeping anything out. . .
. Ed Folsom Whitman equates the human body and
democracy in some radical and essential way that
the human body is what we all share. We all
experience this world through the body. And if we
can all begin to agree that the body itself is a
sacred thing then we have the beginnings of
democracy.
TEACHERS GUIDE
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• Poem of Wonder at the Resurrection of the Wheat
• (1856)
• Now I am terrified at the earth! it is that calm
• and patient,
• It grows such sweet things out of such
  corruptions,          It turns harmless and
  stainless on its axis, with          such
  endless successions of diseased corpses, It
  distils such exquisite winds out of such infused
           fetor, It renews with such unwitting
  looks, its prodigal,          annual, sumptuous
  crops, It gives such divine materials to men,
  and accepts          such leavings from them at
  last.

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• Crossing Brooklyn Ferry
• (from section 3)
• (1855)
• . . .
• It avails not, neither time or placedistance
  avails not  
• I am with you, you men and women of a generation,
  or ever so many generations hence 
• I project myselfalso I returnI am with you, and
  know how it is.
•    Just as you feel when you look on the river
  and sky, so I felt
•  Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I
  was one of a crowd
•  Just as you are refreshd by the gladness of the
  river and the bright flow, I was refreshd
• Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry
  with the swift current, I stood, yet was hurried
•  Just as you look on the numberless masts of
  ships, and the thick-stemd pipes of steamboats,
  I lookd.  
• . . .

Ed Folsom Whitman publishes a new poem called
Sun-down Poem in this edition eventually called
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry. He writes "It avails
not neither time or place. Distance avails not. I
am with you, you men and women of a generation or
ever so many generations hence. I project myself.
Also I return. I am with you and know how it is."
Whitman places his "I," the "I" that's been
speaking in the present tense, puts it into the
past. And he puts himself in a past now that's so
far past that he's not alive anymore. And gives
over the present tense of the poem to you and me,
to us, the readers. Whitman in 1856 was not only
imagining us in 2008 reading this poem, but
projecting us into 2008 to read this poem. It's
as if he is creating us as a character in the
poem. . . . Ed Folsom What all the preaching
in the world, what all the religions in the world
have been telling you to have faith about that
there is some sort of life after death, that it's
possible to communicate across time and across
space. We've just proved it, haven't we? That we
can talk beyond death. That we can have affection
for one another beyond death.
TEACHERS GUIDE
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• Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1891-92
  edition.
• CAVALRY CROSSING A FORD
• A LINE in long array where they wind betwixt
  green islands,
• They take a serpentine course, their arms
  flash in the sunhark
• to the musical clank,
• Behold the silvery river, in it the
  splashing horses loitering stop to
• drink,
• Behold the brown-faced men, each group,
  each person a picture,
• the negligent rest on the saddles,
• Some emerge on the opposite bank,
  others are just entering the
• fordwhile,
• Scarlet and blue and snowy white,
• The guidon flags flutter gayly in the
  wind.

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• Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1891-92
  edition.
• Come Up from the Fields Father
• . . .  
• Open the envelope quickly
• O this is not our son's writing, yet his name is
  sign'd
• O a strange hand writes for our dear sonO
  stricken          mother's soul! All swims
  before her eyesflashes with blackshe
           catches the main words only Sentences
  broken gun-shot wound in the breast, cavalry
            skirmish, taken to hospital, At
  present low, but will soon be better .
• . . .

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• Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1891-92
  edition.
• Vigil Strange.
• . . .
• My comrade I wrapt in his blanket, envelop'd
  well his form,
• Folded the blanket well, tucking it carefully
  over head and care-          fully under feet,
• And there and then and bathed by the rising sun,
  my son in his          grave, in his rude-dug
  grave I deposited,
• Ending my vigil strange with that, vigil of
  night and battle-field          dim,
• Vigil for boy of responding kisses, (never again
  on earth          responding,)
• Vigil for comrade swiftly slain, vigil I never
  forget, how as day          brighten'd,
• I rose from the chill ground and folded my
  soldier well in his          blanket,
• And buried him where he fell.

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• A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road
  Unknown
• . . .
• These I resume as I chantI see again the
  forms, I          smell the odor Then hear
  outside the orders given, Fall in, my men,
            Fall in But first I bend to the
  dying ladhis eyes opena          half-smile
  gives he me Then the eyes close, calmly close,
  and I speed forth to          the darkness,
  Resuming, marching, as ever in darkness
  marching, on          in the ranks, The unknown
  road still marching.

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• Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1891-92
  edition.
• The Wound-Dresser
• . . .
• Thus in silence in dreams' projections,
  Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the
  hospitals, The hurt and wounded I pacify with
  soothing hand, I sit by the restless all the
  dark night, some are so young, Some suffer so
  much, I recall the experience sweet and sad,
  (Many a soldier's loving arms about this neck
  have cross'd and
• rested, Many a soldier's kiss dwells on
  these bearded lips.)
• . . .

Ed Folsom The intensity of that sense of
encountering the strangers again and feeling
tremendous affection for them, demonstrating that
affection. Many of the soldiers as they were
dying the last kiss they would have, the last
moment of affection they would have would be from
this bearded poet who had taken time to stop with
them. There were these again moments of what he
had learned in New York to be those moments of
urban affection. That in the hospital became
national affection all of these soldiers from
all over the country, southern soldiers as well
as northern soldiers. There really was a sense in
those hospital wards of Whitman encountering the
country, the entire nation in a way that he never
would in any other form in any other setting.
They were all there and he would absorb it all,
show affection for them all.
TEACHERS GUIDE
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• Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1891-92
  edition.
• LOOK DOWN FAIR MOON.
• Look down fair moon and bathe this scene, Pour
  softly down night's nimbus floods on faces
  ghastly, swollen, purple, On the dead on their
  backs with arms toss'd wide, Pour down your
  unstinted nimbus sacred moon.

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• Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1891-92
  edition.
• RECONCILIATION.
• Word over all, beautiful as the sky, Beautiful
  that war and all its deeds of carnage must in
  time be
• utterly lost, That the hands of the
  sisters Death and Night incessantly softly
• wash again, and ever again, this soil'd
  world
• For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is
  dead, I look where he lies white-faced and still
  in the coffin -- I draw
• near, Bend down and touch lightly with my
  lips the white face in the
• coffin.

David Reynolds Walt Whitman, who above all had
been searching for unity, comradeship,
togetherness, feels that in the death of Abraham
Lincoln we finally have that kind of unity that
America had lacked before that. The unity that is
finally achieved and that Whitman's early poetry
could, couldn't, tried to achieve but never
could.
TEACHERS GUIDE
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To a Certain Civilian Did you ask dulcet
rhymes from me? Did you seek the civilian's
peaceful and languishing rhymes? Did you find
what I sang erewhile so hard to follow? Why I
was not singing erewhile for you to follow, to
understand - nor am I now (I have been born
of the same as the war was born, The
drum-corps' rattle is ever to me sweet music, I
love well the martial dirge, With slow wail
and convulsive throb leading the officer's
funeral) What to such as you anyhow such a
poet as I? therefore leave my works, And go
lull yourself with what you can understand, and
with piano-tunes, For I lull nobody, and you
will never understand me.
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• Specimen Days
• THE MILLION DEAD, TOO, SUMM'D UP
• The dead in this warthere they lie, strewing
  the fields and woods and valleys and
  battle-fields of the southVirginia, the
  PeninsulaMalvern hill and Fair Oaksthe banks of
  the Chickahominythe terraces of
  FredericksburghAntietam bridgethe grisly
  ravines of Manassasthe bloody promenade of the
  Wildernessthe varieties of the strayed dead,
  (the estimate of the War department is 25,000
  national soldiers kill'd in battle and never
  buried at all, 5,000 drown'd15,000 inhumed by
  strangers, or on the march in haste, in hitherto
  unfound localities2,000 graves cover'd by sand
  and mud by Mississippi freshets, 3,000 carried
  away by caving-in of banks, c.,)Gettysburgh,
  the West, SouthwestVicksburghChattanoogathe
  trenches of Petersburghthe numberless battles,
  camps, hospitals everywhere . . . the infinite
  dead(the land entire saturated, perfumed with
  their impalpable ashes' exhalation in Nature's
  chemistry distill'd, and shall be so forever, in
  every future grain of wheat and ear of corn, and
  every flower that grows, and every breath we
  draw)not only Northern dead leavening Southern
  soilthousands, aye tens of thousands, of
  Southerners, crumble to-day in Northern earth.

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ESSENTIAL UNDERSTANDINGS

• Confronted by a contemporary audience that was
  indifferent, and at times downright hostile to
  his poems, Whitman wrote with future audiences in
  mind. He felt most at home in conversation with
  future readers, who he imagined would share his
  reverence for bodily experience, strong emotion,
  and poetic excess.
• During the Civil War, Whitman abandoned the
  experimentalism and exuberance of his antebellum
  poetry. His wartime poems are less personal, and
  more conventional, than the poetry he wrote
  before the war began. Rather than celebrating an
  easy (and wholly subjective) relationship between
  self and world, Whitmans wartime poems labor to
  express the realities of war.
• 3. Whitman was intensely ambivalent about the
  violence of war. He lamented the suffering and
  death of Civil War soldiers on both sides of the
  conflict. At the same time, he believed that war
  produced national identity, and that the United
  States would be unified and strengthened by the
  ordeal.

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WALT WHITMANS CIVIL WAR POETRY An Online
Professional Development Seminar

Final Slide. Thank you.
Walt Whitman c. 1860